Receptive Human Virtues

Download or read book Receptive Human Virtues written by Elizabeth Agnew Cochran and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-08-26 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a new reading of Jonathan Edwards’s virtue ethic that examines a range of qualities Edwards identifies as “virtues” and considers their importance for contemporary ethics. Each of Edwards’s human virtues is “receptive” in nature: humans acquire the virtues through receiving divine grace, and therefore depend utterly on Edwards’s God for virtue’s acquisition. By contending that humans remain authentic moral agents even as they are unable to attain virtue apart from his God’s assistance, Edwards challenges contemporary conceptions of moral responsibility, which tend to emphasize human autonomy as a central part of accountability.