Leadership by whom? Toward what end? In the United States and around the world, these questions are more vital—and more contentious—than at any time in nearly a century. Of course, we’ve had the answers for more than two millennia from Socrates and Plato: leadership by the wise toward a just society. Unfortunately, that only leads us to more questions: Who are the wise and what is justice?As I suspect most of you would do, I turned to books for some possible answers. The words “wise” and “just” suggested an obvious direction for my research. These are, in almost every tradition, core virtues. So, I plunged into the literature of virtue, and the branch of philosophy known as virtue ethics. What I found is
described below.
The Development of Virtues
Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue offers a helpful paradigm in understanding the development of virtue ethics, as well as a strong defense of the traditional virtues. He isolates four streams, which I will label the Classical, the Judeo-Christian-Islamic (hereafter the “People of the Book,” or simply “Book”), the Contrarian, and the Bourgeois. MacIntyre contends that in “heroic” societies before classical Athens, virtues were attached to specific societal roles. Courage was for the warrior, Wisdom for the ruler, Obedience for the subject. He concludes: “This concept of virtue or excellence is more alien to us than we are apt at first to recognize … morality and social structure are in fact one and the same in heroic society … Morality as something distinct does not yet exist.” The big change, at least in the west, came in the fourth and third centuries B.C.: “In Homer the question of honor is the question of what is due to a king; in Sophocles the question of honor has become the question of what is due to a man.”The classical Greek virtues, largely codified by Aristotle, included both those that supported society, like Courage and Generosity, and qualities of the individual, like Temperance and the puzzling Magnanimity, of which MacIntyre plausibly notes, “any translation … is unsatisfactory.” (Try deciding how you would define “great-souled” and to whom you would apply it.)
Then came the “Book” virtues, espoused in the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions. Among these, MacIntyre observes is “at least one quality as a virtue which Aristotle seems to count as one of the vices
relative to magnanimity, namely humility.” Actually, the Book traditions add several such virtues, from Compassion to Meekness, Peacemaking to Repentance.
The Test of Time
Thousands of contemporary religious writers expound the Classical and Book virtues. Two who straddle the religious and the philosophical are C.S. Lewis, particularly in The Abolition of Man, and the contemporary Peter Kreeft in Back to Virtue. Kreeft, like Lewis, honors both the Book virtues and the Classics. During the 1960s, he writes, his students asked, “whether we could do something more ‘relevant,’ something more experimental, something like what other classes were doing: designing their own course instead of being ‘enslaved’ to the hoary past and to the ‘imposed values’ of the teacher.” He agreed, and the class set out to build an ideal polity from scratch, with Kreeft acting only as “their Socratic questioner.” After they completed their design, however, he invited them to read The Republic. The result: “The students were truly amazed to find that all eight of the ideas they had just discovered were precisely the main points of this bewhiskered old classic.” In fact, “they wanted to read more ‘old stuff.’ So, we read Plato’s Gorgias, Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, Augustine’s Confessions, and even parts of Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae.”It’s precisely these virtues that drew the wrath of the Contrarians, among whom Nietzsche and Ayn Rand have probably been the most influential. Both rejected not only Humility and all its accoutrements as a perversion of virtue, but inverted “virtues” in a variety of ways. Nietzsche maintained, “It takes physical courage to indulge in wickedness. The ‘good’ are too cowardly to do it,” while Rand said, “My views on charity are very simple. I do not consider it a major virtue and, above all, I do not consider it a moral duty. There is nothing wrong in helping other people, if and when they are worthy of the help and you can afford to help them. I regard charity as a marginal issue.” How ironic that just as World War II was exposing the horrific consequences of a distorted Übermensch ethic, Rand should resurrect pretty much the same ethos in the United States.
A Contrarian View
I found a late 20th century version of the Contrarian ethic in Virtue Ethics by the philosopher Richard Taylor, who sees the arc of the universe as one of degeneration, not progress: “The history of philosophical ethics since the rise of Christianity has been a history of decline, finally degenerating into the verbal sparrings and lint picking of modern practitioners of the subject.” He asserts, “the pagan moralists knew that what is worth having is not the common, but the uncommonly good … virtue originally meant strength and superiority, and was correctly believed to be rare.” Unless you believe in a deity as the ultimate moral arbiter, human agreements on what is permitted and what is forbidden are the total of morality, although, he laments, “even educated persons sometimes declare that such things as war, or abortion, or the violation of certain human rights, are ‘morally wrong,’ and they imagine that they have said something true and significant.”Finally, a distinctly American set of virtues was proposed a bit earlier than the Contrarian and persists to the present day in one of the most popular works of pedagogy of our time: the Bourgeois set, as perhaps first catalogued by Benjamin Franklin. Again, MacIntyre: “Franklin includes virtues which are new to our consideration such as cleanliness, silence, and industry; he clearly considers the drive to acquire itself a part of virtue, whereas for most ancient Greeks this is the vice of pleonexia [avarice]; he treats some virtues which earlier ages had considered minor as major; but he also redefines some familiar virtues.” The best example of the last is chastity, about which Franklin advises, “Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.” (High school students of a certain era pruriently circulated Franklin’s further guidance on the subject in “Advice to a Friend on Choosing a Mistress.”)
Teaching Virtues
William Bennett’s 1993 Book of Virtues is mostly the lineal descendant of Franklin’s list. While urging such ancient virtues as Compassion, Courage, and Friendship, Bennett leaves out Wisdom and Humility, and adds such virtues as Work, Self-Discipline, Responsibility, and Perseverance, along with Faith, and the—very contextual—Loyalty. These are apparently of special importance for schools, since Bennett’s first words are, “This book is to aid in the time-honored task of the moral education of the young.”However, an almost prophetic rebuttal of Bennett was made by Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg, in her 1962 book The Little Virtues: “As far as the education of children is concerned I think they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones. Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt for danger; not shrewdness but frankness and a love of truth; not tact but love for one’s neighbor and self-denial; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know.”
An experiential point about teaching virtue was also made by Aristotle long before modern pedagogues. For him, the virtues are not taught, either by stories, as in Bennett, nor by precept, case studies, or any other reasoning process. Rather they are lived. As he put it, “We are what we repeatedly do. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.” As the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, in a near definition of virtue ethics, “the just man justices.”
In attempting to draw conclusions, I am keeping in mind what Robert Nozick said in Philosophical Explanations: “Isn’t it ludicrous for someone … even to touch on the topics of the monumental thinkers?” Yet, to me, certain patterns do stand out. Courage, for example, however interpreted, is common to all the traditions, partly because, as Maya Angelou wrote, it is “the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.” C.S. Lewis went further, calling [courage] “not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point.” Wisdom obviously belongs on the list for leaders, and also for learners, as both the Hebrew and the Christian Bible urge: “Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom.” But the other Book virtues, such as Compassion, Humility, and Prudence, seem at least as essential, and much more threatened today, among both leaders and followers. The same goes for another essential virtue not mentioned until now—Hope—which is, as Czech statesman Václav Havel said shortly before the fall of the Soviet Union, “definitely not the same thing as optimism … not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
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