Virtue

I just read a book for class called The God of Faith and Reason by Richard Sokolowski. Neat book. One of the sections was on Virtue.

In our modern culture, we tend to praise people who hold up to their beliefs at great personal sacrifice. It is as if we only value something if it were hard to do. There is no way to tell by looking at someone if they have good moral fortitude. Morality is determined not by a deed itself, but by the personal motivation behind it. You can only tell by looking deep within a person and exploring their motives and their struggles and all the internal stuff that goes on. Good deeds by themselves are suspect unless they were done with the "right" attitude. Bad deeds may have some good in them if the person did the best they could and that was all they could manage to do. In fact, if something was enjoyable we tend to think it is less worthy of praise since the person must have done it for "selfish" reasons.

In other words, if you feed the hungry but you did it because it was fun, then you aren't as much an example of morality as someone who feeds the hungry despite wanting to do something else with every fiber of their being but who does it anyway because it was the "right" thing to do.

In the days of Aristotle, the ultimate moral category was the virtuous person. This was a person whose ideals and willpower were so much in line that s/he delighted in doing good. S/he wanted to do good. It was easy to do good. The virtuous person was held up as an ideal. This person had no internal conflict.

The person who was able to do good despite being pulled in contrary directions was actually secondary to the virtuous person.

Somewhere along the line, we lost that notion of virtue. We don't believe there are people who are naturally oriented to good or evil. We just believe that there are people who struggle with internal motives of all sorts, and we tend to value the person who is able to hold his or her head up highly despite being pulled in contrary directions. I have usually gone along with this view, but I am coming to appreciate the classical perspective a bit more.

Isn't it great to be so in line with goodness that you just want it and can't get enough? Isn't that a better goal to be than someone who wants to do bad but is able to pull themselves kicking and screaming to do something good? It is wonderful to have that self control, but isn't it better not to even need it?

So internal motivations still count here. But it is also true that a good deed is a good deed despite the intentions behind it. And a selfish motive may actually be the ideal! I dunno, I don't have this all worked out, but the gears are really turning on this one.