Paradoxical Virtue

Reinhold Niebuhr and the Virtue Tradition

Kevin Carnahan, David True

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429960048
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

After the re-emergence of the tradition of virtue ethics in the early 1980s Reinhold Niebuhr has often served as a foil for authors who locate themselves in that tradition. However, this exercise has often proved controversial. This collection of essays continues this work, across a wide range of subjects, with the aim of avoiding some of the polemics that have previously accompanied it.

The central thesis of this book is that putting the work of Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian realism in dialogue with contemporary virtue theory is a profitable undertaking. An introductory essay argues against locating Niebuhr as a consequentialist and in favour of thinking of his work in terms of a dispositional ethics Contributors take different positions on whether Niebuhr's dispositional ethics should be considered a form of virtue ethics or an alternative to virtue ethics. Several of the articles relate Niebuhr and Christian realism to particular virtues. Throughout there is an appreciation of the ways in which any Niebuhrian approach to dispositional ethics or virtue must be shaped by a sense of tragedy, paradox, or irony. The most moral disposition will be one which includes doubts about its own virtue.

This volume allows for a repositioning of Niebuhr in the context of contemporary moral theory as well as a rereading of the tradition of virtue ethics in the light of a distinctly Protestant, Christian realist and paradoxical view of virtue. As a result, it will be of great interest to scholars of Niebuhr and Christian Ethics and scholars working in Moral Philosophy and the Philosophy of Religion more generally.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Niebuhr on the ironies of virtue and the virtue of irony
• 2 Hope, virtue, and politics in Reinhold Niebuhr’s works
• 3 Virtue and the fragile Christian Realist
• 4 Reinhold Niebuhr: faith in and beyond history
• 5 Deceptive honesty: myth and virtue in Reinhold Niebuhr
• 6 The paradoxes of virtue: agape in the work of Reinhold Niebuhr
• 7 Reinhold Niebuhr and the virtue of mutuality
• 8 The humble place of humility in Reinhold Niebuhr’s ethics
• 9 Choosing sorrow: Niebuhr, contrition, and white catastrophe
• 10 Reinhold Niebuhr, virtue, and political society: a key to the Christian character of prophetic realism
• 11 A Niebuhrian virtue of justice
• 12 Reinhold Niebuhr and phronesis
• 13 Reinhold Niebuhr and the aesthetics of political leadership
• 14 The virtues of the social critic
• Contributor bios
• Index