Duty Ethic And Virtue In Religion

inspires Reverend Henry Maxwell to preach a sermon to the Church’s attendees about living like Jesus. He urges them to ask themselves in every situation “What would Jesus do?” and then act accordingly, for a whole year. The key aspect here is that this implies that there is a specific set of principles which Jesus would live and act by, and that Reverend Maxwell and the congregation must be aware of if they are to follow Jesus’s footsteps. Reverend Maxwell does acknowledge that there must be some unanimity amongst the congregation but seems to also encourage individual discretion, which seems paradoxical. Craig Martin notes that, “…although they do not say so in this first meeting, it becomes clear throughout the novel that the members of this church are implicitly guided by the ideals of honesty … and selflessness, especially the latter” (Martin 2012: 167). The seemingly contradictory ideas of following the Bible, which to the Protestant Christian would be the ultimate authority, complete with laws, restrictions, commands, etc., and relying on the individual to choose what is wrong and right in a situation, highlights the shortcoming of trying to categorize a religion’s virtue. In many cases, virtue is much more complicated than a label would allow, which also leads to the idea of duty ethic and virtue ethic overlapping and working together within the same religion. While the duty ethic theory may seem like the obvious description of Christian morality, in practicality, virtue
ethic seems to have an equal, or more important, role in shaping the ethical behavior of the participants in the WWJD movement. Virtue ethic focuses on the cultivation of morality through learning in human interactions, its nature is much more relaxed and individual oriented than duty ethic.
Despite Christianity being traditionally identified as consisting of “duty ethic,” virtue ethic is tangible in the functional aspect of the religion. In his analysis of the relationship between Confucianism and virtue ethic, Kessler writes, “Confucian ethics is confident that the right kind of person (the virtuous
sage)