Call both one’s efforts at being a good person and the ways of
thinking, feeling, and responding to circumstances that develop while
one works to be a good person ‘virtue.’ Let a ‘meaningful’ life be a
life imbued with a sense of purpose or significance—a life that is full,
engaging, and engaged, where the fullness comes of something more than
mere subjective interest and enthusiasm. It can seem as though virtue
and meaning have very little to do with each other. Whatever sort of
struggle might be involved in working to be a good human being can seem
like something personal—an individual quest to have a beautiful
character or a shining soul. Having a meaningful life, on the other
hand, looks like the sort of thing that will require that I go beyond
the business of working toward having a lovely soul and into a larger
world where I try to find things that are genuinely worth pursuing, and
devote myself to their pursuit. In this talk, I will work to bring the
two together, partly by urging a different account of virtue, partly by
developing a slightly more articulate account of meaning in human life,
and always by drawing on work by Thomas Aquinas.
Learning to be Good
It may be that talk about virtue has never been common in ordinary
life. It may be that the only common talk about virtue in North America
happened a long time ago and was primarily concerned with women and
their sexual habits, where ‘virtue’ was a matter of chastity. But in the
latter part of the 20th century, Anglophone philosophers
started talking about virtue again, and we now confront a wide variety
of different kinds of talk about virtue in both moral philosophy and
areas of empirical social science directed to exploration of moral
psychology and moral education. By most of these lights, a specific
virtue is a character trait that tends to make its bearer a better
person than she would be without it, and the sorts of virtues that are
topics of inquiry are acquired virtues—virtues that develop
through training and practice. There are accounts of virtue that find
their philosophical ancestor in the 18th century Scottish
philosopher, David Hume. There are accounts of virtue that draw
extensively from the work of Roman thinkers like Cicero. There are
accounts of virtue rooted in work by the ancient Greek philosopher,
Aristotle. The theorist of virtue I have found most useful is a
scholastic neo-Aristotelian—Thomas Aquinas.
For Aquinas, there are four cardinal virtues—practical wisdom,
justice, temperance, and courage. We need all four. Michael Pakaluk puts
the point this way:
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A virtue is a trait that…makes someone such that his activity—what he
does, what he is responsible for—is reasonable. But there are four
basic types of such activity: his thinking itself, as practical and
directed at action; his actions ordinarily so-called…; and how he is
affected. This last category splits into two, Aquinas thinks, on the
grounds that acting reasonably in the realm of the passions involves
regulating both the passions by which we are drawn to something and the
passions by which we are repulsed from something. These two sorts of
passions imply two sorts of tasks or achievements…which the ordinary
distinction between the virtues of temperance and courage confirms
