24 - Virtue

Summary

Like Adam and Eve after the fruit, Jews in the modern world found their eyes opened to choices not imagined before, and as in the earlier case, that experience was not altogether pleasant. Without the certainties of the past, how could one know what a proper life looked like? How was one to live? What was one to do? In a manner akin to the modern Jew responding to the prevailing trends in Western philosophy by rejecting the demand that the particular yield before the universal, contemporary virtue ethics is an approach to the ethical life that considers the dominant ethical theories of modernity and responds, in effect, “these are not enough. These do not understand the depth of the moral life and they are powerless to answer how to live a morally rich life.” Where the modern Jew negotiated a way of maintaining particularity while participating in the universal, the virtue ethicist attempts to find a way to respond to the demands that ethics be somehow universally applicable while recognizing the essential embeddedness of the virtues and ethics themselves. Virtue ethics, which demands that we consider the question of how one should live before we attempt to evaluate the morality of a given action or attempt to choose how to act when facing a moral dilemma, draws our attention to the rupture in the moral certainties at the point when Jewish tradition encounters modernity.