An exciting trend in virtue ethics is its engagement with empirical psychology. Virtue theorists have connected virtue to various constructs in empirical psychology. The strategy of grounding virtue in the psychological theory of habit, however, has yet to be fully explored. Recent decades of psychological research have shown that habits are an indispensable feature of human life, and virtues and habits have a number of similarities. In this paper, we consider whether virtues are psychological habits (i.e., habits as understood by (...) the field of psychology). After some background to frame the interaction between the two disciplines, we explain the predominant account of habit in psychology, which we call “standard psychological habit,” in the next section. We then consider Servais Pinckaers’s objections that virtue cannot be a habit and conclude that standard psychological habits cannot be virtues. Finally, we argue that another psychological account of habits, goal-directed habits, withstand Pinckaers’s objections and provide a promising construct for understanding virtue. (shrink)

Here eight outstanding scholars from the U.S. and Europe reflect upon the issues. They are Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Ralph McInerny, Robert Spamann, Servais Pinckaers, Wojciech Giertych, Ignacio Carrasco de Paula, Carlo Cafarra, and John M. Haas. Anyone interested in the advancement of human, moral, and spiritual values will welcome this clarifying book.

The practical problem of how to conduct oneself as a Christian and a Philosopher or Bioethicist in public debate an when asked to be engaged in government committees is difficult. One solution that has had some support has been to approach the issues on the grounds of our natural law tradition but understood anthropocentrically – the ultimate end is not communion with God by integral human development. This is often called New Natural Law (NNL). This separation of Philosophy and Theology (...) has had its critics and most notably the current Poe and his immediate predecessor. In their own writing addressed to people of goodwill, they took a different approach that was essentially Christocentric and involving s close partnership between Philosohy and Theology. In my own experience over thirty years of public involvement in Bioethics, I have discovered that the NNL approach has two overwhelming problems. What is offered to the secular dialogue, as an anthropocentric natural law, often sounds false to secular others because we propose something guided by our beliefs, but failing to acknowledge that contribution. However something that I have discovered latterly in that approach is in fact false by our own standards. By the strictures we impose on our contribution we in fact ignore the New Law instituted by Christ, the law of love. The New Natural Law (NNL) Project has proved to be a failure where it has been tried, and, I know realize, was doomed from the outset, because in being anthropocentric it was essentially lacking and the answers that it gave to problems were often unsatisfactory because lacking love and the particular demand of needing to be capable of being oriented towards God, the God of love. The NNL approach tended to produce a casuistry that was too liberal and too lacking in understanding of the essential role that affectivity plays in our lives, created as we are in the imago dei, in the image and likeness of the God of love. Such a morality demands much more than anthropocentricism can demand. In recognizing these difficulties I propose instead a more pragmatic approach that reflects a partnership between Philosophy and Theology as espoused by the Second Vatican Council, and by Pope’s Benedict XVI and Pope John Paul II, and which engages the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and Servais Pinckaers. An approach that I have tried with some success in chairing government committees. (shrink)

It is always difficult to present a collection of essays, and this the more so if written by twenty-eight authors. However, this imposing and beautifully printed volume has been planned very carefully, so that the various contributions create a fairly complete study of Aquinas’s thought in the Second Part of the Summa theologica. The essays have approximately the same length and are accompanied by numerous scholarly endnotes. L. E. Boyle recalls that St. Thomas’s intention was to connect moral theology to (...) dogmatics, the Second Part being foremost in his mind. It did indeed capture the attention of the students of his order. S. Pinckaers gives a fine survey of the sources used by Thomas in the I-II and brings out the place of the auctoritates in theology. S. J. Pope presents a compact summary of the contents of the Second Part but does not consider its relation to the Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics. (shrink)