"The best way to learn about justice would be to observe a just man"

Expertise and Ethics

by Anthony Esolen

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Then the first question we might ask of an ethicist who tries to persuade us, with diagrams and statistics and syllogisms, that what we had thought was evil is actually all right, is not “What degrees do you have?” or “What articles have you published in peer-reviewed journals?” but “Who are you?” It isn’t an easy question, nor is it decisive. An otherwise decent person may be, for a long while, better than his evil philosophy, and then we may thank God for foolishness and inconsistency. But it ought to be asked.

Who are these medical ethicists who recently have concluded, with wonderful logic, that parents have a right to murder their infant children—and who call it, with telling duplicity, “after-birth abortion?”  We would not turn to Larry Flynt or Hugh Hefner for a definition of decency; why should we turn to these people to advise us on which children we may kill and when? Are they crooked? Why should we follow the crooked, when we want to walk straight?

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...the virtuous life is an art; and one learns art not from theorists but from the artists themselves.

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