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Articles
Christian Ethics: An Ambiguous Legacy
Terri Murray tells the story of how St. Paul hijacked a religion.
Recently some authors have suggested that Christianity offers a rapprochement between an actcentred ethics and agent-centred ethics. The alleged dichotomy between these two ethics hinges on methodology: Is it preferable to see ethics as concerned with actions or with character? Which question does ethics attempt to answer: ‘What ought I to do?’ or ‘What sort of person ought I to be?’
Actions and character overlap in important ways, however, and it is not yet clear that these two approaches are necessarily antagonistic, except where one or the other is misrepresented or over-simplified, as seems to be the case in many recent arguments. Virtue proponents betray a superficial familiarity with Kant’s moral philosophy when they contrast it sharply with an agent-centred ethic. Kantian ethics is often equated with a rather crude understanding of his famous ‘categorical imperative’. Virtue ethicists often fail to recognise that Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was concerned less with actions per se than with motives.
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