The Virtue of Virtues

Some of the 72 disciples of Confucius at Koshi-byo in Nagasaki

Sharon Begley writes in Science Journal in 2004:

The task was to practice “compassion” meditation, generating a feeling of loving kindness toward all beings.

“We tried to generate a mental state in which compassion permeates the whole mind with no other thoughts,” says Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk at Shechen Monastery in Katmandu, Nepal, who holds a Ph.D. in genetics.

In a striking difference between novices and monks, the latter showed a dramatic increase in high-frequency brain activity called gamma waves during compassion meditation. Thought to be the signature of neuronal activity that knits together far-flung brain circuits, gamma waves underlie higher mental activity such as consciousness. The novice meditators “showed a slight increase in gamma activity, but most monks showed extremely large increases of a sort that has never been reported before in the neuroscience literature,” says Prof. Davidson, suggesting that mental training can bring the brain to a greater level of consciousness.

Not since David Hume has virtue ethics found a place in the mainstream philosophy community, despite the fact that – more than any other moral framework – virtue ethics serves as the basic moral framework for all of the world’s major religions and cultures.  

Over the last few hundred years, a blink of an eye when compared to the length of human civilization and moral code, virtue ethics has slowly been cast aside in favor of Mill’s crude utilitarianism and Kant’s crude deontology.  But there are glaring, obvious problems with both of these approaches, which can only be resolved by virtue ethics; utilitarianism is prone to human error, and deontology requires the added complexity of language and its interpretation.  By being abstract in its very nature, and through emphasizing “being” rather than “doing”, virtue ethics tempers the errors of utilitarian ratiocination with intuitive checks and balances and avoids the problems of language and clarification which necessarily plague deontological moral constructs.  

This is not to dismiss the other two prevailing approaches to morality.  For a truly ethical, complex, understandable, and flexible system, elements from all three frameworks should be incorporated.  In terms of crafting delineated and clear rules for a society, it seems like virtue ethics is lacking.  Deontology should continue to take the lead in creating a base of rules for what is morally unacceptable.  Utilitarianism should largely continue to guide public policy for practical reasons.  But in terms of creating an enlightened and morally upright citizenry in a secular age, we could use a turn back to the virtues that underpin our societies and which long predate various religious parasitisms.  Perhaps in our rush to upheaval, we threw the baby out with the bathwater.  As of right now, virtue ethics is underserved in Godless society.

Virtue ethics seems well fit for the subjective, personal moralities that we would all like to be free to (and should) explore and develop, while at the same time providing something universal to serve as magnetic north for our individual moral compasses.  By meditating on abstract notions of compassion, or practicing willpower by giving up the things we like, or aspiring to be wise, or giving away our possessions, or even by exposing ourselves to extremes of heat and cold like the ancient Stoics did – by putting the instinctual and emotional animal to work for the reasoning and cerebral person, one ceases to be a mere human and becomes a saint.  Virtue ethics fosters a prescriptive rather than a proscriptive morality – what one should aim to become, rather that simply what one is not allowed to do.  It sets the bar higher that what is simply deemed “satisfactory” by society, with the individual moral agent in charge of both the speed and the direction of his own moral development.

Much was made of the ability (or lack thereof) of neuroscience to investigate individual moral actors and individual moral codes after the Sam Harris TED lecture last February.  While I also believe in naturalized morality, I see no reason to think we’ll ever be able to explicate general principles to serve any practical purposes, and I see no reason why we should.  Nevertheless, many psychologists seem to think that there has been an overemphasis on studying and understanding abnormally evil behavior and a lack of research or investigation into individuals who are abnormally virtuous.  It follows that there should be more studies like the Tibetan Buddhist monk study.  Look around.  Our future may depend on it.