The past week has focused the world’s attention on several violent incidents. The murders of Henry Nowak and Austin Metcalf, along with the recent knife attack in Belfast, all highlight the growing disorder in our society. For many ages, the moral virtues – patience, temperance, fortitude and others – safeguarded the common good. As we have lost a true understanding of human nature, we have also lost sight of its purpose. Without reason to direct them, the moral virtues waste away. Without these virtues, society becomes incapable of understanding justice or preserving the common good. The violent acts that have shocked public attention this week are not merely isolated crimes; they are symptoms of a deeper moral crisis. A society that neglects the cultivation of virtue will eventually find itself unable to secure either justice or social peace.

Man is a creature out of sorts. He desires too much food and sex, flies blindly into rage or flees like a coward from pain. He is at odds with the world around him, but even more with the world within him. Before they can settle society, the moral virtues must first settle this civil war within man’s own heart. Aristotle understood virtue as the habit by which man learns to govern his passions according to reason. Aquinas deepened this insight, teaching that the moral virtues enable man to live according to his rational nature and ultimate end. Temperance moderates desire, patience governs anger and fortitude guards against cowardice. Unless he wins the battle for his own heart, he will be incapable of participating properly in society, which his nature also requires.

Man is a social animal; he needs far more than he can produce alone. Human beings therefore organise themselves into societies that enable each person to obtain what he needs. These societies, however, do more than distribute private goods. They also create common goods that every member shares in.

Common goods such as safety and social peace differ from private goods such as food. Unlike private goods, they increase as more people contribute to them. The greatest threat to the common good is therefore the person who refuses to cooperate in its pursuit for selfish ends.

Man’s selfish and capricious passions are the greatest threat to this cooperation. This is why justice – the virtue that safeguards the common good – requires all the other moral virtues. Human cooperation depends upon self-mastery. For both Aristotle and Aquinas, justice is impossible without it. A man governed by his passions cannot consistently give others what they are due because he remains unable to govern himself. Violent crimes are particularly revealing because they are not merely violations of law; they are direct assaults upon the conditions that make civil society possible. When virtue disappears, the law can compensate for its absence only for so long.

The cases of Karmelo Anthony and Vickrum Digwa illustrate this point. Their actions directly harmed a common good: the safety of society. As Austin Metcalf’s father told his son’s killer in court: “You failed your parents, you failed yourself and you failed society.” In a profound sense, both Anthony and Digwa failed society. Their actions damaged the trust and security upon which civil life depends, while revealing their own failure to master the passions that led to such fatal decisions.

Yet the moral failure does not end with the perpetrators themselves. Public reactions to these crimes often reveal a deeper confusion about the nature of virtue itself.

As we have separated reason from the virtues, they have grown destructive. Detached from their proper ends, they become ruinous and unjust. We increasingly see fortitude directed towards defending the guilty rather than the innocent, compassion obscuring responsibility and neglecting victims and, as with the half a million dollars donated to Karmelo through GiveSendGo, generosity lavished on the perpetrator.

For Aquinas, virtue is right reason in action. Courage shown in defence of wrongdoing, or mercy exercised at the expense of justice, is not virtue but its corruption. Aristotle and Aquinas understood that virtue consists in acting rightly, at the right time, towards the right object and for the right reason. As “race awareness” continues to obscure social discourse, we rapidly lose the ability to distinguish justice from sentimentality. We now find ourselves excusing vice while neglecting the common good.

Human beings possess the capacity to choose and character is formed through those choices. As we forget this truth, we will only continue to struggle to hold individuals accountable for their actions. If we are to preserve the common good against violence, we must first cultivate moral virtue within ourselves.

We must also punish those who threaten society through the vicious pursuit of their own desires. This is not primarily for rehabilitation, though we may hope for that outcome, but because justice requires the restoration of what has been taken from the community. We all benefit when justice is pursued because justice itself is a common good. Every citizen enjoys the peace, order and security that flow from its proper administration.

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