The missing virtue Educating for character
Marino, Gordon
Gordon Marino THE MISSING VIRTUE Lessons from dodge ball & Aristotle Smericans are inclined to ring the moral alarm and then hit the snooze button. After the latest moral crisis on Wall Street (I...
...What about courage...
...Those who argued against it noted that some students found big red balls being hurled at their skulls traumatic...
...In the early eighties, the moral philosopher Alastair Macintyre (After Virtue) observed that for postmodern men and women, candor, rather than moral accountability, had become a cardinal virtue...
...Those who defended the game argued that it helped develop mettle...
...Again, trying to give a boost to the ancient virtue, I pace dramatically and repeat, "You can't be an honest coward...
...Truth telling, for example, only becomes difficult when there are unpleasant consequences for being honest...
...You are a junior, planning to apply to medical school in the fall...
...Rieff was right...
...Oh yeah, I guess so," is invariably the grudging response...
...Guess who won the debate...
...No paper, and you are sure to get a D in the course and torpedo your chances for admission...
...While the professor may be a martinet, he is also a trusting soul...
...respect gets the first vote, then compassion, and this year, a sense of humor comes in the third...
...Before unveiling Aristotle's recipe, I press my students, "Which moral virtues do you believe are indispensable to the good life...
...Save for the two years that I taught at the Virginia Military Institute, I have never seen courage hit the top of the list...
...Indeed, last year after much dispute, dodge ball was bounced out of many public schools...
...Over the years, I have taken some soundings in my ethics classes and have been surprised to find that a cardinal virtue that everyone used to salute now evokes a shrug...
...A quick study of the "self help" literature of the nineteenth century also hints that our ancestors thought of courage as the bedrock of moral character...
...After the latest moral crisis on Wall Street (I won't go into the sexual-abuse crisis), there were loud cries for more ethics classes...
...The deadline is fast approaching...
...Truth and consequences or a white, maybe gray, lie...
...In accord with Aristotle, our moralists today rightly recommend diversity workshops as a means to develop a tolerant disposition...
...In Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle invites us to think about the connection between moral character and happiness...
...The professor believes that, in the interest of fairness, all students ought to have the same amount of time to work on their term papers and so has promised to dish out an F to anyone who does not hand the essay in on time...
...The president was famous for having penned a Pulitzer Prize-winner called Profiles in Courage...
...You could easily get a few extra days if you told him you were suffering from mononu-cleosis or that your grandmother died...
...But as many Americans came to see the military as misguided and worse, a pall was cast over traditionally martial virtues, such as honor and courage...
...Courage by proxy is no courage at all...
...It will be interesting see how the military's reputation fares after the second Gulf War...
...Television, movies, and popular literature emphasized the signal importance of grace under pressure...
...Prior to the war in Vietnam, the values of the military were widely respected and well represented in the larger culture...
...Aristotle, however, taught that we acquire virtuous dispositions by practicing the actions that we want to be disposed toward...
...Definitely not...
...And yet, the ramifications of regarding courage as a moral elective are potentially catastrophic, not only for our ability to tell the truth, but for our foreign policy as well...
...The qualities that were imagined necessary for good soldiering were incorporated into our notions of an ideal moral life...
...Unless he is even more afraid of getting caught in a lie, the student who cannot control his fears will start working up a short story on deadline day...
...As the subconscious reasoning goes, courage is good for people intent upon combat but useless for less primitive, more pacific people...
...Honesty eventually makes it onto the blackboard without my prompts...
...Yet in most of our lives there is very little opportunity for getting practice in coping with physical fear...
...What will it be...
...At best, the teaching elite now thinks of the military as a necessary evil and the virtues associated with the guardian class have become declasse...
...Students seem to walk out of class thinking (if only for a few hours) that courage is essential to the life they aspire to, and I shuffle out speculating on how courage could ever have become an afterthought...
...Usually delivered in midsemester, this is one of my better half-time speeches...
...I close with an object lesson...
...The sermonette continues, "And if you can't bear the consequences, you will be unwilling to tell the truth...
...A hand shoots up...
...Still, there is hope...
...In the mid-sixties, Philip Rieff (The Triumph of the Therapeutic) apprized us of the fact that therapy had become the organizing motif in much of Western culture and, as a result, our understanding of moral character was shifting...
...Gordon Marino is a philosophy professor and the director of the Hong Kierkegaard Library at Saint Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota...
...Not a bad idea, but if you are going to talk with students about ethics, which is something I do for a living, it helps to know where they are calling from...
...Students look around puzzled, as if to say, OK, what's the trick...
...Raising my voice and making a vee with my eyebrows, I nudge them, "Is there something missing...
...Again, what prompted the demotion of courage...
...You planned to write your term paper when you were on break in Cancun, but you never got around to it...
...I hector my captive audience, "How can you be honest without courage...
...If that is the case, which moral virtues are essential to happiness...
...Courage was touted as a keystone virtue in the post-World War II era in which I grew up...
...After a while, some of the more traditional virtues such as wisdom and justice are invited in...
...A nation of people who cannot tolerate feeling afraid might be unduly inclined to send their subcontracted military into actions that will quiet the sources of their fears...
...He asks, Can you be happy and a cad...
...My students at Saint Olaf College are as morally earnest as any I have ever taught, but there can be no denying that the death rates of grandparents rise here at semester's end as much as they do at other campuses...
...Suppose it is the end of the spring semester and you did not hand your paper in for your ethics class...
...It was then common to hear stories about boys who would not be allowed back into their homes until they faced down some bully...
Vol. 130 • April 2003 • No. 8
