When President Obama stood up to deliver his address to the grieving people of America, he clearly expounded Aristotle’s virtue ethics and inspired all of us to look to our own characters.

For the You Tube link to the half hour address, go to:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztbJmXQDIGA

As we discuss these issues, let each of us do so with a good dose of humility. Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let’s use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways that our hopes and dreams are bound together.

After all, that’s what most of us do when we lose somebody in our family, especially if the loss is unexpected. We’re shaken out of our routines. We’re forced to look inward. We reflect on the past.

Did we spend enough time with an ageing parent, we wonder? Did we express our gratitude for all the sacrifices that they made for us? Did we tell a spouse just how desperately we loved them, not just once in a while, but every single day?

So sudden loss causes us to look backward, but it also forces us to look forward, to reflect on the present and the future, on the manner in which we live our lives and nurture our relationships with those who are still with us.

We may ask ourselves if we’ve shown enough kindness and generosity and compassion to the people in our lives. Perhaps we question whether we’re doing right by our children, or our community, whether our priorities are in order. We recognize our own mortality. And we are reminded that, in the fleeting time we have on this Earth, what matters is not wealth, or status, or power, or fame, but rather how well we have loved and what small part we have played in making the lives of other people better.

Firstly President Obama appeals to virtues or habits of character – humility, mercy, sacrificial love, generosity, kindness, compassion – these are classic Christian virtues, or socially approved good characterisitics, appropriate to a country steeped in Christian tradition.

But more than this, he appeals to a goal of excellence – to trying and striving to love and act well. Excellence, or the Greek word arete, is what a virtue really means and the end-goal of cultivating excellences is that we should all flourish. It is not a personal thing: morality is about social goals, the goal of eudaimonia or social flourishing.

Most strikingly, President Obama calls us to “expand our moral imaginations”, to place ourselves in the shoes of the other, to feel with them. Moral imagination is closely tied to moral reasoning or phronesis, the Greek word for practical wisdom (prudence, judgement). Practical wisdom is the skill of listening and sifting and thinking well, of being able to sum up a situation and deliver the right words (or actions) at the right time in the right way.  He goes on to call us to reflect on ways in which our actions might be brought in line with our values to build a better future, and in this way captures well the blend of imagination and reflection implied by the virtue of phronesis.

In his stirring speech with its so appropriate words and feelings, President Obama showed us he could lead well, and causes us to aspire to that other Greek idea – to aspire to heroism, to heroic actions on behalf of strangers or friends.