Ethicists often approach our task by thinking about the norms that apply to act types. We ask, for example, what it means to punish, to make amends, or to forgive, and what conditions govern the appropriate performance of actions that fall within these types. However, actions often do not fall neatly into only one action type. This chapter discusses two cases that can be interpreted both as acts of protest and as acts of what Linda Radzik calls “informal social punishment.” Since the norms that govern these two types diverge, the fact that a particular action can be interpreted in either of these ways poses a challenge for anyone who might be seeking moral guidance from the type to which the action belongs. The cases highlight a theoretical gap that needs to be filled not only by accounts of social punishment or protest but also by ethicists who would use this approach to think about actions of other overlapping types.

The virtues have long played a central role in Christian moral teaching. It is not surprising, then, that over the centuries theologians have produced a number of interesting versions of an ethics of virtue. Although they hearken back to and are profoundly shaped by a shared set of canonical texts, theological commitments, and ritual observances, many of these virtue-focused accounts of ethics differ quite markedly from one another. The perfectionism of Wesley's A Plain Account of Christian Perfection is as different from the agapism of Edwards's The Nature of True Virtue as it is like it. And neither of them could easily be confused with the works of Josef Pieper, who was one of the most important contributors to twentieth-century Thomistic ethics. Given the length, breadth and sophistication of this tradition, Christian moral theology offers a wealth of resources for contemporary virtue ethicists, whether they are working within a Christian theological framework or not. This chapter will highlight four strands within recent theologically informed work on virtue ethics, each of which is directly relevant to current controversies in moral philosophy: (a) Thomistic virtue ethics, (b) narrativist virtue ethics, (c) neo-Augustinian virtue ethics and (d) divine motivation theory. Along the way it will shed light on what it means to offer a virtue ethic, as opposed to a virtue theory.

THOMISTIC VIRTUE ETHICS

The second part of Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae is devoted to questions relating to ethics and comprises approximately three-fifths of the total work.