Galen Guengerich, Senior Minister of All Souls (Unitarian Universalist) Church in New York City, thinks so. At the recently completed General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association in Minneapolis, he posed, elaborated, and defended this position for Unitarian Universalists (UUs) in an eight-part series of well-attended talks. (Ideas discussed in this post may be found in this sermon that Rev. Guengerich delivered prior to General Assembly and that overlaps with his first talk at G.A.)

A More Demanding Spirituality

Character, as Guengerich conceives it, is about asking more of ourselves than an “anything goes” spiritual multiculturalism does. It’s about self-discipline. He thinks that people are looking for a more demanding form of spirituality than is conveyed by the answer “we have no creed” often given by lay UU’s to the question “but what do UU’s believe?”

Guengerich is reasonably concerned about the fate of his own denomination. Although some UU congregations have grown recently, over-all the denomination has numerically stagnated – it has not grown in absolute numbers since Unitarians and Universalists joined forces in 1961, yet in the same period the U.S. population has doubled. But the challenges to “religious liberal” or “spiritually progressive” values are greater now than ever, as indicated by the influence of the religious right even after it suffered from its association with the political meltdown of the Bush II Administration. Guengerich thinks that if UU’s and their social witness are to make a real difference, we need to consider what an ethics of character has to offer.

An Ethics of Aspiration

Following the philosopher Richard Taylor’s description of Aristotle’s character-based ethics, Guengerich calls his own approach an “ethics of aspiration.” This is to be distinguished from an ethics of duty, where duty is understood as the obligation to follow rules handed down from on high. In Christianity this view is often tied to the doctrine that humans are fundamentally sinful and weak, at least since Adam and Eve sinned by eating of the Tree of Knowledge.

The character-based approach is also contrasted with a more empirical form of moral thinking that evaluates choices in terms of their consequences for human happiness, understood in terms of pleasurable mental states. The best known example of this approach is the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. In this perspective moral choice seems essentially a means to desired outcomes, which, critics point out, might be achieved if we could all be guaranteed a continuous drug-induced high. An ethics of character, by contrast, conceives the good life as a more or less sustained life of excellent activity.

Virtue Ethics and Self-Cultivation

In academic philosophical discussions, character-based ethics is usually called virtue ethics, a term used by Guengerich in his series of talks. To be sure, “virtue” still suffers in popular consciousness from its “Puritan” meaning as referring to the condition of girls and women who have avoided pre-marital sex and “saved themselves” for their husbands. This sense of the term often obscures the older, more general meaning of virtue as moral strength, a product of good upbringing or self-cultivation. (The latter idea has a place in American Unitarian history, for example, the essay “Self-Culture” (1838), by William Ellery Channing, the preeminent early 19th century Unitarian.)

Virtue as Moral Strength

The term “virtue” comes from the Latin virtus, which derives from vir, meaning man (in contrast to woman). Virtus probably originally meant “male” excellence, particularly courage in battle. The same is likely true for the Greek equivalent, arêtê, which is related to Ares, the god of war. But by classical Greek and Roman times, the words had come to mean any excellent personal quality shaping human conduct (especially those contributing to a flourishing life and the common good).

Character is a more or less consistent whole made up of a person’s moral virtues, vices, and intermediate states. In the best sort of person, these states are virtues; in a highly flawed person, they are largely vices. Moral virtues, in Aristotle’s ethics, are firm dispositions to choose or to experience emotions and appetites according to a rationally defensible pattern. They are not innate in human beings but we form them as the result of repeated action, choice, and moral experience. A useful type of bodily strength acquired as a result of exercise might be called a physical virtue. Similarly, moral virtue is acquired, if it is acquired, as a result of mental and psychological exercise of the appropriate sort. These observations come from Aristotle, who discussed moral character (êthos) in a lecture series given in the fourth century BCE.

Guengerich agrees with much of this. He also agrees with Aristotle that the virtues “lie in a mean,” and so avoid “too much” and “too little.” Thus, courage avoids the error of too little caution, which produces foolish rashness, and the error of too much holding back, which produces cowardice. Yet sometimes the emphasis is more on “not too much” (a theme of Guengerich’s own talk on Temperance).

The Tragedy of Female Slavery Today

Speaking of the recent book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, Guengerich notes that “some of what’s in the book is horrific – story after tragic story illustrating that planet Earth is a dangerous place to be female”; for example, “far more women and girls are shipped into brothels each year than African slaves were shipped to plantations each year [in the better known early modern trans-Atlantic slave trade—J.G.].” The Kristof-WuDunn book argues that the oppression of women, exemplified by “sex slavery, gender-based violence, and maternal mortality,” is the “great moral issue of the twenty-first century.” I’ll come back to this below. My question here is what are the qualities of character we need to work effectively together to end this horror?

The Periodic Table of the Virtues

Guengerich follows Aristotle in constructing a small list of important “virtues” related to character, organizing his series at General Assembly around them: Courage, Wisdom, Justice, Compassion, Temperance, Transcendence, and Hope. Aristotle himself had a short list that included Courage, Justice, Temperance, and (“practical”) Wisdom (which he considered an intellectual virtue related to moral choice rather than a moral virtue in his technical sense). He also had a longer list that included generosity, appropriate love of honor (roughly, an appropriate sense of self-worth), and friendliness.

In my view, Aristotle would have regarded the capacity to feel compassion neither too much nor too little a moral excellence. The Greek term for compassion is often translated “pity.” This is clearly important for Aristotle in the experience of tragic drama, which he likely thought part of the education that a free and responsible person should have. But, in a concession to the machismo of ancient elites, he didn’t give compassion attention equal to courage and temperance as Guengerich does.

Character and Social Change

Clearly, the excellences called Courage, Justice, Compassion, and Temperance are character strengths that spiritual progressives can cultivate in themselves, promote in others, and draw upon in campaigning against modern slavery and the oppression of women. On other issues too, the moral excellences come to the fore. For instance, when we mobilize against the negligent or intentional diversion of environmental harms to areas where already disadvantaged or politically weak groups reside – or demand the reduction of these harms, we are promoting environmental justice and drawing on the virtue of Justice in ourselves, but the effort gains strength from the capacity to feel compassion, which requires something of the moral virtue of the same name. When we try to modify society so that people may live more lightly upon the earth than most of us do in high-consumption societies, we are trying to promote the moral virtue of Temperance or “not too much.” If we address poverty issues by taking a stand for a “just global economic community” – a vision promoted at the recent General Assembly by Unitarian Universalists for a Just Economic Community – or the “Global Marshall Plan” proposed by Tikkun/NSP, we are encouraging justice in others and activating it in ourselves if we already possess it. Since Global Justice requires that those who are able to take “too much” refrain from doing so, Temperance again is called for. Finally, since environmental injustice tends to increase poverty and poverty is a condition that often rationalizes the oppression of women, these issues are highly intertwined.

Modifying Aristotle’s Table

Since Aristotle, thinkers concerned with the virtues have modified his original list. Virtues have been added to or deleted from the list, and their meaning has been subtly altered to reflect concerns of the community whose values are shaping the interpretation. Guengerich is surely not the first.

The most thorough medieval revision of Aristotle was probably that of Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae. His major modifications occurred when he conceived the moral life as a kind of preparation for contemplation of God in life after death, having left behind the body subject to physical decay, and when he added three “theological virtues” faith, hope, and charity to by then familiar list inherited from Aristotle.

Modern ethical thinking apart from the Catholic tradition tends to downplay the virtues. One exception is the late Robert Solomon, who tried to develop an Aristotelian approach to the contemporary business world. Solomon assumed roughly the context of mid-to-late 20th century capitalism and – what is increasingly difficult for some of us to swallow – that capitalism can be given a “human face.” Thus he highlighted virtues like honesty, trust, fairness, and, yes, compassion, that would have been less prominent in classical antiquity.

The Role of Reason

Describing Aristotle’s approach in preparation for presenting his own, Guengerich says, “Aristotle says that both things and people can be judged successful if they…achieve their full potential. The question of potential [for Aristotle] has to do with what is distinctive or unique about something. A knife…has the distinctive ability to cut things, and thus a sharp knife, well used, has achieved its full potential. The distinctive capacity of human beings [for Aristotle] is the capacity to reason. Our purpose as humans, therefore, is to develop our rational powers and live in accordance with them.”

This emphasis on reason omits the equal stress Aristotle placed on the creation of excellent dispositions to feel the “passions.” For him, practical wisdom, basically what Guengerich identifies as “wisdom” on his own list, the “intellectual” excellence of (rational) deliberation concerning what is to be done, cannot exist in a person unless the person has a more or less perfected capacity to feel, that is, unless the person has the upbringing and/or self-culture to feel fear, confidence, anger, a sense of personal worth, compassion, desire for food and drink, and a wish to help others in the proper way – to the proper extent, at the proper time and for the proper duration, toward the proper people, etc. Still, I see no reason for Guengerich not to accept this aspect of Aristotle’s analysis. Some of the virtues on his list – courage, temperance, compassion, and hope, at least – appear to call for it.

The Need for Heroism

Having cited the claim by Kristof and WuDunn that the great moral issue of our time is the oppression of women, Guengerich responds, “the great moral issue of our time is not, in fact, the oppression of women. This is indeed the great moral catastrophe of our time. But the great moral issue of our time is the dearth of virtue, which allows misogyny continually to oppress so many women around the world.” The need, in his view, is for “virtuous men and women, whose strength of character instills conviction in those who follow their lead and heaps shame upon those who do not, to rise up….Even today, suffering ones cry out for our help and wicked ones count upon our indifference.” He explicitly uses the word “heroes” to describe such men and women as he urges UU’s (and by extension, spiritual progressives) to be.

The concept of “hero” requires a narrative framework to give it meaning. An ethics of character evokes such a framework even if it is not explicitly stated. Still, a list of virtues suggests, as Guengerich himself notes, a “table of the elements,” and tends to produce an explicit discussion of each of them rather than an examination of the relevant narratives. He supplies several stories to provoke thought about the virtues he recommends but leaves the thread that unites most of them implicit, apart from the list of virtues. Yet the nature of the standards – the moral excellences to which one aspires – is not settled by merely adopting a generally Aristotelian character ethics as the framework for thinking about our own lives and our lives in community.

If an Ethics of Character Is Necessary, Is It Enough?

The point is that traditional versions of virtue ethics have often been deformed by an insufficiently critical attitude toward social inequality. Aristotle himself thought that women’s capacity for decision-making was deficient because of inherent moral weakness; hence justice as he conceived it did not require their equal participation in household or political decision-making. Related to this, many past versions of virtue ethics incorporate beliefs that certain human populations are naturally weak, beliefs inferred from the observed “facts” that they do not articulately assert themselves in public contexts. Yet such “facts” are contingent on social conditions that might, and arguably should, be changed.

Thus, in deciding what we should aspire to and what is to be done in terms provided by the virtue ethics tradition, we must still ask how much social inequality is rightly tolerable and how far appropriate compassion reaches. In Riane Eisler’s terms, do we work for a society based on Domination or Partnership?

If we’re going to take on the oppression of women, poverty, environmental collapse, and other issues intricately linked to these, we need a long-term vision as well as a willingness to collaborate to bring it about and to stay engaged in the process. The moral strengths that deserve the name “virtue” (or whatever we want to call those items that collectively compose excellence of character) would enable us to do that. But they have to be virtues that are conducive to healing our planet and so can survive critical examination.

July 27, 2010