Abstract
What place is there for virtue theory in theological ethics? Many question the normative significance of virtue theory in theological ethics today, leaving it to rule-based ethics to provide action-guidance. There are three key objections to the normativity of virtue theory: that virtue theory is about agents rather than actions, that virtue theory has nothing to say directly about the morality of actions, and that the virtues are too vague to be of normative or action-guiding significance. This essay, drawing on Thomas Aquinas’s account of virtue, challenges these perceptions and argues for a genuinely normative, action-guiding virtue theory within theological ethics. Theological ethics, in turn, can contribute to virtue theory, especially by its emphasis on the ecstatic nature of mature moral virtue, and through its reflection on the virtue of spiritual discernment.
Highlights
Joseph Selling’s Reframing Catholic Theological Ethics helpfully addresses what is sometimes called “Fundamental Moral Theology,” the part of theological ethics that deals with the more foundational questions to do with method, law, virtue, conscience, and moral action (Selling 2016)
To see virtue theory as primarily focused on character is to underestimate the way virtue theory can assist theological ethics in its task of evaluating moral actions and thereby offering the right degree of action guidance, neither being too vague to be of any help, nor attempting to control what should be left to the prudential, discerning judgement of the situated moral subject
A theological ethics can help to resist the misguided attempt at complete codifiability in moral decision making through its respect for the practice of spiritual discernment, which searches for knowledge of the ever-surprising will of God in the particularities of a person’s life
Summary
Joseph Selling’s Reframing Catholic Theological Ethics helpfully addresses what is sometimes called “Fundamental Moral Theology,” the part of theological ethics that deals with the more foundational questions to do with method, law, virtue, conscience, and moral action (Selling 2016). This is a metaphysical principle intended to apply universally to all created beings; yet, once again, it has significant implications in ethics Aquinas deduces from this axiom that, in the case of the human person, it is precisely through operation, rather than merely habit, that the human person reaches her end.. Aquinas’s theological, developmental virtue theory recommends an attentiveness and desire that grows from being act-focused to being agent-focused, and to being other-focused. Virtue theory is act-focused, insofar as it concerns habits that are, by their very essence, principles of virtuous operation It helps, with Jorge Garcia, to make an important distinction: “Virtues may be seen as the proper focus of the moral subject’s attention, or, alternatively, it can be claimed that virtues are the proper focus of the moral theorist’s attention” (Garcia 2010). A theological virtue theory, because of its understanding of the nature of theological love, is in a good position to recognize that the loving, compassionate, and just person is not focused primarily on her own moral state, but is self-forgetfully or “ecstatically” concerned with the other to whom love, compassion, or justice are due
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