Choice

The Choice of Pilate
jesus  / pilate  / belief  / choice

The story of Christ’s betrayal and crucifixion involves the Roman empire. The fifth presiding governor over the territory of Judea incorporating the Hebrew tribes, was Pontius Pilate. Pilate is often quoted in undergraduate philosophy for asking Christ, “what is truth?”. He’s also often cited in pastoral homilies for his choice to “wash his hands” of the guilt of Christ’s crucifixion.

For most, this is thought to be the central moment of choice in the Pilate story. Does he give Jesus over to the crowd, or does he risk a riot to spare him? But I think this is only half the story. You see, Pilate had another choice to make. One much more momentous, and one that made his hand-washing inevitable, once he took it.

Judgment and Virtue

It has been put by some that Virtue ethics lacks a decision-procedure to help us make moral decisions, and is therefore, not a good moral theory. In this essay, I will argue that the decision-procedure is not a satisfactory standard for judging ethical systems because they do not take the full experience of human morality into account, and because the theories instrumenting them often achieve exactly the opposite of their stated goal. I then offer an approach to virtue ethics that I think might salvage the theory as a whole, and I conclude that, despite my moral skepticism, such a theory would be preferable to decision-procedure based approaches.