W. Jay Wood

This chapter provides a fresh re-statement and development of a view of Christian faith that goes back to Augustine and Aquinas. According to this view, faith in God is a natural disposition to not only cognitively accept, but to embrace and be changed by the natural and supernatural means by which God reveals Himself to human persons. The fact that this disposition is not (apparently) a human universal is not a strong reason to reject it as properly epistemically basic. A detailed account is given of how this attitude of faith unfolds, involving an interplay of cognitive and affective atttitudes, and how it matures in ways that suggest that it is intellectually virtuous. Its highest form is mystical knowledge, a kind of intimate ‘connaturality’ of affection between the believer and God analogous to, yet deeper than, intimate forms of human love.

From antiquity, temperance has been viewed as the virtue that moderates our appetites for food, drink, and sex. Recent work on the virtues has revived the medieval view that our intellectual appetites also stand in need of moderation. Augustine’s and Aquinas’s work on _studiositas_ and _curiositas_ reveals how our pursuit of knowledge can be virtuous or vicious insofar as it conforms to or deviates from right reason and wise concerns. Their distinctively Christian accounts of temperance also differ from Aristotle’s in denying that one can ever be perfected in temperance. Temptation, and our susceptibility thereto, remains an inescapable feature of this life. In analyzing intellectual temperance both Augustine and Aquinas illustrate how vicious desires for knowledge and experiential acquaintance harm others and ourselves. Further harm arises depending on how the knowledge we acquire is applied.

Paul Helm’s Faith With Reason articulates and defends an account of reasonable religious faith that claims that religious faith consists of both cognitive and fiduciary elements. One part of religious faith consists of propositions about the object of religious devotion whose strength “ought to conform to the evidence for the proposition in question, ” if they are to held reasonably. Religious belief is not a special species of belief, says Helm, but is subject to the same standards of evidence and criticism as other beliefs. In addition to the epistemic and evidential aspects of religious faith one must add the element of trust. Faith is distinguished from mere notional assent by the fact that the persons of faith actively entrust themselves to God, and depend upon Him to bring about various good purposes they deem to be of great importance.

Some of the most interesting works in virtue ethics are the detailed, perceptive treatments of specific virtues and vices. This chapter aims to develop such work as it relates to intellectual virtues and vices. It begins by examining the virtue of intellectual humility. Its strategy is to situate humility in relation to its various opposing vices, which include vices like arrogance, vanity, conceit, egotism, grandiosity, pretentiousness, snobbishness, haughtiness, and self-complacency. From this list vanity and arrogance are focused on in particular. Humble persons are not distinguished from arrogant persons by being unaware of or unconcerned with entitlements; rather, they lack the arrogance that entails a specific kind of motivation called ‘ego-exalting potency’. Humble people are motivated by pure interests regarding entitlements given their ability to serve as means to some valuable purpose or project. The chapter ends by considering a wide variety of ways intellectual humility can promote the acquisition of epistemic goods.

Blaise Pascal is highly regarded as a religious moralist, but he has rarely been given his due as an ethical theorist. The goal of this article is to assemble Pascal's scattered thoughts on moral judgment and moral wrongdoing into an explicit, coherent account that can serve as the basis for further scholarly reflection on his ethics. On my reading, Pascal affirms an axiological, social-intuitionist account of moral judgment and moral wrongdoing. He argues that a moral judgment is an immediate, intuitive perception of moral value that we willfully disregard in favor of the attractive, though self-deceptive, deliverances of our socially constructed imaginations. We can deceive ourselves so easily because our capacity to evaluate goods is broken, a dark legacy of the fall. In the article's concluding section, I briefly compare Pascal to contemporary ethicists and suggest directions for future research