On mixing your virtues

By Mark Vernon on Monday, March 8 2010, 10:06 - Moral matters - Permalink

I was reading Choosing The Common Good over the weekend, and I think I understand another reason why I'm very wary of the Catholic bishops' advocacy of virtue ethics. It's because theirs is actually an amalgam of virtue description and rule prescription. Or to put it another way, it's a mix of life as a moral art and life as a moral science. And the two approaches don't mix very well.

The Catholic stipulations against sex outside of marriage provide a good case in point. To have a blanket ban can only come from a rule approach. It's wrong, period. But with a virtue approach, pre-marital sexual exploration, say, may be a great good, if not without risks - though virtue ethics requires the taking of risks to gain the practical intelligence it so values. Hence too the desirability of sex education. Also, a virtue approach doesn't see any strict distinction between sex and love, one flowing from the other in the good life. There are some sexual relationships its unwise, even bad, to pursue. But marriage as a inviolable demarcation comes to look rather arbitrary - and unjust in the case of lovers for whom marriage is not an option, as, in the eyes of the church, is the case for lesbians and gays.

Mark Vernon

The blog might be thought of as the first draft of what I've been thinking about, seeing, hearing and reading.

I am an English writer, journalist, and author, used to be a priest in the Church of England, live in South London, and am an honorary research fellow at Birkbeck College, London. I am a founding member of The School of Life.

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Comments

1. On Monday, March 8 2010, 16:16 by BR

Very interesting post. I wonder, though, if you could say that 'rules' almost inevitably come in where you are trying to say what the practical exercise of a particular virtue looks like? So, you might say that there are some kinds of action (e.g. murder) that are inconsistent with the expression of the virtue of love. Some that are inconsistent with the expression of the virtue of courage. And so on. And, having identified those actions, you could say 'as a rule, actions XYZ are wrong'.

It could be that you yourself would contest the rigid association of the expression of certain virtues with marriage; but would you be able to say confidently that there are no actions that you could 'rule out' as expressions of some of the virtues that you would recognize to be valuable. Is the problem 'rules', per se, or that you think that the Catholic church identifies the wrong rules?

Your comment about 'risks' by which you can come to practical wisdom is interesting. In the concrete, though, would that idea not pose the danger of treating a 'wrong' act as a means to the end of attaining practical wisdom? (And could you ever be sure, in any particular situation, that you would get wisdom from taking that sort of 'risk'? Even if, after the event, you might be able to say 'well I learned XYZ from that particular mistake', would you ever be in a position to know that beforehand?) Maybe I'm interpreting what you're saying unfairly.

I haven't read 'Choosing The Common Good', so I'm in danger of just waffling on here. But all I really meant to ask about was whether 'rules' can really be so definitely - in principle - set apart from virtue ethics?

2. On Tuesday, March 9 2010, 07:30 by Mark Vernon

BR - Thanks for that, and yes there's a role for rules, but the role should perhaps be like the rules of a game: they set certain parameters, but good players of the game do far more than just obey the rules. In fact, when the game is being played well, you're barely conscious of the rules at all: they're invoked as a last resort when something's gone wrong. The worry with the stress in rule-based religious morality, then, is two-fold. First, that they don't define the game, they constrain it. Second, that they have become the main issue, and that actually works against playing the game of life well.

On risk, it's risky, yes! But that's called being human.

3. On Tuesday, March 9 2010, 15:05 by BR

Fair point! Particularly the danger of making the rules the main issue. I guess an obsession with rules can be a flight from unsettling complexity (a failure with respect to the virtue of courage). I think you need to get into all the welter of complex detail in concrete moral problems; and I also think that, as you do so, you are invariably working - overtly or not - with rules of some sort, to make sense of the detail you're seeing. (So, you might say that marriage - in some conceptions of it - fails to acknowledge the good in gay relationships; but to say that, you need some rule, some picture against which you look at the details, about the 'good in relationships'). But I think the game analogy you give is a good one. Someone might make an unusual move either because they are particularly good at the game, or because they are particularly bad at it; and you need to assess the particular move carefully, and get into the detail, to decide.