I ran across an interesting book review. Part of it reads:
The Greeks recognized that it takes more than a sound argument to get people to do the right thing. People need to be trained to desire and be motivated by the right kinds of things, beginning in childhood. Aristotle’s basic insight regarding moral education is that people don’t learn how to live virtuously in a classroom or a weekend seminar, because virtue requires not good lecture notes, but practice. Good arguments might be necessary for justifying our actions or for understanding why our actions are right, but they are certainly not sufficient to transform us into moral people. In addition to praising the life of reason, by emphasizing the cultivation of virtue, involving exercise and practice, the Greeks offer a deeper conception of what it is to live well, and an assurance that striving for virtue is itself the pursuit of happiness.
This idea of life as something we practice, and that a well-lived life is something that we learn to do – something that takes discipline and attention is critical if we are to recapture a public sense of virtue and shared values.
We seem to have bought the notion that only an ethic imposed from without – by God – is valid, and sense we’ve by-and-large abandoned God-as-rulemaker (even if we believe), we are adrift. This is nonsense – dangerous nonsense.
The recent IG report on the Justice Department had conservative Christians hiring people based on candidates attitudes towards “God, guns, and gays” even though this was an explicit violation of the civil service rules. These same conservative Christians have swept aside the constitution and justified kidnapping and torture, illegal wiretaps and placing unqualified candidates in critical government jobs – all on the basis that their faith and philosophy trumps. Personal integrity and a sense of obligation to the public they serve does not seem to enter into it – I suspect because they think of themselves as answering to a higher power. The moral decay they decry has in fact infected them – because they look to a set of rules for their morality, and not the discipline of working hard to live a virtuous life.
One lesson o take from this is that adherence to the beleif that morality existis in any set of rules is insufficient. No matter what, you have to do the hard work of developing a life worth living – which comes from cultivating virtue, not by espousing rules.
