The word virtue sounds old and fusty, like something an overprotective dad in a 1950s sitcom would zealously patrol on his daughter’s date nights. But if you look at the data, virtue is what we all really want for those we love.
A recent study found that, when asked what they most want in their friends, participants primarily indicated good character traits like being merciful, generous, or kind. Similarly, a Pew survey of parents found, to no one’s surprise, that good character traits like being honest and ethical are what parents most desire to see in their children. Indeed, being honest and being ethical are the top two traits for both friends and parents.
These findings no doubt fit your own life as well. What we really want for those we love, if we are honest with ourselves, is broad, deep, stable, good character, possessing traits like generosity, kindness, perseverance, and fidelity. Once upon a time, such traits were known as virtues. Whether you would have used this term for it, the thing you desire most for those you love is virtue. For being so ardently desired, we don’t do nearly as much training to cultivate virtue as we do to cultivate, say, wealth, or health, or skill. With a notable exception for religious schools like the university where I teach philosophy, virtue cultivation is not a central plank of our educational system. As Pope Leo recently wrote in his apostolic letter, Drawing New Maps of Hope, “Education is not only the transmission of content, but also the learning of virtues.”
I’m not here to call for a full-scale revision of our educational system, but to call attention to a source of deep moral wisdom that goes under-appreciated: religion itself.
Traditions of Moral Wisdom
The question of how we inculcate virtue and eradicate vice has exercised every religious tradition. For instance, the Jewish Musar literature, the Islamic Akhlaq literature, and the Buddhist literature on Sila all focus on the analysis and cultivation of good character. As such, these traditions remain centrally relevant to our lives, even those of us who don’t accept their metaphysical assumptions. Indeed, these traditions might include the best designed tools we currently have for developing good character.
My own research focuses on the Christian Moral Wisdom tradition, from the early desert monastics, through the medieval sages, to the present day. Here I’ll speak of what I know best, but scholars from other traditions could do equally well. Even when measured against the newest social science, these ancient tools provide essential wisdom for modern character development.
Let’s consider three examples in which contemporary psychological findings and traditional religious wisdom align.
Self-Reflection
The psychologist Wendy Wood, author of the excellent book, Good Habits, Bad Habits, has done important research on stable, habitual traits. She argues that extinguishing a bad character trait and forming a good one requires vigilant and effortful monitoring of one’s situations and actions. This makes sense. If you want to grow in kindness, you’ll have to give careful thought to your kindness kryptonite. More than that, you’ll need to keep track, assessing where you fail most and least, what circumstances seem to bring out the best or worst in you, and so on. Such monitoring helps us form what psychologists call habitual awareness, the knowledge of where and when we act from our stable dispositions.
Wood and colleagues have argued that monitoring can raise such automatic activity to the conscious level, triggering our cognitive control abilities. In light of our monitoring, we can form action plans for the future, “If this happens again, then I will do that,” plans that psychologists call implementation intentions. So what do we see in this practice? We see careful monitoring as a means to awareness, and awareness turned toward the future in intention.
We find an uncannily similar practice in the examination of conscience of St. Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556), often called the examen. Ignatius encourages five steps: mindfully putting oneself in God’s presence; praying for the grace to understand one’s life well; reviewing the day, including one’s actions and feelings throughout; reflecting on what one said, did, or thought in those instances; and planning for the next day in light of the insights from today. You perform the examen about your day in general, but you also have a particular vice you are trying to eradicate or virtue you are trying to cultivate as a focus of your reflection.
The similarities are clear. The examen begins by centering oneself, asking for help, and diminishing distractions. It continues with explicit reflection to form awareness. When and where do you find yourself, if not next to kryptonite, perhaps being whispered to by a little devil on your shoulder? And the examen concludes with intentions formed for how to live tomorrow in light of the awareness of today.
Avoiding Temptations
This brings me to the second parallel between contemporary social scientific findings and the moral wisdom tradition. Sometimes, what you learn from careful monitoring is that certain situations are catastrophic for you. Maybe you can be patient with everyone but your children; kind to the whole world, so long as your co-worker doesn’t count; calm until college football begins, etc. Some, but not all of these circumstances are avoidable. You can step away from fantasy football for a season, but society and spouses generally frown upon similar tactics with children.
One useful tool for character formation that Angela Duckworth and colleagues write about is situational self-control, choosing to enter situations that align with your goals and avoid, where possible, those tempting situations that are contrary to your goals. Whenever possible, avoid the path where the devil awaits.
Such a practice helps us steer clear of the situations in which we’d be sorely tempted to act in the ways our monitoring has shown us would be detrimental.
Again, we find a similar practice rooted in religious tradition. As St. Alphonsus Liguori (1696-1787) describes it, “As we not only avoid the bite of a serpent, but are careful neither to touch nor approach it, so we must fly not only from sin, but also from the occasion of sin, that is, from the house, the conversation, the person that would lead us to sin.”
Cultivating Self-Control
Consider a third example. Religious communities of the major world religions have always practiced fasting—abstaining from some good thing for the sake of spiritual or moral growth. Authors no less central than St. Jerome and St. Thomas Aquinas have claimed that fasting from one good thing can help you grow in self-control with respect to another. It sounds plausible. But is there evidence from empirical research for this transferability of self-control from one domain to another?
Contemporary social scientists such as Mark Muraven have argued that self-control in one area can positively influence the trait of self-control in other areas. Indeed, he has shown cases where smokers who practice self-control in other areas have had more self-control when it comes to quitting smoking. What is practiced, he finds, is not important, provided that the practice requires self-control.
What We Really Want
Insofar as we deeply desire virtue in those we love and we recognize the paucity of tools contemporary society offers to cultivate good character, we have strong motivation to rediscover ancient moral wisdom. There we find practices that helped them, and also help us, become the kind of person we all yearn to be. You want what’s good for your children and friends because you love them. But, of course, they love you in return and want what’s best for you, too. Become the person each of you wants the other to be.
Dr. Timothy J. Pawl is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of St. Thomas, in St. Paul, Minnesota. To see more of his writing on virtue, visit his Substack, Pawline Epistles.
