Clifton on virtue and the good life

(This post is part of a series on Shane Clifton’s book Crippled Grace. This posts focuses on chapters 3 and 4. The post on chapter 1 can be found here, and chapter 2 can be found here.

In chapter 3, we turn to Clifton’s engagement with the virtue tradition. The virtue tradition, at least in the West, begins with some of the pre-Socratics, but comes to prominence with Plato and, especially, Aristotle. It then played a key, and perhaps the central, normative role in Christian theology and philosophy up through the medieval period. It’s always been central to Catholic theology, whereas deontic or divine command views became more influential in protestant circles. In the past sixty, there has been a resurgence in virtue ethics. (I co-edited a book on virtue and vice a few years ago; my co-editor and I are now writing a short introductory text on virtue that should be complete this summer.)

Clifton introduces the reader to some of the key concepts in traditional virtue theory in this chapter:

• flourishing (‘living and doing well’);
• how virtue is teleological;
• the distinction between virtuous activity and virtue;
• and moral formation, including habituation, instruction, and the role of community

In general, I don’t want to quibble with details of this chapter too much, as Clifton’s not trying to give a comprehensive treatment of the virtue tradition in general, nor the incorporation of that tradition into much Christian theology. But let me note that I think Clifton takes too strong of a disconnect between the “two constructions of flourishing” (60) found in the Hebrew Bible, namely Proverbs (eudaimonistic) and Ecclesiastes (hedonic). I think he’s correct that the Christian tradition needs to ‘reinterpret’ parts of the ancient Greek virtue tradition (see, e.g., 69). But the role of ‘imitating Christ’ that he talks about can be (and, I think, should be) understood in terms of moral perfection and a moral exemplar).

I think that Clifton misses an important distinction about pity (which I plan on addressing in a future post) and gets wrong parts of Aristotle’s view of friendship (but not nearly as much as N. T. Wright does in an otherwise excellent book). I also find the claim that virtue can be wielded as a form of oppression (83) to be very puzzling. If virtue is a kind of excellent–and especially if that excellence is a perfection not just of the individual but also of the individual as a member of their community–then I’d need to know more about how virtue can play this alleged role before agreeing. This should be seen as a friendly invitation for him to say more.

The majority of chapter 4 is the story of Mark Tonga, another quadriplegic that Clifton knows. Quite a few philosophers (e.g., Kittay) and theologians (e.g., Yong and Carter) writing on disability draw on narratives in a similar way. I think there is value in such narratives, especially for those readers that don’t have much direct experience with disability. For purposes of my class, however, the chapter didn’t really add much. I would have preferred for it to focused more on the disconnect between subjective and objective accounts of happiness, or how virtue demands advocacy or social action. But I can’t fault Clifton too much for not writing the book I wanted.