Yves Simon on Moral Virtue (part 2 of 2)

Last month, I wrote a rather longish entry (at least for this blog) setting out a few themes from Yves Simon's excellent short work, The Definition of Moral Virtue, focusing in that post on two things in particular:  his identification of three moral positions common in modernity which attempt to dispense with the traditional conception of virtue, and the implications of his distinction between nature and use as modes of goodness or badness.  What I left unaddressed was another major theme of his book, the difference between mere habits and habitus.  

That the virtues -- and for that matter the vices -- are at their bases, in the sort of being which they have, habits is a standard commonplace of Virtue Ethics.  You can find that term readily used in most translations of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, or Aquinas' Disputed Questions on Virtue and Treatise On the Virtues, as well as in other classic texts of Virtue Ethics traditions of moral enquiry.  Simon cautions us against that, however, showing how the Greek hexis and its Latin translation habitus involve something more and something different than the concept "habit" which we so often unthinkingly substitute in their place -- and in telling us why, he also teaches us some important and often overlooked lessons about virtue and vice.

Anselm, Justice, and Virtue

Yesterday, I gave a guest lecture on St. Anselm's moral theory in a colleague's Medieval Philosophy class, introducing his students to some Anselmian themes beyond the "ontological argument" they recalled from their earlier Intro to Philosophy classes.  Central among those was Anselm's understanding of justice -- or the variety of goodness distinctive to humans and other rational beings -- as rectitude or uprightness of will.

What is particularly interesting about Anselm's examination of this idea -- which he plays with throughout his works, progressively developing a more and more complex picture of moral goodness and evil -- is that early on he articulates this standard of rectitude not simply in terms of the will conforming to some standards, ideals, or rules, but in a more reflexive manner.  Justice is rectitude of will kept for its own sake (rectitudo voluntatis propter se servata).

How Do We Get It Wrong? Four Ways Aristotle Addresses

In the piece I started yesterday, I promised to talk about how and why a contemporary virtue ethicist and a classic virtue ethicist distinguish different types of moral failure from each other.  Discussing the contemporary, Alasdair MacIntyre, I placed more focus on the why -- the reasons we ought to be concerned not only whether we've done wrong, but to what degree, for what reasons -- and what we learn about ourselves in the process, including how -- like a bus that has left the road for short-cut dirt paths and is now bouncing over unfamiliar, dusty, and trackless terrain -- we might discern not only the overall direction we need to steer back towards, but how we might discern where trails run, which grooves and ruts we need to avoid and which might lead us back onto the straighter, more reliable roads towards the good.

As the post got longer and longer, I had to defer my promise to discuss Aristotle -- one of the worthies among the Virtue Ethics's classic thinkers -- since the whole goal of Virtue Ethics Digest was to have shorter pieces than those you might find on my other blog, Orexis Dianoētikē.  So, here it is, with more attention tonight to the how and less to the why in Aristotle's works -- though I don't want to give that short shrift, and will accordingly discuss that first.

This Field Required: Poverty and Virtue Ethics

Here’s an interesting blog posting by Pamela Stubbart, exploring the implications of a concept that’s being talked about quite a bit in psychology and some in ethics:  will-power depletion.  The general idea is that each human being has, at any given time, a certain amount of willpower — capacity to stick to or follow through on a difficult decision or action, also, in the older ethical literature, known as “self-control” — on reserve, and it can be exhausted as it gets used over time making decisions.

There have been some empirical psychological studies, which seem to indicate — you should always be rather skeptical of “studies show… ” until you’ve looked carefully at how the study was carried out and what reasoning the researchers employed — that there is something to this idea of “willpower depletion.”  And, this in turn has some implications for those in poverty:

the less money you have, the more sit­u­a­tions you will encounter in which you must restrain your­self and make dif­fi­cult pur­chas­ing trade­offs, and this means you’ll have less willpower left­over later to deal with other sit­u­a­tions in which you might need it