People used to be taught to associate with persons who are good.  Since the cardinal sin is now viewed as having opinions about the matter, we don’t consider whether people are good any more.  Now we ask whether they are “nice.”

It is still a moral judgment, but it doesn’t look so much like one.

In certain times – ours is one of them -- war among different understandings of the world produces a fear of ideology.  In the name of getting along, the cry then goes up that we must all become non-ideological.  People who admit that they believe in something are called fanatics.

And then there was the young man caught interviewed on video camera by a roving reporter after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke during year five of the Clinton administration.  Yes, I know that seems like the bronze age to at least half of you, faithful readers, but I’m still thinking about yesterday’s “bad man, good statesman” question.

Reporter (I'm quoting from memory):  “Does the scandal affect your view of the president?”

“Even a bad man can be a good statesman.”  It’s not true, but I’ve noticed that people who say this sort of thing tend to be unimpressed by explanations of the unity of the virtues.

Readers:

Mondays I now reserve for student letters.  These two were responses to an article in which I counseled a young man and his girlfriend to remain chaste.  Please keep in mind my audience.  The article appeared in a Christian magazine, and both readers belonged to my own faith.  One should only do sums with people who believe in arithmetic; the same with quotations from Scripture.

Reader One:  Thanks.

I suppose we have all heard the argument that that modesty produces dirty minds by promoting a “mystique” about the body.  On this view, if we want clean minds, we should show more rump and cleavage.

My favorite atheist is Guenter Lewy.  I have never looked into his beliefs about ethics in general; it’s not that.  What interests me about him is his confession, in a little book he wrote some years ago called Why America Needs Religion, that he envies his religious friends their moral resources.  Lacking the model of the love of God, he says, many people on his side love “humanity,” but far fewer love “individual human beings with all their failings and shortcomings.”  They may do good works, but they are “not likely to produce a Dorothy Day or a Mother Teresa.”

One of the curious things about the proponents of so called evolutionary ethics is that although they wave the banner of science, their ethics are actually arbitrary.  Take for example Robert Wright, who proposes utilitarianism.  Since you can’t derive utilitarianism just from belief in natural selection, how does he get there?  He argues like this:

One of the hottest fads in social science is “evolutionary psychology,” also known as “evolutionary ethics.”  The story line is that by considering how we came to be, we will learn more about how we are.  According to this view, Darwinism reveals the universal, persistent features of human nature.