Todd A. SALZMAN and Michael G. LAWLER. Virtue and Theological Ethics: Toward a Renewed Ethical Method. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2018. Pp. 237. $35.00 pb. ISBN 978-1-62698-304-5. Reviewed by Kate JACKSON-MEYER, Boston, MA.
Virtue ethics has received fresh attention over the last forty years in light of its agent-based approach. In Virtue and Theological Ethics: Toward a Renewed Ethical Method, Todd A. Salzman and Michael G. Lawler provide tools and support for a Catholic virtue approach. They have ambitious goal, which they clearly state:
The text achieves the stated objective in the following ways: it attends to Catholic ethical method with special attention to Magisterial documents and contemporary conversations, it offers insightful analysis of various conservative and progressive ethical approaches to specific issues, and it argues for a virtue approach. Salzman and Lawler often refer to issues in sexual ethics, illustrating the implications of their method in practical matters.
Much of the grounding of the book is presented in the Introduction where Salzman and Lawler explain important components of their method. Here, for instance, they explain the Wesleyan quadrilateral’s four sources for theological ethics—tradition, scripture, science and other disciplines, and human experience. Their approach lifts up the importance of science and human experience. In this section they also offer their definition of virtue: “A virtue is a stable character state, habit, or disposition that moves us to feel, understand, judge, and act in a way that is an act of the virtue” (7). Relying on Louis Janssens’s work on Gaudium et Spes, they describe six dimensions of the human person that ethical acts ought to advance. They explain, “The human person is a subject; in corporeality; in relationship to the material world, to others, and, we add, to self and to God; created in the image and likeness of God; a historical being; and fundamentally unique but equal to all other persons” (9). They also defend the importance of contemporary discussions about emotion and neuroscience.
While laying out their ethical method in Chapter 1, Salzman and Lawler argue for a “perspectival objectivism” (42) founded in Lonergan’s observation that one is only able to gain a “partial but reliable and adequate truth”(38). They distinguish this from relativism.
In Chapters 2 and 3 they take up the issue of what is a virtuous perspective, with special attention to neuroscience, emotion, different uses of the sources of theology, and sexual ethics. They offer an interesting and accessible discussion of emotions—a once overlooked topic in ethics, which is now gaining more attention—arguing that emotions are “proto-judgement[s]” (66). They demonstrate how scientific research can bolster theological reflection by incorporating into their reflection the insight from neuroscience research that moral cognition is comprised of both an emotional system and a reasoning system in the brain. Chapter 3 begins with the problem of “selection, interpretation, prioritization, and integration (or SIPI) of those sources” of moral knowledge (93). Relying on historical analysis and data from science, they argue for an updated anthropology that challenges the CDF’s claims about homosexuality.
In Chapter 4, they define sexual human dignity, arguing that a focus on sexual dignity is crucial for defining human dignity in general. This chapter offers a strong example of one of the many ways they analyze conservative and progressive approaches to ethics.
A highlight of Chapter 5 is its challenge to traditional ethical theory about the possibility for the components of ethical acts—object, intention, and circumstance—to be totally independent. Salzman and Lawler make a strong case that it is often difficult to define the object of an ethical action without reference to the intention of the action. This chapter also uses the issue of communion for divorced remarried Catholics who do not seek annulment to show how conservative and progressive virtuous perspectives argue differently.
In Chapter 6, Salzman and Lawler turn to the primacy of conscience, the importance of the People-of-God-in-communion, and the role human experiences in ethical reflection, especially cultural experiences, scientific experiences and scientific knowledge, and experiences of oppression. They show that turning to human experiences has implications for how the tradition ought to revise its views on homosexuality moving forward.
In these ways, Salzman and Lawler argue for a person-centered, virtue approach for theological ethics and they make a strong case for how this approach has been and can continue to be developed using the resources of the Catholic tradition. This text would work well in courses on ethics in general, or on sexual ethics specifically. Chapters 4 or 6 could stand alone in a course focused on sexual ethics. Fans of Salzman and Lawler will find that this text furthers their previous work.