God and humans ruled out the possibility that they could be friends. For Aquinas, friendship with God was not something that could be achieved on one’s own; it comes as a gift. Aristotle taught that virtues were acquired; they were habits that we achieve through proper habituation. Like many before him, he stated that the most important virtues were the “cardinal” virtues, from the Latin cardus, meaning “hinge”; they are the “hinge” that allows one to live well. Aquinas taught that friendship with God required something more than the acquired virtues; it required “infused” virtues that came from the Holy Spirit. They are “faith, hope and love,” and direct us to both God and our neighbor because to love God and neighbor fulfills the two tablets of the Ten Commandments given by God to Moses. To love God we must participate in God’s own love, and that participation makes possible infused virtues.
(3) Immanuel Kant’s Autonomous Reasoner
Although both Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas’s ethical teachings are still present in practice and theory today, they are not often the dominant ethical theories used in the modern university. They are considered too parochial. Modern ethical thinking originated with two seminal thinkers, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and J. S. Mill (1806–73). Perhaps we do not run red lights because if we lived by such a rule—I will willy-nilly run red lights—we could not will that everyone act by the same rule. Driving would be impossible.
For Kant, the only truly good thing in the world is a good will. Ethics was not about contingency, habituation, happiness, or friendship; it was about the rational, autonomous individual willing an action that could be done by anyone in any circumstances at any time. This gave rise to what is referred to as the “universalizability” thesis. Unlike Aristotle and Aquinas, ethics did not depend upon a community like the Athenian city or the Christian Church, it was available to anyone who was willing to do his or her duty. Accomplishing one’s duty consists of obeying commands or imperatives. Kant taught that there were two kinds of imperatives—hypothetical or categorical. Both are forms of practical reasoning. In the hypothetical imperative, an action is performed not for its own sake but for the sake of something else, for instance that it makes one happy or righteous in the eyes of God, one’s family, city or nation. In the categorical imperative, an action is performed for its own sake. Kant gave several versions of the categorical imperative. One version is to always treat others as ends and not as means. Our action, if it is to be moral, must always honor the dignity of another individual. Another version stated, “act only on that maxim which you can at the same time will that it be a universal law.” A maxim is a rule one adopts to live by. It should be adopted freely by the ethical agent and not because anyone else, parents, teachers, rulers or priests, told you to adopt it. Ethics is about autonomous actions that arise out of one’s own individual thought and will, and not the thought or will of another.
Simply adopting a maxim does not make it moral. We could always imagine an immoral maxim one might live by such as “always steal when you can get away with it.” What makes an action moral, what fulfills the categorical imperative, is that the maxim you live by can be made a universal law. The categorical imperative asks that if you are on the receiving end of a maxim, could you will it? In other words, if someone steals your goods because they can do so with impunity, would you be willing to adopt that maxim as a universal law? Reasonable people would refuse to make such a maxim into a universal law so it fails the categorical imperative. Kant’s ethics, then, are an extension of the adage to treat others the way you would want to be treated. His ethics began a tradition of ethical thinking known as “deontology” from the Greek word deontos, which means “binding.” Ethics is doing your duty because it is your duty whether you benefit from it or not.
(4) J. S. Mill’s Utility Maximizer
Perhaps we refuse to run red lights because it increases the utility to our lives, that is to say it increases pleasure or diminishes pain. John Stuart Mill was a trained economist like his father John Mill who taught utilitarian ethics. He was part of a radical group of thinkers in the nineteenth century who challenged how we think about ethics. Like Kant, ethics is about action, but Mill built on his predecessor Jeremy Bentham’s work that took pleasure or utility as central for ethics. He, too, started a tradition that has developed and grown into a variety of theories, but what the tradition has in common was best expressed in three articles Mill published in 1861 that were collected into a small book in 1863 known as Utilitarianism. Mill wrote, “Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.”6 This statement sounds similar to Aristotle or Aquinas’s eudaimonia; ethics seeks its end in happiness, but what is meant here by happiness has shifted. Happiness is the “intended pleasure and the absence of pain.” There is no sanction for it except the desire each has for his or her own happiness. Ethics is about increasing utility and/or diminishing disutility. For Kant, utilitarianism commands a hypothetical imperative in that it tells us to follow a rule not because of the rule itself but because of its consequences, either in making us or the greatest number happy.
(5) A Feminist Ethics of Caring
Much modern ethical thinking pits deontology against utilitarianism and defends some version of one or the other. But not all ethicists are happy with this situation. Feminists, in particular, find it wanting. Perhaps the reason we do not run red lights is because we have been nurtured by caring others who pass on to us a desire also to care. Neither a universal categorical imperative, nor a desire to increase utility, explains our ethical actions. Ethics is more local, more grounded in relationships of trust. Some feminists argue that the deontological/utilitarian binary is little more than a debate within dominant forms of masculinity. Virginia Held suggests that these two forms of ethical theory assume a male agent fit for liberal political or economic theory; deontology assumes the person as rational autonomous agent and utilitarianism as a self-interested individual. They are based on capacities putatively intrinsic to maleness, but ones that overlook capacities that women possess, one of which is “the capacity to give birth to new human beings.”7 Based on this and other capacities, Held develops an “ethics of caring” that draws upon “the universal experience of care.” Every person, she claims, has been cared for or cares for others at some point in his or her life. This universal experience makes more sense of our ethical practice, and can lead to a better ethical theory. Like Aristotle and Aquinas, it has a place for something more than autonomous reason. It emphasizes neglected aspects of being human—desire, passion, emotion. Unlike them, it is not found in only some communities, religious or otherwise, so it can satisfy the universalizability premise. It is modern without privileging the autonomous rational or self-interested individual.
The five ethical theories above do not exhaust the diverse ways philosophers and theologians think about ethics, but they suffice for demonstrating some of that diversity. They help us see why no single answer can be given to a perceived need to teach ethics. If in response to discovering that someone teaches ethics, a person responds that we need more of it, it would be appropriate to ask them, what do you think we need more of—acquired virtue, infused virtue, binding imperatives, maximizing utility, care? Some of these answers might overlap, but they also have different conceptions of what the purpose of ethics is, and they assume different social contexts in which it makes sense. All five assume that they are telling us how the common person (if there is such an entity) thinks about morality, and how the common person should think about it. Yet there is an interesting correlation that should not be missed in these diverse theories. Each of them privileges some underlying social context that renders them intelligible. Aristotle’s ethics assumes a small, manageable city and a moral agency fitting its citizens. Aquinas’s ethics assumes a church and a moral agency fitting disciples; Kant’s a nation-state securing the dignity of autonomous rational individuals through rights; Mill’s a market where self-interested individuals trade and barter; and Held’s an extended family where persons relate to each other as caregivers and receivers. What this demonstrates is something that the contemporary Aristotelian moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has argued—every ethics implies a sociology. Ethics cannot be abstracted from the social and political contexts that both make it possible and which it then in turn serves. Ethics done well will require us to consider
