Can Virtue be Taught?: Thomistic Answers to a Socratic Question

1 Alarmed by those who offered guidance in such questions, Weber criticizes the ideal of the teacher as a custodian and transmitter of wisdom to which students apprentice themselves in the quest for human fulfillment. Because such questions are unanswerable from the perspective of scientific inquiry, a young person asking “How shall I live?” is really asking 229 The Thomist 77 (2013): 229-60 CAN VIRTUE BE TAUGHT? THOMISTIC ANSWERS TO A SOCRATIC QUESTION MATTHEW ROSE Berkeley Institute Berkeley, California I N HIS 1918 ADDRESS “Scholarship as a Vocation,” Max Weber outlined a vision for higher education that would come to inform much of the twentieth-century academy. The lecture is famous for its sharp distinction between facts and values, its discussion of the process Weber named “disenchantment,” and its argument that the advancement of learning depended on refining the techniques of specialization. While “Scholarship as a Vocation” is often read for its austere views on the nature of modern academic institutions, its deeper goal was to challenge traditional understandings of pedagogy. Weber argued that as scholarship became ever more focused and provisional, the modern academic had to relinquish the notion that one could impart anything like wisdom or virtue. Among the most important of his arguments was that teachers renounce their claims to moral authority. Since all views about the purpose of life are a matter of subjective opinion and personal preference, the classroom is no place to entertain questions like, What kind of person should I be? What should I live for? What has real worth and significance? Students interested in life’s meaning were told to look to “demagogues” and “prophets,” not scholars. De finibus non est disputandum.1 MATTHEW ROSE 230 “Which of the warring gods should I serve?” (Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills [New York: Oxford University Press, 1958], 153) I hasten to add that Weber’s amoral vision was imperfectly adopted. As Julie Rueben has chronicled, modern universities never abandoned the idea that they should prepare students to live morally and contribute to the common good. They simply did so fitfully, dispassionately, and lacking substantive agreement on moral norms. See Julie Reuben, The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 2 For administrative complaints, see Derek Bok, Our Underachieving College (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Task Force on General Education of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University (2007); Millennial Values Survey Reportby the Berkeley Center at Georgetown University (2012). For social scientific research, see Perry Glanzer and Todd Ream, Christianity and Moral Identity in Higher Education (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009); Christian Smith, Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); James Davidson Hunter, The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age without Good or Evil (New York: Basic Books, 2001). For humanistic criticism, see Anthony Kronman, Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given up on the Meaning of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Mark Roche, Why Choose the Liberal Arts? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010); Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). Today there is widespread dissatisfaction with Weber’s vision and growing agreement that higher education has been derelict in the moral formation of students. Once limited to religious and political conservatives, these complaints now come by way of a broad spectrum of observers, including administrators at elite universities, social scientists alarmed at the ways higher education shapes moral identities, and defenders of liberal education who worry the humanities have been drained of their moral dimension.2 All of this is to say that it is no longer inflammatory, as it was a generation ago, to wonder if the moral education of American undergraduates is a matter of public emergency. In the face of such concerns many suggest that Catholic institutions are better positioned to respond than are their secular peers, whose internal disagreements are so deep as to include the rationale behind the education they claim...