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1 Virtue Ethics and the Challenge of Hauerwas William Bennett touched a national nerve in 1993 when he published his bestseller, The Book of Virtues.1 Many Americans seemed to be longing for the sort of ethical foundation that Bennett endorsed. The idea that there are enduring virtues that deserve to be taught appealed to many who had grown weary of living in a climate of moral uncertainty rife with ethical ambiguities. In Bennett’s thick book, everything was reassuringly black and white. Here were stories with heroes to be emulated and villains to be despised. Here was right and wrong that could be grasped and taught. Of course, not all agreed with Bennett’s implied understanding of what constitutes the virtuous life, and some offered alternate anthologies of stories and suggestions for their use.2 That such debate exists is one of the problems besetting the wider culture, which possesses no means of judging between competing claims.3 Even if agreement on what actually constitutes a universal list of the virtues may well be altogether impossible, the desire for such a list, or even lists, illustrates that there is a chord in contemporary American society responsive to the idea of virtue. It should be noted, though, that the efforts of Bennett and others to champion the restoration of the moral fiber of contemporary culture is but the populist tip of a significant body of work that has come to be called virtue ethics, or an ethics of virtue. 1. William J. Bennett, ed., The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993). 2. Colin Greer and Herbert Kohl, eds., A Call to Character (New York: HarperCollins,1995). 3. The reasons for this are complicated and have more to do with politics and sociology, rather than with what is immediately theological. James Davison Hunter ably explores this reality in The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age without Good or Evil (New York: Basic Books, 2000); see esp. 205–20. 15 The Rise of Virtue Ethics The academic antecedents to Bennett’s popular efforts began several years earlier. Indeed, it is easily and safely argued that an ethics of virtue is as old as Aristotle or even Plato. It was Plato who identified and Aristotle who thoroughly expounded what by the Middle Ages had become the first four of the “seven cardinal virtues” (prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance). Aristotle’s carefully considered ethics supplied the enduring framework for thinking about the virtues and their human manifestations.4 It was he who set the standard for virtually all subsequent virtue thinkers, including Christian teachers of ethics such as Thomas Aquinas and Philip Melanchthon. Contemporary virtue ethics certainly is interested in the classic virtues as presented by Aristotle and made complete with the addition of the three “theological virtues”: faith, hope, and love.5 Still, today’s interest in an ethics of virtue is about much more than the promulgation of anthologies describing virtuous individuals or a school district’s decision to assign a virtue for each month in the academic calendar in the hope of encouraging the cultivation of correspondingly virtuous behavior in students and perhaps even faculty.6 Having been overshadowed and displaced by the Kantian and later utilitarian directions of Enlightenment ethics, an ethics of virtue began a renaissance in the last part of the twentieth century. “The past fifteen years,” wrote Gregory Trianosky in 1990, “have witnessed a dramatic resurgence of philosophical interest in the virtues.”7 He continues, “The charge that modern philosophical thought neglects the virtues . . . once apposite, is by now outmoded; and the calls for a renewed investigation of virtue and virtue ethics are being answered from many quarters.”8 Of the many quarters providing answers to the call for a retrieval of virtue ethics, or at least the study of virtue, one of the most important is Alasdair MacIntyre. MacIntyre is generally credited with fueling the resurgence of interest in an ethics of virtue by attracting the attention not only of the philosophical community but of the 4. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, esp. Books II-VII. 5. The work of Josef Pieper not only serves as an excellent example of contemporary interest in the ancient virtues, but also provides an outstanding discussion of these virtues and their relevance to life in the church today. See Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues: Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967). 6. This practice has been...

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