Introduction

In part due to a lack of adequate moral-theoretical categories during his life, Niebuhr is often located as a consequentialist. This category, however, fails to capture the range of moral concerns Niebuhr dealt with, and certainly fails to capture the centrality of concern for dispositions in his thought. Niebuhr also was clearly not a consistent deontologist. Since Niebuhr’s death there has been a renaissance of “virtue ethics.” Early waves in this recovery tended to draw upon Hegel, and communitarianism. In Christian Ethics early virtue ethicists tended to be pacifists. This made Niebuhr an unlikely dialogue partner for the scholars driving the rebirth of virtue at the end of the twentieth century. It is also true that when Niebuhr did talk explicitly about virtue, it was usually to critique those who claimed to have it. The Augustinian roots of his theological ethics made him suspicious of claims to goodness and efforts to manufacture morality via social practices. Still, his ethics are irreducibly focused on dispositions, and he explicitly resisted what he saw as the overly pessimistic tendencies in the Augustinian/Protestant tradition. So how are we to locate Niebuhr today? Essays in this book take on this question. While accepting that Niebuhr had a kind of dispositional ethics, Charles Mathewes seeks to distinguish this from a virtue ethics and offers a critique of virtue ethics from a Niebuhrian perspective. Most of the other essays seek to expand and/or complicate the concept of virtue ethics in ways that allow for positive dialogue between Niebuhrian thought and virtue ethics, or even lay out how Niebuhr could be thought of as a virtue ethicist. The idea of paradoxical virtue (a virtue constituted in part by the knowledge that the virtuous person is not virtuous) plays a role in many of the essays.