An Introduction To Moral Theology, 2nd Edition. William May
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to do what is good with facility and readiness. They make the person’s “work” — i.e., his or her actions — good, and in addition make the person himself or herself morally good.19 We must, however, understand properly what all this means. We must not “hypostasize” the virtues, i.e., erect them into agents of some sort. It is rather the person (with God’s never-failing help, I must add immediately) who makes himself or herself, and his or her “work” or action, good by making good moral choices; but virtues are dispositions that the person gives to himself or herself (again, with God’s never-failing help) by consistently making morally good choices, and these dispositions facilitate “doing” the good well.
Note, too, that in the preceding paragraph I have referred to “moral” virtues as the dispositions or “habits” engendered by consistently choosing freely to do what is good by shaping one’s choices and actions in accordance with the truth that makes the person, as well as his or her “work,” good. There are other “virtues” that persons can acquire that enable them to do some things well which do not make the persons themselves good. These are virtues in a “relative” sense, and among them the Catholic tradition, particularly as represented by St. Thomas, includes the “intellectual” virtues of understanding, scientific knowledge, and metaphysical wisdom that perfect the intellect in its speculative inquiry and through which those who have acquired, say, the intellectual virtue of scientific knowledge of medicine can do what doctors are supposed to do; and the “intellectual” virtue of art, concerned with making things, such as speeches, poems, symphonies, etc., beautiful and well. But such virtues do not necessarily make the medical doctor or research scientist or great painter a morally good person.20
Virtuous, morally upright persons know how to shape their choices and actions in accordance with the truth and to take care to form their consciences in an upright way. They know how to choose well among alternatives of choice and to distinguish those that are morally good from those that are morally bad, even if, at times, they might find it difficult to articulate reasoned arguments to support their moral judgments. They nonetheless have an authentic kind of moral knowledge, and, unlike some professional moral philosophers or theologians who might be capable of presenting cogent arguments in support of the judgments these morally upright persons make, they are ready and willing to choose in accordance with their moral judgments and not devise clever rationalizations in order to avoid doing what ought to be done because doing so might have undesirable consequences for themselves.
These morally upright women and men “know” what they are to do if they are to become fully the beings they are meant to be, and they are ready to “do” it because they are virtuous, either because they have, with God’s never-failing grace, acquired virtues, or because God in his great love and mercy has infused virtues into their being when they turned from sin, repented it, and changed their hearts. Their knowledge is “connatural,” that is, it is knowledge mediated by a love for the good, a love for God and their neighbor, a love for the truth. Their knowledge is analogous to the knowledge that close friends, for instance, husbands and wives, have of each other, a knowledge different from that of disinterested observers, a knowledge rooted in love.21
Grisez, upon whose work (along with that of St. Thomas) this book depends greatly, maintains that it is possible to “distinguish among virtues in different ways, by using as a principle of distinction any intelligible set of factors relevant to choices. Thus, virtues (or vices) can be distinguished by the different dimensions of the acting person, by different fields of behavior, and so on. No one of these accounts is definitive to the exclusion of others. Each is a way, helpful for some purposes, of dividing the same whole into intelligible parts.”22 Grisez’s own way of distinguishing among virtues is different from St. Thomas’s way of doing so, although both agree in distinguishing naturally acquired virtues (e.g., chastity, courage, justice) from the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity.
The principle used by St. Thomas in distinguishing the naturally acquired virtues is based on the distinction among the different “operative powers” of the human person that are subject to perfection — the intellectual and appetitive powers — and among the appetitive powers the distinction between the sensitive powers of simple emotions of desire for food, drink, sex, etc. (the emotions of what he called the “concupiscible” appetite) and of emotions evoked in the presence of danger or difficulty (the emotions of what he termed the “irascible” appetite) and finally the “intellectual appetite” or the will. The principle used by Grisez to differentiate among the moral virtues is the kind of fundamental moral truth in light of which persons can discriminate among alternatives of choice in order to discern which alternatives are morally good and which are morally bad.
I will first briefly outline Grisez’s way of distinguishing among virtues, noting that further aspects of his teaching on virtue will be set forth in the following chapter (on natural law) and in the chapter devoted to the specific nature of the Christian moral life. I will then summarize St. Thomas’s way of distinguishing among virtues insofar as it has become classical and, moreover, offers us valuable insights into the nature of our moral life that are surely compatible with and complementary to the light Grisez’s analysis of virtue sheds on the moral life. I will conclude by briefly commenting on the contemporary debate — a misplaced one, I believe — that sees a dichotomy between a “virtue”-based ethics and a “normative”-or “principle”-based ethics.
A. Grisez on Virtue
Earlier in this section, I spoke of “commitments,” i.e., of certain kinds of choices committing us to a way of life into which lesser, everyday choices, are to be integrated. Reflecting on this, Grisez maintains that “virtues are aspects of personality as a whole when all the other dimensions of the self are integrated with morally good commitments.… Commitments establish one’s existential identity: a whole personality integrated with a morally good self is virtuous. Since such a personality is formed by choices which are in accord with the first principle of morality and the modes of responsibility, the virtues embody the modes. In other words, the modes of responsibility shape the existential self of a good person, this self shapes the whole personality, and so good character embodies and expresses the modes.”23
To understand what Grisez is saying here, it is necessary to anticipate matter to be taken up in the following chapter on “natural” law. There we will see that the great moral issue is this: in order for us to choose well — i.e., to choose those alternatives of choice that are morally good — we must in some way know, prior to choice, which alternatives are morally good. In other words, we need moral truths to guide our choices. In the following chapter, we will see that the natural moral law — written in our hearts by God — is precisely a set of such truths, beginning with the first principle of morality (religiously expressed in the commandments that we are to love God above all things and our neighbor as ourselves) and its specifications, principles such as the Golden Rule, and that in the light of this first basic moral principle and its specifications we can indeed make true moral judgments and good moral choices.
Grisez, as we will see, calls the specifications of the first moral principle — principles such as the Golden Rule — “modes of responsibility.” These fundamental moral truths can be known in some way by everyone — as the Church and such Christian saints and doctors as St. Thomas teach.24 Thus, ordinary persons who seek to act in a morally upright way can come to know them, perhaps not explicitly formulating them but recognizing them and appealing to them if asked to give basic reasons for making the kind of choices they make — analogously to the way ordinary persons know such principles or starting points of speculative inquiry as the principle of non-contradiction. If they then choose to shape their choices and actions — and in particular, their “big” choices or “commitments — in accord with these truths, they will become virtuous, i.e., inwardly disposed to choose well and to do what is morally good with facility. Grisez thus concludes that virtues embody these truths, i.e., the first principle of morality and its specifications or “modes of responsibility.”
His way, then, of identifying the natural or acquired moral virtues is, as will be seen more fully in the following chapter, closely related to his way of identifying and articulating