Virtue over individualism is the call that leads to true flourishing

Thomas Casemore• March 28, 2025

In a recent ethics lesson, I introduced a class to the concept of Virtue Ethics. Not all of my pupils were entirely convinced, something which shouldn’t have surprised me given the zeitgeist in which these young students are steeped.  

Virtue Ethics, in brief, is an Aristotelian ethical theory that seeks to find the “golden mean” between the vices of excess and deficiency. This “golden mean” is a virtuous characteristic.

Such virtuous acts, Aristotle says, should then be repeated until they become habit. And then, by becoming habit, they become embodied as character.

For example, the excess of the golden mean “courage” is “recklessness”, and the deficiency is “cowardice”. By practising “courage” it becomes habitual and thus the individual becomes a courageous person.

Virtue ethics is not purely Aristotelian, however; Catholicism borrows heavily from this thought-world and frames a lot of its moral language in terms of virtues and habits.

By embodying the virtue as our character, we move closer to eudaimonia, or “the highest good”, and therefore we flourish as people. In Christian terms, this may be seen as Theosis or “transforming into the divine likeness”. 

At the end of the lesson, I addressed the applications of the ethic, asking students to consider how, unlike other normative ethics, Virtue Ethics offers the opportunity for character transformation through habitual development.

One child then asked an innocent question, but one that defines our current culture.

“But what about my individuality?”

This question raised two immediate problems from my perspective. 

The first: what if that “individuality” is monstruous or evil? Should we promote individuality to the detriment of society? 

The second: why did it matter to me or worry me that the pupils had asked this?

The question the pupil asked was a result of no fault of his own. We live in a society that screams individualism – “you do you”, and “whatever makes you happy” – at the top of its lungs.

There are many clear issues with individualism, but this child’s question brought out the most prominent. If my individuality is everything, why should I change? And, by extension, why should I be able to ask anyone else to change?

An obsession with the rightness of the individual, and individual truths, leaves a moral void in which a person can never self-examine; never improve; never even see the need for improvement. There is no “improvement”.

If individualism is the rule, then I can never measure myself against others, or moral demands, toward thinking, “I really should change”. Instead, I will think, “I’m great just the way I am”.

This is sadly a problem we also see in the liberal wings of the Church too: a “Jesus-loves-me-onlyism” that centres on a narrow reading of the gospels and Jesus’s messages of love; a Christianity that says, “God loves you just the way you are so don’t change” and “Jesus wouldn’t judge”. 

Such expressions of Christianity are without flourishing, and cannot offer anything other than death. 

It is true that God loves all people, but in more liberal Christianity, this is where the story stops – with a misunderstanding of love.

God’s love calls us to change, to grow, and to develop through Theosis. Instead of being dead in our sins, God loves us and calls us to flourishing life by commanding that we reject our vices. That we die to ourselves – our individualism – and “put on Christ”. 

But, instead, today we see expressions of, “I am my vices – and woe betide anyone who questions me”. 

Love of self becomes paramount; it becomes the eudaimonia – “the highest good” – itself.

Therefore, if I am being asked to change, it is an unloving request that violates my individualism.

This idea became most apparent to me a couple of months ago when I was unfortunately forced to watch the mockery of marriage that is Married at First Sight. 

Individualism and self-love are in no shortage amongst those wishing to appear on TV, but watching people in their late-twenties and thirties try to navigate relationships having had it “their way” for years was, in a word, depressing.

It was incredibly glaring how the conflict between a desire to find love and a socially engrained unwillingness to change, meant that only two of the “couples” made it to the end of the show.

The embodied societal presumption that “I am perfect just the way I am”, is so opposite to the true self-sacrificial nature of love, that most situations in the show could not be navigated by the “couples”.

But relationships are not the only place individualism has dug in its claws with detrimental effects.

Instead of adapting to living in community and sharing true transformational love, our society encourages excessive self-love above all else. This sees isolationism and lack of community increasing all over Britain through fractured relationships and self-absorption.

Individualism is in direct contradiction to Virtue Ethics because it is an expression of the root all sin – pride.

Virtue Ethics, by contrast, gives Catholics the opportunity to develop in areas of deficiency or excess.

Confession forces us to reflect on what these areas of vice might be.

And then in community, through pastoral help, and maybe even spiritual direction, we can further change these vices into virtues.

In a world of individualism, Catholic Virtue Ethics invites us to change. In a world where we can be whoever we wish to be, it calls us to be who we were meant to be.

And in a world where there is vice, depression and confusion all around, it calls us to a life of flourishing.

Virtue Ethics is integral to Catholic morality because, like Christ and with Christ, it invites us to transform into people living flourishing lives. 

With the help of the Holy Spirit, we can develop through Theosis evermore into the likeness of Christ – becoming more like the Christ who, ultimately, is the fullest embodiment of a flourishing life, and the epitome of lived virtue.