Jonathan Ashbach wrote an essay on our response to Coronavirus that set me thinking about Virtue Ethics. I think, from context, we can tell that Ashbach supports lifting lockdown restrictions - or at least, his ideas are warmly welcomed by other people who do - but there seems to be more in his essay than just an argument over quarantine. Let's unpack... In society as in the human personality there are many virtues: duty, compassion, individual self-expression, loyalty, freedom, justice, to name a few. These exist in tension with each other. For example, promoting justice tends to mean restricting freedom. In a fully just society the police would have sweeping powers to detect and punish criminals; in a fully free society, there would be great scope for evil-doers to get away with crimes. Aristotle describes the GOLDEN MEAN which is the optimal arrangement where virtues exist together in a state of creative tension. The mean is not fixed and is relative. For example, in war, loyalty and duty become more important, individual self-expression less important and compassion for the enemy becomes – in some situations – a temptation to be resisted rather than a good to be embraced. But no virtue ever becomes unimportant and all virtues need to be acknowledged, which is why it is important to have the Geneva Conventions in wartime to remind us that compassion is still a virtue, however unpopular or politically inconvenient it might have become. Just as individuals embody a different mixture of virtues in different intensities, so do societies. There are cultures that set more store by duty than by individualism, others set more store by freedom than justice. These arrangements aren’t fixed either but they are held in a sort of stable form by powerful institutions (the media, religion, political constitutions, education) that reinforce and reproduce a society’s particular composition of virtues. (The word Aristotle uses for virtue is ARETE so you could talk about the ARETEIC COMPOSITION of a society). Sometimes one particular virtue is raised to the point where it subordinates all the others. In Nazi Germany, loyalty to the state becomes this preeminent virtue. At other times, a virtue is entirely demeaned: compassion ranks so low in Stalin’s Russia and Pol Pot’s Cambodia that leaders feed entire populations into mincing machines of their own creation. A million people were executed in 'the Killing Fields' of Cambodia in the 1970s Aristotle, and thinkers who follow him, deplore the tendency to exalt one virtue over the others. Jonathan Ashbach terms such people ‘barbarians’ who wish to cash all the virtues in for one single value or else denigrate one virtue entirely – as opposed to the ‘civilised’ person who struggles to hold the virtues in tension and seek the Golden Mean. The barbarian says “Justice is a bourgeois illusion!” or “Compassion is just lack of patriotism!” The civilised man and woman is always saying “Yes, but …. And on the other hand …” (This is a Greek concept of ‘barbarism’ – it’s got nothing to do with what the actual historical Celts or Persians were in fact like. The Greeks were often wrong in identifying particular societies as ‘barbarians’ but they weren’t wrong about the idea of barbarism itself.) During times of crisis, there is a tendency for us all to rush to one value to be our exalting characteristic. In the past it was often loyalty to country. Currently it’s Compassion (or Mercy, as the ancients thought of it). People who champion other values get shouted down. Tell the ardent patriot about the importance of free speech and due process and he calls you a traitor. Tell a certain sort of humanitarian about the importance of ending quarantines and he calls you a murderer. It is the same response.. Obviously, experts will tell us the likely casualties of different courses of action, but the choice about which action then to take is a moral choice. Virtue Ethics reminds us that the rednecks waving flags outside US senate houses are not moral strangers. They are reminding us of virtues we are neglecting: liberty, individual self-expression. That doesn’t mean their policies are the right policies, just that their motives are not wicked motives. When we sneer or shriek at them, we’re no different from the McCarthyites shouting “Filthy Commie!” at writers and film makers who were trying to point out some things about Justice in American society. We have made one virtue into the only virtue and lost sight of the Golden Mean. It is we – not they – who have stopped being civilised. Images like this create strong reactions but Virtue Ethics reminds us that these people are championing virtues too - just ones we are currently neglecting Ashbach goes a bit further than this analysis. He seems to be saying that the areteic composition (I love that phrase!) of society has been fundamentally altered by the arrival of the mass media to shape our moral responses to events. This is plausible. And he seems to be saying that a particular virtue - courage - is in danger of being denigrated, the way justice or compassion were shouted down in previous crises. Courage (Fortitude, in ancient terminology) is an interesting Virtue because it undergirds all the others and without it no person or society can be virtuous. A coward is only kind or honest or just up to the point where it becomes dangerous. This is why C.S. Lewis says, "Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality.” The idea that the mass media are launching a sustained assault on the virtue of Courage - by endorsing timidity and a fear of death as the only appropriate and moral response to what's going on - is a pretty serious charge. Of course, there really is a risk of death for some people and there's a distinction between timidity and caution (itself a virtue that the ancients termed Prudence). As usual, Virtue Ethics addresses dilemmas by asking, What would a healthy, sane and balanced society look like? It counsels finding a middle way between recklessness and caution - and between compassion for the vulnerable and the liberties and freedoms of the majority. But of course, how exactly that should be put into practice in everyday situations is still left maddeningly vague.
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