Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T00:25:44.329Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Why is Faith a Virtue?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Tim Chappell
Tim Chappell
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

A virtue is a disposition of character which instantiates or promotes responsiveness to one or more basic goods – where a basic good is one which in itself can provide an agent with a sufficient motivation, and an observer with a full explanation. The basic goods to which faith is a responsiveness are truth and practical hope – the latter being the belief that action according to deliberate choice is not ultimately pointless for me. Now these goods are often in tension for an agent; indeed if there is no God, they will eventually come into irresoluble tension. If God does not exist, there is no single coherent disposition which is a responsiveness to both goods; that is, there is no virtue of faith. So faith is only a virtue if God exists.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , March 1996 , pp. 27 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 In any non-metaphorical sense of ‘virtue’, no, they may not.

2 Such as Rosalind, Hursthouse, ‘Virtue Theory and Abortion’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 20 (1991), p. 224.Google Scholar

3 Finnis, J. M., Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 62ff.Google Scholar

4 Cp. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1153b27.

5 In the opening lines of Nicomachean Ethics; but the evidence is ambiguous.

6 Bentham and James Mill are obvious examples; J. S. Mill's distinction between ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ pleasures, in Chapter 2 of his Utilitarianism (ed. Warnock, ; London: Fontana, 1962)Google Scholar begins to complicate the picture.

7 Kant, , Critique of Practical Reason (trans. Beck, Lewis White: Oxford, Maxwell Macmillan, 3rd. edn. 1993), p. 132:Google Scholar Part 1, Bk. 2, Ch. 2, S. V, ‘The existence of God as a postulate of pure practical reason’.

8 Iris, Murdoch, ‘On “God” and “Good”’, pp. 59ff., in her The Sovereignty of Good (reprinted by Routledge Kegan Paul, 1991).Google Scholar