After 'Values'

Despite a surge of virtue-related discourse in certain Christian thought spaces, post-virtue, ends-based moral reasoning is having its moment in the mainstream. “We are creating a mode of politics that openly celebrates the death of morality,” lamented journalist Derek Thompson recently in his piece,“Can America Escape the Cycle of Vicemaxxing?”

It’s easy to see how he reached this conclusion. Prominent right-wing figures transparently dispense with principles and conscience as limiting factors on power; prominent leftists shamelessly plug petty theft as a form of legitimate protest while expressing winking tolerance of political violence.

An ends-based moral logic comports neatly with all manner of atrocities— bombing Iranian civilians, killing boat strike survivors, celebrating the death of your political opponents. Questions of just war, or fairness, or human dignity become at best afterthoughts, and at worst impediments to realizing the righteous ends of conquest, dominance, being on the right side of history. It manifests in a “bloody-minded utilitarianism,” as Ross Douthat has termed it. “Bad guys being killed saves American lives; you can trust us that these are all bad guys; no, you can’t see the legal justification; and anyway, Obama killed more people with his drone strikes.” Sometimes, it’s hard not to conclude that viciousness itself is the point.

In a piece on the military’s boat strikes off the coast of Venezuela, Phil Klay posits that the current administration’s moral logic has moved beyond even ends-based justifications. “I suspect the question the administration cares about is not ‘is this legal,’ ‘is this a war crime,’ ‘is this murder’ or even ‘is this good for America,’” he writes, “but rather, ‘isn’t this violence delightful?’”

What we are witnessing is but one result of a phenomenon several thinkers have identified: we have abandoned a moral order predicated on virtue and substituted it for one predicated on values. And as author Grace Hamman in her book Ask of Old Paths, notes, “values are an incomplete and inadequate way of determining the moral quality of actions and beliefs.” Values—the ends we hold as being intrinsically worthy of pursuit—tend to find a natural home on yard signs or bumper stickers: Science is Real; Love is Love; No Human is Illegal; Make America Great Again. We may denigrate this kind of messaging as “virtue signaling,” but it's important to recognize that these are not virtues. Virtues, the “set of dispositions and habits that must be practiced in order to flourish,” as Matthew Loftus terms them, cannot be signaled, only be lived. Values have their rightful place— they can help clarify priorities, envisage a desired end state, and motivate righteous action— but they cannot be the foundation of a moral life. 

In a promising turn, the language of virtue has shown signs of life among some in the anti-Trump resistance, who are starting to realize that the language of values is ultimately impotent against those who revel in vice. The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer, in his piece detailing how Minnesotan Christians mobilized amidst the presence of ICE, writes, “The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone…These [ICE] agents, and the president who sent them, are no one’s heroes, no one’s saviors—just men with guns who have to hide their faces to shoot a mom in the face, and a nurse in the back.”  Serwer argues his case against the administration’s actions on immigration not on the basis of the policy merits; but on the basis that it is cowardly and cruel. 

Unfortunately, despite Serwer’s moral clarity, the American Left in recent years has not evinced a particularly robust commitment to virtue ethics. Setting aside outright celebrations of criminal activity (although these do represent a natural, if extreme, consequence of a virtue-agnostic political ethic), the Left’s idolization of individual autonomy detached from external moral, communal, or religious demands has produced tolerance and celebration of devastating evils like abortion on demand and medically-assisted suicide. (This is not a fault unique to the Left, of course, as evinced by the ugly surge of sports gambling, pornography, and other societal vices tolerated or outright endorsed by the libertarian right.) Notions of “value neutrality” and the supremacy of the secular have manifested in varying levels of disdain for public expressions of religious belief, while intolerant insistence on ideological conformity has led to the castigation and banishment those not sufficiently deferential to the progressive shibboleths of the day.

The worst tendencies of both the American Right and the American Left have a common root in the virtue-to-values shift. The logic of the market; of unfettered choice, has turned morality into, as Jessica Hooten Wilson terms it, “an expression of preference.” The word “value” itself implies market logic, that we assign significance to particular ideas and aims and decide what they’re worth to us. Fundamentally, a values-based moral framework is an attempt to reduce what it means to live a morally upright life to something small and discrete enough for us to “hold.” It’s a product of what Charles Taylor termed the “modern moral order,” part of the buffer of the “buffered self.” Instead of submitting ourselves to transformation in the presence of the divine, we atomize and externalize righteousness, encoding it into various issue positions, from which we select those that speak to us. “Value neutrality” is a natural outflow of this approach, because it assumes values are things we pick and choose from a menu and thus can be shed or shunned at will. 

It’s destructive to individual and societal flourishing when values become the fundamental unit of moral analysis. Partisan pugilism naturally follows, as does comfort with selecting morally depraved leaders because they’re good on the issues. Taken to an extreme, a values-based morality can lead to terrible acts of violence done in service of a purported good. One can bomb an abortion clinic or assassinate public figures in the service of a value—in fact it’s the logical thing to do. If the only thing that matters is achieving the righteous end, any means become licit. 

Conversely, it is impossible, by definition, to do evil things in service of a virtue. In contrast to values, which we choose and hold and experience as external to ourselves, virtue is something we embody. Historically, variously-defined sets of “capital,” “cardinal,” and “theological” virtues have collectively included chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, kindness, patience, humility, fortitude, justice, faith, hope, and love. That isn’t just a laundry list of human-derived impositions; it’s a (non-exhaustive) description of the attributes of Christ that Christians as his disciples are expected to assume, which means that Christians should be leading the charge on virtue. We are not saved by our practices, but certain practices are an inevitable product of salvation. 

The Augustinian good of the values-based moral order is a recognition of the importance of orthodoxy: we are reasoning creatures, and what we believe does matter. It’s not enough, though, to ask “what do we believe?” but rather “who are we becoming?”  Salvation demands transformation. Christ says we shall be known by our fruit; St. Paul helpfully specifies what that is: joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, which together ultimately comprise love. To practice virtue is to exert ourselves to live in accordance with those fruits, to work out our salvation and strive to resemble Christ day by day. As C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity, “Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.” 

Christians are not to be moral relativists. We should be capable of discerning right from wrong and bold about articulating the distinction. Embracing virtue does not mean sacrificing moral clarity on issues that matter. The difference is that clarity proceeds from virtue rather than preceding it. It’s because we are seeking to be just and kind and faithful people who resemble Jesus that we care about particular issues of justice and mercy and human dignity, which means we undermine the whole operation if we stop being just, kind, faithful, etc. in the pursuit of those ends. It’s entirely possible for us to eliminate abortion or end poverty or build a lot of family-friendly housing and lose our souls in the process. We should and must fight for righteous outcomes, but we must be on our guard for when our zeal tempts us to unrighteous acts. 

Reclaiming virtue as the basis of morality isn’t a panacea; nothing in this fallen world is. Christians (and people of good faith generally) will still disagree and argue about how best to put virtues into practice. There will also be times when the manifestation of one virtue takes precedence over another, depending on context and the responsibilities an individual assumes in their role (a virtuous judge, for example, exercises justice over mercy when imposing a sentence on a guilty defendant—though they do so not with malice or disdain toward the sentenced; rather with hope for repentance and a deep awareness of their own guilt before God). Working out what it means practically to live a virtuous life must be done in counsel with others in the body of believers, and with a deep awareness of our shared need for grace. 

Christians have a particular responsibility to embody godly practices and habits of the heart, but thanks to natural law and common grace, all people are capable of virtuous behavior. It’s encouraging to see Serwer and others, like Representative Jake Auchincloss, a Democrat from Massachusetts, employ the language of virtue and vice in a policy context, unafraid to make judgments about some things being intrinsically better or worse for us as individuals and a society. For a liberal society like ours to function in a way that promotes human flourishing and the common good, it requires its citizenry to adopt a certain set of virtues. Yuval Levin names some of them: “As a liberal democracy…we require virtues like toleration, forbearance, patience, and humility. And as a republic, we require virtues like responsibility, courage, honesty, magnanimity, and faith.” 

A peaceable, orderly, and just common life doesn’t just happen—it requires people who are willing and able to change their behavior and restrain their desires to support their own flourishing and that of those around them. It requires Christians who recognize that any moral framework that does not ultimately aim to shape us into the image of Christ is perverted and misguided. It requires us to recognize that even our values are subject to the lordship of Christ, that many of those values must be left at the foot of the cross when we embark on the Christian way.