Conservative Principles - Virtue Ethics

I begin today's post with a quote from Ross Douthat:

"Conservatism only really exists to say “no” to whatever liberalism asks for next, it fights nearly all its battles on its enemy’s terrain and rarely comes close to articulating a coherent set of values of its own. Liberalism has science and progress to pursue—and ultimately immortality, the real goal but also the one that rarely dares to speak its name—whereas conservatives have … well, a host of goals, most of them in tension with one another. Neoconservatives want to return us to the New Deal era; Claremont Instituters want to revive the spirit of the Founding; Jacksonians want to rescue American nationalism from the one-worlders and post-patriots; agrarians and Crunchy Cons pine for a lost Jeffersonian or Chestertonian arcadia. Some conservatives think that liberalism-the-political-philosophy can be saved from liberalism-the-Baconian-project and that modernity can be rescued from its utopian temptation; others join Alasdair MacIntyre in thinking that the hour is far too late for that, and we should withdraw into our homes and monasteries and prepare to guard the permanent things through a long Dark Age.

Liberals, on the other hand, dream the same dream and envision the same destination, even if they disagree on exactly how to get there. It’s the dream of Thomas Friedman as well as Karl Marx, as old as Babel and as young as the South Korean cloners. It whispered to us in Eden, and it whispers to us now: ye shall be as gods. And no conservative dream, in the 400 years from Francis Bacon until now, has proven strong enough to stand in its way."

If liberals are those who find truth in the words of the serpent from the garden of Eden, then conservatives are those who do not.  From this point of view, the liberalism is an inherently optimistic philosophy.  It preaches happiness, progress, and maybe someday, a utopia.  Conservatives are those pessimists who think that despite our best efforts, human nature is basically static, and that our best bet is to look to what has worked in the past, assuming that it will basically continue to work in the future.  

The majority of traditional societies have advocated what is today known as virtue ethics.  Virtue ethics is a theory that posits the goal of ethical/moral life to be the perfection of the human being by acquiring certain habitual states known as virtues.  Thus, the ethical goal, was the betterment of the individual on a deep level.  In contrast, the dominant mode of thinking in modern society is consequentialist, where the only relevant factor in deciding whether an action is considered right or wrong, is the the consequence of the action. Thus, unlike virtue ethics, the goal of modern ethics is to make the world a better place.  This is done most often by giving to charity, respecting people's rights, giving them freedoms to fulfill their desires and promoting pleasure/comfort through a variety of means.  Where virtue ethics promotes the perfection of the human being within the confines of human nature, consequentialist ethics tries to promote the perfection of the current state of affairs/world/society.

It seems that the conservative, as he was described above, is bound to reject  consequentialism.  If one is committed to the idea that world cannot be made better in any significant way, or to phrase it more moderately, if one recognizes that society is too complicated to be planned out and changed according to a plan, then it would be very shortsighted to think that the purpose of ethics would be to change the world for the better.  A much better approach would be to perfect ourselves, insofar as this possible in life, and be the best human beings we are capable of.

-Cato the Youngest