ABSTRACT
Jonathan Edwards’s ethics preserves a clear contrast between the moral status and capacities of the elect, who receive a “spiritual sense” essential to true virtue in conversion, and those of the reprobate, who lack this moral faculty.1 This reservation of true virtue for justified Christians may raise questions about whether an Edwardsian vision of the moral life can inform moral reflection outside Edwards’s own particular Reformed context. Drawing themes from Edwards’s ethics into conversation with highly influential contemporary Catholic philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre is a means of considering the extent to which Edwards’s ethics can function as an intellectual resource for the contemporary movement known as “virtue ethics.” Virtue ethics is characterized by the retrieval of ancient character-centered approaches to philosophy as an alternative to Kantian and consequentialist reflection on specific moral situations and questions. Drawing on ancient philosophical texts, virtue ethicists encourage reflection on one’s overall character and the direction of one’s life as a starting point for ethics, rather than associating ethics primarily with questions of how an individual should act at a given moment. Alasdair MacIntyre’s 1984 After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, a text that redirects philosophers toward these questions by recovering key structural concepts derived from Aristotle’s understanding of virtue, played a pivotal role in launching this movement. A comparison of MacIntyre and Edwards suggests that Edwards’s accounts of virtue and the human person offer potential for constructive interplay with contemporary themes in Thomist virtue ethics.
