Virtue and rewards

It has long been said that virtue is its own reward. This notion is particularly set against any “instrumentalization” of virtue, any notion that virtue is a means to achieve some other end. We are good because it is good to be good, not because being good is rewarded with some other good. The rewards of virtue are internal to virtuous living.

One of the effects of this idea is that it is difficult to work out what virtuous economic life might look like. From the entrepreneur and the upper manager and investor to the lowest man on the assembly line, everyone works for profit. It won’t do for an employer to tell his employees at the end of the week that they should consider their hard work its own reward. Hard work doesn’t pay the rent and doesn’t count as legal tender at the grocery. If virtue is its own reward, can we be economically virtuous?

I think the biblical portrait of work and rewards begins to unravel this problem.

Contrary to many portrayals of the ethics of Jesus, Jesus did not teach His disciples a pure “altruism” that renounces all hope of reward. Every time He says something like “give without expecting anything in return,” He immediately adds “and your heavenly Father will reward you” (e.g., Luke 6:34-35). That reward may not come until the end, but Jesus assures us that it will come. Instead of “Virtue has its own reward,” Jesus teaches that “God rewards righteousness, in His time.” The ultimate reward is God Himself; all are to be like the Levites, for whom Yahweh was their only inheritance. Yet, God’s gift of Himself is a reward, and because of who God is His gift of Himself embodies all other possible rewards.

No doubt there are goods internal to virtuous living, but fundamentally Jesus teaches what might be called a “higher instrumentalism.” Or, perhaps better, He teaches a theocentric ethic that incorporates the theological virtue of hope. It should be noted that the ethic of Jesus assumes that there is a an accounting at a final judgment. The ethic of Jesus disappears when we try to strip off the “mythology” of eschatology.

In practice, those who operate by “virtue is its own reward” might well look like Christians. Both ethical systems, for example, insist on the value of sacrifice; both teach that loss now might lead to ultimate gain. But the rationale for sacrifice, and the disposition in the midst of loss, are quite different. Faced with obstacles and opposition, a “virtue-is-reward” type will soldier on, knowing that doing the right thing is good in itself; faced with obstacles and opposition, a disciple of Jesus will also soldier on, just as Jesus did, for the joy that is set before him.

And one of the theoretical advantages of the biblical model is the way it merges ethics with economic life. Jesus draws parables from economic life (the parable of talents, for instance) because the structure of life in the kingdom is the same as the structure of economic life: In both cases, one is called to sacrifice and labor in hope of ultimate payoff; both follow the pattern of sowing and reaping; both are about sowing in hope.

These thoughts don’t even count as a sketch, but they might suggest some lines of inquiry that could help heal the breach between ethics and economy.