63. ETHICS — Part C

As stated at the beginning of the previous two posts, this week’s triptych plunges into the thinking of a group of scholars about ethics: Co-editors James Van Slyke, Gregory Peterson, Michael Spezio, Kevin Reimer, and Warren Brown produced a comprehensive review of ethics in a book entitled Theology and the Science of Moral Action: Virtue Ethics, Exemplarity, and Cognitive Neuroscience. In their approach, the co-editors included an integration of research in moral cognition and behavior within the fields of neuroscience, moral psychology, and virtue theoretical ethics in philosophy and theology.

When I read this book, I thought about all that goes into our commitments to act on our principles. What leads us to behave as we do? I will not attempt to summarize this book. Instead, I will select quotes from the book, hopefully to stimulate your thinking. As is the case in each of my posts, I will end with a question for your reflection based on these quotes.

“If the kind of story we believe we are living determines how we define right and wrong, how do we assess the moral value of our own and of other stories? The answer is found in the particular practices and virtues considered to be formative/definitive of good character.”

“Our responses to moral challenges must in some sense always be ad hoc, but it need not be reactionary.” We are inclined to develop habits through improvisation within the boundaries of our theology, tradition, reason and experience.

“Through improvisation, the ongoing enactment of possible responses in everchanging situations, compassionate responding over time may well literally rework neural connections such that egocentrism is transformed into compassionate being.”

“That aspect of the person, which is shaped through improvisation, is conscience, the mental capacity or sense that evaluates moral choices as right or wrong and inclines us toward that which is deemed right. … Conscience is relational, made up of cognitive, emotional, conative, and intuitive elements. It is trained through reflection on actions, motives, emotions, shaped by the disposition to seek that which is believed to be good, and once it becomes an intuitive response, we have achieved a mature conscience, or habit.

“All of this is only possible because of the basic mechanisms of empathy — the ability to project ourselves into narrative, to imagine ourselves in the life situation of another, and to creatively improvise in the face of life’s challenges.”

“In the end, moral activity is much less discursively rationalized than we think; instead, more often than we might care to admit, moral actions are intuitive, interactive, imaginative, and habitual responses to the world around us, precipitated by our being the kind of people we have been shaped to be and by what we have been sensitized to empathize with in any given situation.

“If so, then human morality is funded by the complexity of our embodied way of being in the world much more so than dictated by any moral rule or calculus that demands only one course of right action.”

“Hence, human cognition in general, and human morality in particular, not only revolves around the emotions and the affections, but these are the core elements that both impinge on our representations of pleasure or pain and also are involved in the activation or deactivation of our senses that look for rewards or punishments.

“Here the biological rootedness of morality also comes into play: what is satisfying and elicits feelings of happiness and joy is valuable and, by extension, moral; while what produces fear, disgust, sadness, and so on, is repulsive and, by extension, immoral.”

“Human morality, then, is tri-dimensionally shaped by our bodies (and brains), our psyches (emotions and affections), and our environments (social relations).”

“The most prominent philosopher of virtue in recent times is undoubtedly Alasdair MacIntyre. He argued in his book on moral philosophy entitled After Virtue that contemporary morality is disordered because, while we use the rhetoric, we have lost track of the practices that gave rise to our moral beliefs due to the Enlightenment’s legacy of universalizing moral ideals in abstraction of their lived traditions. … MacIntyre has led the way in re-asserting that construing morality in terms of the pursuit of the virtues provides a more holistic and embodied account of our moral lives.”

“In dialogue with the Aristotelian tradition, MacIntyre elaborated on two aspects of virtue ethics: that the virtues are inherently formed and shaped by social (or communal) practices, and that they are teleologically directed toward a eudemonistic form of life (one characterized by happiness, blessedness, or prosperity, i. e., the good life).

“From this, MacIntyre defined virtue as ‘an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such goods.’”

Q: As described above, to what extent do you see yourself as a virtuous person?