The very idea of moral character has been hollowed out. It’s now thought to mean “being good,” and we tend to regard it simply as obeying rules, avoiding evil, and exhibiting “nice” behavior. Next to the more traditional idea of virtue, this kind of bloodless, anemic do-goodery makes a trained dog…
The very idea of moral character has been hollowed out. It’s now thought to mean “being good,” and we tend to regard it simply as obeying rules, avoiding evil, and exhibiting “nice” behavior. Next to the more traditional idea of virtue, this kind of bloodless, anemic do-goodery makes a trained dog seem more interesting than a human being.
It may sound melodramatic, but today there is a contest between two warring schools of thought on virtue. In fact, we have reached a kind of cultural crisis. The first school regards character and moral excellence roughly in the ways described here — as a matter of our nature. From this perspective, the virtues are proper to us. They don’t come automatically, of course, but the capacity to attain them is an essential part of our being.
This constitutes a crisis because the first school understands “human nature” as robust and indelible, while the second regards it as a thin tissue of whatever things people frequently happen to do, or whatever might be physically possible to do, or what is inscribed simply in genetic code. Gone is the idea of a deep human nature, one that includes purposes. Gone is the “why” or the “what-this-is-for” of our faculties and capacities.
According to the second school, however, we have few or none. Our culture is torn, in other words, between the idea that people are a certain kind of being that becomes fully itself in virtue, and the idea that we are not much of anything, so our acts are a heap of “whatever.”
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