Priming Us for Excellence: The Capacity of Human Law to Cultivate Acquired Moral Virtue

The basic pair of questions this dissertation will ask is, do the laws of our society cultivate acquired moral virtue, and if so, how do they accomplish this task? This dissertation argues that law has the potential to exercise extensive influence over our growth in such virtue and does play an important role in shaping not only our actions, but also our inclinations to act. However, there are also ways in which its power is limited, such that we ought to say that law can prime or poise us for virtue. The impetus for asking these questions springs not from the novelty of the questions themselves–questions that go back at least to Plato and Aristotle–but rather, from two other sources: first, the need for an answer to be presented anew in light of questions and arguments posed by theologians, political philosophers, and legal theorists; and second, the need for an answer that accounts both for emerging scholarship on the nature of growth in virtue and a contemporary understanding of our engagement with the law. Taking Thomas Aquinas as our guide, we want to know how he conceived of the relationship between human law and moral virtue, and whether we can still affirm his position today. In some ways, law is a very fitting tool for the cultivation of virtue: its final end, the common good, includes the practice of virtue; law, as an ordinance of reason, provides for key components of growth in virtue, such as offering us in paradigms of virtue through which we learn to recognize objects of virtue; and fostering desire for virtuous acts. Law is also, as some will say, “inseparable from all the activities of living and knowing,” such that it cannot but shape what we do each day. However, the influence of human law is circumscribed as well, for reasons having to do both with the proper jurisdiction of human law vis-a-vis natural and divine law, and with the nature of growth in habits. As we will find, an honest answer to our central pair of questions must take into account both the tremendous power and real limitations of human law with respect to cultivating moral virtue.<p></p>