Thought for the Day, 8 February 2010

Clifford Longley

Has it ever occurred to anyone that where our MPs of all parties have gone wrong, or many of them, is that they've overdosed on deontology? It sounds like a bad visit to the dentist, but it can mean basing your ethical decisions on rules. Deontology is a moral code that could persuade you, for instance, that if the law says it's OK, then it is OK.

When deontology collides with virtue ethics you get the sort of slow-moving car crash that is the MPs' expenses scandal. And virtue ethics? That's what we all do, when we look at the way those MPs justified their expenses claims. Never mind the rules: we can just smell that something's gone bad.

Virtue ethics are due for a come-back, though they've never really gone away. Academic philosophers turned their back on virtue when they turned their back on classical philosophy in general. But it lived on, as the Scottish philosopher Alastair MacIntyre remarked in his ground-breaking 1981 book After Virtue, in the thought-patterns of ordinary people.

It's obvious we need these virtuous principles restored to the public pedestal where they belong. I also believe we may be about to witness an attempt to do just that. You'll recognise it when you see it.

We owe virtue ethics mainly to Plato and Aristotle, though there are traces of it visible in the Old and New Testaments. But we wouldn't have heard of it if St Thomas Aquinas hadn't taken it into the West's intellectual bloodstream in the Middle Ages, something many philosophers have been kicking against ever since. For their taste it's too mediaeval and metaphysical, that is to say too Catholic.

The classic virtues are usually listed as wisdom, justice, fortitude and temperance; for wisdom some say prudence, for fortitude some say courage. This is a very practical philosophy that resonates well with cognitive behavioural therapy, currently fashionable in psychiatry and social work.

To become virtuous, what you have to do is practice. For instance to become courageous, just act courageously, perhaps pushing yourself a little beyond your limits. Second time round it will be easier; eventually it becomes a habit and you will have become a more virtuous person. Ditto the other three. Vice works the same way, of course. The more you do it the more vicious you gradually become.

This is the very simple theory. But virtue ethics has consequences that are not so simple. It presupposes that we all possess a moral character that can be formed and improved upon, over time. It also presupposes that there are moral qualities we can all admire, moral standards we can all agree about... and some external source for our morality - obviously not Parliament - we can all respect. Now what might that be?