On Virtue and Values – I

Themes: Ethics, Philosophy

I’ll be coming back to Friendship shortly…
In the meantime I have a commission to write a briefing on the operation of ‘Virtue’ and ‘Values’ within Christian corporate ethics. I’m interested in some feedback.

Virtue:

“When virtue has slept, it will arise all the more vigorous.”
Nietzsche

Ah Friedrich!

Darkly funny,
Cuttingly Accurate,
… and horribly disturbing if it is taken to be a normative statement.

Also, profoundly unhelpful as a starting point from which to seek any positive appraisal of the concept of ‘Virtue’.
The virtue that sleeps is not virtuous.

Let’s ignore him…

The term virtue has etymological roots in the Latin vir meaning ‘man’. Virtue originally carried with it connotations of manliness and virility. As with all things Latin, a great deal of the philosophical underpinnings of Virtue, were borrowed from Greece. Particularly the Greek philosophical notion of ‘ἀρετη’ – (moral) excellence.

Certainly, if you read the bearded moralists of antiquity, you get a strong sense that when they talk about ‘moral excellence’ they envisage a Man, ten feet tall and able to grind walnuts into flour with his pectoral muscles.
If he has any weakness, it will be in the ankle region – the Spectre of the godlike Achilles flits around the outside of every Greek ethical symposium.
Greeks love Heroes.

However camp it may have been in practice, Greek ethical reasoning bequeathed to us (via Christianity) a framework for thinking about morality and ‘the good’ in terms of qualities of the individual. This has had important consequences for later ethical thought.
Certainly, Nietzsche gets some of his oomph from drawing on these roots. (He’s hard to ignore)

Virtues are generally thought of as, ‘objective goods’. Although ‘wisdom’, or ‘courage’ are qualities of the individual person – ‘Wisdom’ and ‘Courage’ are complex, objective patterns of behaviour to which the individual conforms. All wise people, and all courageous people share a likeness, in that they are particular examples of Wisdom, or Courage. Simply put, the individual doesn’t decide what makes up ‘Being Virtuous’.

Virtues are objectively determined – in Platonic thought through a hierarchy of generality ascending to that which is simply ‘The Good’. Yet, even without buying into a Platonic theory of universals, an ethical theory based on Virtue will generally regard ethical ‘goods’ as qualities of an individual while agreeing that these ‘goods’ are (to various degrees) defined independently of the individual.

The focus on individual qualities tends to move the focus of ethical reasoning from ‘action’ to ‘character’. Rather than asking, ‘is clubbing baby fur seals right or wrong?’ one is led to consider, ‘is this an activity of a Virtuous Man?’

This does not mean that Virtue is unconcerned with relationship, or has no corporate dimension. In fact, it may be that Virtue may include the quality of living in rightly ordered relations with God and other people. However, even in this context, our ethical interest is still in the character of the individual person.

In modern usage, talking about ‘Virtue’ sounds weird. It’s rare terminology outside universities and theological colleges. However, some of the concepts have carried over into our popular modern language about ethics. In particular, we are familiar with discussing someone’s ‘character’ or ‘character traits’. What we mean by ‘character’ can vary according to whether we adopt a psychological, sociological, spiritual framework, but the core sense of ‘qualities of a person’ remains.

Coming Up:
The Virtues of Virtue:
What good do we get out of using Virtue as a paradigm for our ethics?
… is that a cheeky question?

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Last Week: Gender

Themes: Ethics, Faith

Aristotle:

And it is clear that the rule of the soul over the body, and of the mind and the rational element over the passionate, is natural and expedient; whereas the equality of the two or the rule of the inferior is always hurtful. The same holds good of animals in relation to men; for tame animals have a better nature than wild, and all tame animals are better off when they are ruled by man; for then they are preserved. Again, the male is by nature superior, and the female inferior; and the one rules, and the other is ruled; this principle, of necessity, extends to all mankind.

Where then there is such a difference as that between soul and body, or between men and animals (as in the case of those whose business is to use their body, and who can do nothing better), the lower sort are by nature slaves, and it is better for them as for all inferiors that they should be under the rule of a master. For he who can be, and therefore is, another’s and he who participates in rational principle enough to apprehend, but not to have, such a principle, is a slave by nature.
(Aristotle, Politics, V)

Paul:

2:8   Therefore I want the men in every place to pray, lifting up holy hands without anger or argument. 9 Also, the women are to dress themselves in modest clothing, with decency and good sense; not with elaborate hairstyles, gold, pearls, or expensive apparel, 10 but with good works, as is proper for women who affirm that they worship God. 11 A woman should learn in silence with full submission. 12 I do not allow a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; instead, she is to be silent. 13 For Adam was created first, then Eve. 14 And Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and transgressed. 15 But she will be saved through childbearing, if she continues in faith, love, and holiness, with good sense.
(1 Tim 2:8-15, HCSB)

Difficult texts, hey?

This past week hasn’t seen much activity ’round here. I’ve been coming and going all week from a conference being held down the coast at Stanwell Tops for AFES senior staff.

Part of my interest in attending this week, and one of the highlights, has been being able to eavesdrop on some great discussion and reflection on how gender shapes our ministry together. Regardless of the content of this discussion (which was extremely important), it showed in a beautiful way, how Christians should approach difficult and sensitive issues of theology and practice.

The sessions on Gender were held on Tuesday and Thursday nights, I travelled down with a few people from Moore College, including one of the College lecturers who was giving the talks.
(I won’t give his name out of respect for his privacy. Gender is one of those issues… he’s a good mate. Hi, if you’re reading)
The first evening was a very close and careful reading of the text of a crucial passage: 1 Timothy 2:8-15
Most of the AFES staff are pretty handy with Greek and so the exegesis was done with the Greek text of the Bible up on the projector screen. Different possible interpretations were raised and discussed in the light of scholarly understanding of the meaning and syntax of the Greek. It was brilliantly presented, the lecturer knew the passage inside-out and was able to provide really helpful clarification. The result of this was that in having the bigger discussion about how gender shapes the practice of ministry, everyone is able to operate from the same understanding of the text at issue. Not only was the presentation thorough and clear, it was warmly pastoral. The exegesis was interspersed with pastoral comments and applications, that kept reminding us that this isn’t merely a theoretical enterprise but a properly Christian theological one: resulting in better knowledge of God and love for each other.

The Thursday night session was a broader, theological reflection on Gender as presented throughout the Scriptures. The centrepiece of this was an interaction with the work of Kevin Giles, an Australian theologian, around the interplay between Trinitarian relationships and Gender. Giles claims that ‘conservative evangelicals’ have redefined the trinitarian understanding of the relationship between God the Father and God the Son, in order to justify the subordination of women. It’s a weighty charge. Again, the way in which this discussion was handled was brilliant. Our lecturer was wonderfully gracious in his interaction with Giles, giving him due credit for good arguments, and being careful not to engage a straw-man. Discussing the eternal relationships among the members of the Trinity is not light material, yet everything was clear. And his critique of Giles was devastating. He’s thinking about writing a book, which would be really helpful. I think I disagreed with a couple of his alternative propositions, but I thought his critique was one of the best examples I have seen of graceful disagreement.

Following the theological presentation, people were invited to talk together about some the practical implications for Campus Fellowships flowing from the discussion of Gender. Then people were invited to share their thoughts and practices together. At a point at which their could have been considerable tension, there was graceful attentiveness, and loving truthfulness.

I haven’t told you anything about the content or conclusions of these discussions. I can’t, that’s AFES business. But this week I’ve been reminded how the Spirit transforms our minds, how the people of God feed each other with the Word and with godly wisdom, and how to disagree.

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History of Sexuality

Themes: Critique, Ethics, On Power, Philosophy, Reading

You may not be one for gazing adoringly at your own belly-button lint…
…but if Philosophy is your thing and you are interested in thinking through how Christians can engage with our culture about sex and sexuality, then its well worth getting to know Michel Foucault.
French, Post-Modern, Gay, Bracingly Bald.

Ready to just reach out and grab ya!!
(is that a giant lipstick he’s holding?)

Yet, strangely enough, here Christians might find an academic ally.

Foucault is known as a theorist of institutions. His major preoccupation was the flow of power through human relationships in society, and in particular how this affected human knowledge.
He was also a historian (although some would debate this) seeking, in his own phrase, to ‘write the history of the present’. On a basic level this means, that Focault sought to understand modern institutions like prisons, schools, and pyschiatric institutions, through the study of their development and the theoretical discourse that surrounded this development. What did people think about punishment, education, madness? And more important, why has the thinking and talking surrounding these institutions changed over time?
For example, why has our attitude to torture as an acceptable form of punishment been reversed over the course of the last three centuries?

Foucault’s major work was the three volume (unfinished)The History of Sexuality. In it he seeks to trace the development of human thinking about sex through the major periods of Western Civilisation.
It is a fascinating study. Foucault takes us from Classical Greece, through Medieval Christendom, and into the English Victorian period. As a work of history, the value of this study is debatable. Foucault was not a classical scholar and has been repeatedly charged with not being completely on top of his sources.

However, the major contribution of this work is not to our understanding of sexual practice through the ages. Rather, Foucault’s work sets out to demonstrates that people’s thinking about sexual behaviour has changed during different historical periods.
According to Foucault, sex within the classical Greek culture was not theorised as a moral problem but ‘dietetic’, how should a responsible citizen engage in sexual behaviour in a ‘healthy’ way.
A average randy Greek was not asking questions about whether Sex is Good or Evil, but is it Healthy? The primary questions being asked in the relevant Greek literature are for the sake of a healthy life, ‘how much sex should I have, with whom, and when?’

This is transformed with the coming of Christianity. Christians, following their Jewish heritage, regard sex as subject to moral demands.
For Christians, sexual practice is not merely regulated by questions of health and hygiene, instead sexual relations are imbued with a significance that points beyond the simple activity to the will and intention of God. Therefore questions about sex are deeply moral questions.

This might seem rather obvious to you, after all, Christianity as a whole introduced completely new ways of thinking into the pagan world. But Foucault goes beyond this, in fact, his work really only gets interesting when he comes to examine the developments in thinking and talking about sex following the Enlightenment, particularly in Victorian England.

You can really take or leave this historical analysis, Foucault’s reason for going here is primarily to show that our thinking about sex is not set in stone. It is subject to external forces. Foucault’s interest in tracing the development of Sexual Discourse is in seeing how these external factors have operated to produce our current beliefs about sex. He’s engaging in a ‘genealogy’.

Foucault’s analysis points out that through a certain historical period, our society moved from talking about ‘sex’ and started a new form of speech revolving around ‘sexuality’.

This is where his thinking has been most influential and provocative. Foucault argues that while we have always had things to say about sex, ‘sexuality’ is a relatively modern phenomenon. Sexuality joins together sexual behaviour and identity. It’s where we get the notion that heterosexual and homosexual are primary categories of identification.

Foucault’s historical analysis demonstrates that there is no indication at earlier points in Western Civilisation that sex and identity were held together in this way. Rather, sexual behaviour was the outcome of an identity grounded completely elsewhere.

Why is it that we now talk about people as ‘Gay’, rather than People who engage in homosexual practice?

that mon cheroot, is the question…

More to come.

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Sex and Death

Themes: Critique, Ethics, On Power, Philosophy, Society

Emma and I were walking through the Botanic Gardens last week. It was raining so we were snuggled up under our umbrella. We were on our way to my new favourite Sydney Cafe – the Poolside Cafe at Andrew ‘Boy’ Charlton Pool down on the edge of the water near Lady Macquarie’s Chair. We were worried that the cafe would be closed so Emma rang directory to get the number for the Cafe to check.
At the moment the Gardens are running an exhibition in the pyramid green-house on Orchids and Carnivorous Plants. The garden in front of the green house has been planted out with the name of the exhibition in flowers.
We came round the corner and saw this just as the operator from directory assistance picked up Emma’s call. I read out the name written in the garden, just a little bit too loud, “Sex and Death”…
The operator didn’t miss a beat: ‘what suburb please?’
I should have known that there’d be more than one listing…

I’ve been working on writing a review of The History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault, so ideas about sexuality have been rustling round my mind.
The connection between sex and death is striking.

Obviously, there is a biological connection.
Reproductive sex is the mechanism through which we deal, on a biological level, with the problem of death.
It’s easy to take for granted the fact that we are only one generation away from total extinction – a point made with great power in the recent movie, The Children of Men.

But the connection runs deeper, there is a theological connection between sex and death.
Death is subject to a strict taboo in our society. It is in the blushingly Victorian space occupied by sex during the 19th Century. Our culture is marked by the thundering silence we have produced regarding death.
Is it that the secular world feels that it has answered the perennial human questioning about death…

“What happens when we die?”

… And has found the answer is profoundly dissatisfying.

Our way of life, the goods we pursue, the values we endorse, do not really make a great deal of sense in the face of an extinction coming fifteen years after retirement from work. We pile things up as though they are going to last.
… as though we are going to last to enjoy them.

On the other hand, the speech of sex grows louder and louder.
Sex is the coin of the realm. It is in the way we dress, saturates our entertainment, and is essential to our system of trade.
As death has been silenced, tucked politely out of sight. Sex has blossomed into view.

The sexual embrace is a flight from death. The desire to escape death in the power of a sensation, precisely because it is the only form of immortality left to secular humanity. The desire to speak about sex and to trade in sex is a mask for the desire to transgress the taboos surrounding sex, and by breaking the rules to master them.

And whoever masters sex holds the ‘keys of death and hades’.

At this point the Christian worldview could not be more different. Yet not without its own difficulties.
At least initially, there was no connection between sex and death, how does this make sense biologically?
Or was there death before the fall, but a different sort of death? (heresy alert)
And what are we to make of this?

“For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage but are like angels in heaven.” (Matt 22:30 HCSB)

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Australian Values

Themes: Critique, Ethics, Society

Here is a proposal for a large scale investigation which I don’t have the time to do.

Would it be possible to work out the moral dimensions of our culture through a study of the words we use to convey a sense of ‘good’?

By ‘moral dimensions’ I mean the shared values, ethical imperatives or prohibitions, aspirations, etc, which are generalisable through our society, i.e., shared by nearly everyone. I’m open to the possibility that no such values exist.

It certainly seems the case that references to ‘Australian Values’ never seem far away from the lips of politicians or the headlines of the Media. For this reason, many people have rightly raised and debated the question, what are ‘Australian Values’?

While, I think it’s a questionable assumption that there would be such a thing as values which are uniquely Australian, what would be the methodology for engaging in a descriptive rather than a prescriptive study of morality.
Put simply, how would you work out what people actually think ‘good’ is, rather than simply saying what people should think ‘good’ is.

Could you study the range of words used in our public discourse as a reflection of public values?
For example, there is a sense of ‘goodness’ within words such as ‘useful’, ‘beautiful’, ‘positive’, ‘nice’, ‘elegant’.

If we were to go through an edition of the Sydney Morning Herald and pull out words that are used to describe something favourably, would this tell us something about our values?
Is there something particularly significant about words that are being employed in unusal ways, such as, ‘cool’, ‘wicked’, ‘sick’, ‘mad’?

Maybe I’ll start reading a section of the SMH, I’ll let you know what I find…

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