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Introduction: The Recovery of Virtue
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12096 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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12 / 1987 |
850 Words |
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The recovery of virtue is a theme that points in more than one direction. It brings us inescapably into contact with such disciplines as philosophy, theology, and the social sciences. The discussion of virtue, it may be agreed, cannot be limited to a survey of systematic philosophies that deal with ethical questions. It must take place at the crossroads where human reasoning, social custom, historical factors, and even biological conditioning come together.
From the discussion of virtue that follows, at least two conclusions can be safely drawn. First, any serious attempt to deal with the theme of recovering virtue must go beyond abstract reason to look at the social context in which ethical decisions are made and applied. No satisfactory definition of what the ancients understood as "human nature" is feasible, unless such a view of "nature" is related to the way people actually live--and to the inferred preconditions of a generally humane and enduring communal life. A search for virtue can only be conducted by scrutinizing societies and offering generalizations that rest on particular examples.
The second conclusion is that the recovery of virtue poses a cultural question far more than it presents an intellectual task. It is largely self-evident that men make distinctions between good and evil or honorable and dishonorable conduct on the basis of established heroic and religious models. Men view themselves--and are viewed--as good and virtuous when they conform their lives to such received examples. By contrast, willful deviation from these examples is stigmatized as evil. Cultural models are the roots of conventional behavior. The attempt to relate the Good to the conventional and habitual goes back at least as far as Aristotle, who stressed the tie between ethos (a term designating habit, usage, and disposition) and the practice of justice.
In The Sociological Tradition, Robert Nisbet argues that the origin of social theory in the nineteenth century came out of the effort to prove Aristotle's premise. Rejecting the atomistic and rationalist anthropology of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, social theorists focused on the inherited institututions that they believed shaped human existence. They emphasized both the value and inevitability of the social and cultural order in determining our humanity--however much we may try to see the world as free-floating intellectuals. The sociological tradition Nisbet traces subsumed ethical questions under the all-embracing category of "society."
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