Virtue's Splendor: Wisdom, Prudence, and the Human Good

This monograph examines the revival of virtue ethics in contemporary moral philosophy, with particular attention to how classical and medieval accounts of practical wisdom illuminate fundamental questions about human flourishing and ultimate ends. Hibbs traces the resurgence of Aristotelian and Thomistic approaches to ethics, arguing that modern moral philosophy's neglect of virtue and practical wisdom has impoverished ethical discourse and obscured essential connections between moral agency and transcendent purpose.

The work engages critically with the dominant consequentialist and deontological frameworks that have shaped moral philosophy since the Enlightenment. Against these approaches, which tend to reduce ethics to calculations of outcomes or applications of universal rules, Hibbs defends an account of moral life centered on the cultivation of virtues and the exercise of prudence in particular circumstances. Drawing extensively on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Aquinas's treatment of the virtues, the analysis demonstrates how practical wisdom operates as the master virtue that enables proper judgment about human goods and their hierarchical ordering.

Central to Hibbs's argument is the claim that virtue ethics, properly understood, cannot remain neutral on questions of ultimate reality and divine purpose. While Aristotle's own account remains ambiguous about the relationship between human flourishing and divine contemplation, the Thomistic synthesis explicitly grounds the virtues in a theological framework that orders human goods toward supernatural ends. Hibbs contends that attempts to develop purely secular versions of virtue ethics ultimately fail to provide adequate foundations for understanding the unity and purpose of the virtues.

The monograph particularly emphasizes how prudence or practical wisdom functions as the intellectual virtue that perfects moral judgment. Unlike modern conceptions that reduce prudence to mere instrumental reasoning about means, the classical tradition presents prudence as the capacity to perceive moral truth in concrete situations and to direct action toward genuine human goods. This account necessarily raises questions about the source and nature of the moral order that prudence apprehends.

Through careful philosophical analysis and historical reconstruction, Hibbs demonstrates that serious engagement with virtue ethics leads inevitably to metaphysical and theological questions about human nature, cosmic order, and divine providence. The work thus contributes to contemporary debates by showing how moral philosophy, when pursued with sufficient depth, opens onto fundamental questions about God and human destiny that modern ethics has largely attempted to bracket or ignore.