"The very existence of the state depends on proportionate reciprocity; for men demand that they shall be able to requite evil with evil— if they cannot, they feel they are in the position of slaves—and to repay good with good— failing which, no exchange takes place, and it is exchange that binds them together. [7] This is why we set up a shrine of the Graces in a public place, to remind men to return a kindness; for that is a special characteristic of grace, since it is a duty not only to repay a service done one, but another time to take the initiative in doing a service oneself. [8]" Aristotle, Book 5, Nicomachean Ethics
There is surprisingly little written about grace. The first place I went looking was Aristotle's virtue ethics, thinking surely it would be considered there. But Aristotle doesn't name grace** as a virtue. It shows up in a discussion on reciprocal giving and gratitude, but this is in the context of a discussion of the virtue of justice in Book V of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. It is also discussed as graciousness and charm in the context of friendliness and social virtues, as a disposition to be pleasant, going into the territory of charisma.
Aristotle settles on a set of five virtues: courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom. A warrior's courage would have been the chief virtue of his time, but Aristotle displaces courage with practical wisdom (phronesis). Aristophanes had satirized Socrates for having his head in the clouds in his comedy The Clouds, so the philosopher (literally philo-sophia translates to "lover-of-wisdom") as personified by his teacher Plato, and Plato's teacher Socrates before him, was in need of rehabilitation. It is wisdom that the virtuous life aims at, but not an abstract wisdom divorced from reality, rather a practical and useful wisdom.
Back to the list of virtues, particularly to justice and grace. To a modern reader like you and I, justice doesn't seem like a virtue, which we think of as characteristic of individuals. Indeed, Aristotle calls it a "complete virtue" to distinguish it from internal dispositions like courage and temperance. Unlike these, justice is other-directed and relational. It is the only virtue that is defined in relation to other virtues, and that cannot be exercised in isolation. You cannot be just if you are not already courageous, for example. As a personal virtue, justice shows up as uprightness, lawfulness, being fair-minded, having personal integrity, but justice itself is like a meta-virtue.
In this way, justice is structurally different from the other virtues. The same could be said of grace. If we wanted to extend Aristotelian virtue ethics today, we might distinguish a grace that shows up as an internal disposition as generosity and kindness. As a generalized and relational virtue, grace, like justice, is also relational. The difference is that whereas justice is defined as giving another what they are due (distributive or retributive justice), grace goes beyond this. Grace entails giving another more than they rightfully deserve. In this way, grace is a natural extension of his account of justice -- we might even say grace is the more complete virtue.
We organize ourselves politically around our ideas of justice -- in theory, our laws are all about achieving justice in as much as possible. I wonder what it would look like to organize our body politic around grace instead? It might look like the Norwegian system that is built on the principle that crime is a failure of the community as much as of an individual, and the point of correction is rehabilitation and reintegration rather than punishment. We may think the criminal does not deserve the additional support and generosity of autonomy and dignity, but there is no question this works. Norway has one of the lowest recidivism rates in the world, and Norway is not alone. Iceland, and in a different context, Rwanda's Gacaca courts, operate on a restorative model post-genocide. But it does require quite a mental shift and political will to take responsibility for our failures and change from the inside out.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNpehw-Yjvs]
Aristotle mentions a shrine to the Charites — the three Graces of Greek mythology, figured as Aglaea (splendor), Euphrosyne (joy), and Thalia (bloom) — kept not in a temple but in the agora, the center of civic and commercial life. The shrine is in the marketplace to remind us that exchange should not be purely transactional. Human exchange is never a zero sum game with no remainder, and there is always an excess given and taken in every interaction. Grace reminds us that justice is never complete, in and of itself. Arguably, to treat the practices of charis -- gracious giving that exceeds obligation -- as a mere adjunct to justice is to short grace, when grace achieves what justice strives towards but cannot quite reach: social harmony.
The context for our more modern understanding of grace has strong religious overtones. What little there is on grace is framed through a history that goes all the way back to the 1st Century and Paul's letters in the New Testament, where we find the doctrine of grace as unmerited salvation. It was a radical break with the ideas that had you earn salvation through words and deeds, and is at the heart of Luther's break with the Catholic Church and the Protestant Reformation. According to the doctrine, God alone can grace you with salvation, and there is nothing you can do to "earn" it or to oblige God to save you. Humans cannot achieve salvation through their own wills, they cannot make it happen; only God can do that. Grace is a precondition for being able to become virtuous in the first place. Grace is entirely God's act, received through faith, which is itself a gift, given to humans despite them being big old sinners.
In 1958, the famously combative [When C.S. Lewis gave a lecture defending an argument from his book Miracles, Anscombe showed up and dismantled it so thoroughly in the Q&A that Lewis reportedly never wrote popular philosophy again and retreated to fiction.] Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe (a.k.a. G.E.M. Anscombe, 1919-2001) published the essay "Modern Moral Philosophy" proposing a return to the Aristotelian concept of flourishing (eudaimonia) and virtue as the proper foundation for ethics. The book singlehandedly sparked a revival in virtue-based ethics.
She was a committed Thomist Catholic, so in essence she was working to return ethics to a theistic morality grounded in a Christian Catholic reading of Aristotle. More specifically, St. Thomas Aquinas' synthesis of Aristotle with Christian theology in the Summa Theologica. Aquinas took Aristotle's virtue framework and baptized it, keeping the structure of the virtues, eudaimonia, and practical wisdom, but grafting on the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. He argued that natural virtue is perfected and elevated by grace. So for a Thomist Catholic like Anscombe, Aristotle gets you most of the way there but you need grace to complete the picture.
Anscombe was part of a brilliant cohort of female philosophers who found an opening into academic Philosophy in the war years, while the men were off to combat. The cohort at Oxford included Phillipa Foot (1920–2010), Iris Murdoch (1919 to 1999), and Mary Midgley (1919 to 2018). (Benjamin Lipscomb tells the story of this cohort in the fascinating book The Women Are Up to Something, if the biographical details interest you!) Whereas Anscombe was busy smuggling Catholicism into secular ethics by way of Aristotle, her colleague Phillipa Foot was not a believer. She took virtue ethics and ran with it as a secular grounding for a rational morality. Together Anscombe and Foot spearheaded a modern day revival of virtue ethics and Aristotelian scholarship, which comes to include Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue (1981), Martha Nussbaum's The Fragility of Goodness (1986), Rosalind Hursthouse's On Virtue Ethics (1999), and Julia Annas' The Morality of Happiness (1993) and more recently Intelligent Virtue (2011). I got hooked on Philosophy and cut my teeth on Aristotle at the height of this revival of virtue ethics in the early 90's, and I thought this would be a likely direction for me. My first serious work was in virtue ethics, and I set out to learn Attic Greek because of it.
But this is going to be anti-climatic because none of these accounts have a serious treatment of grace as virtue. Nussbaum comes closest. Her work on emotions, vulnerability, and the fragility of the good life circles grace-adjacent territory, particularly her treatment of unearned gifts of fortune, luck, and what we owe each other beyond strict accounting by justice. But she doesn't name it grace.
By now you may be wondering.... the absence may not be accidental. There is something about grace that resists formulation or account. Or, to put it the other way around, there may be something about these framework(s) that resist the inclusion of grace.
There is a phenomenon of re-Hellenizing terms to set ideas apart from Latinate ones. This often happens when a Latinate term is too broad for the intended purposes, or too moralized or theological. Scholars return to a Greek term to establish a more precise, technical meaning in a scientific or philosophical context. Grace is a latinate term looking for re-Hellenization, much like spirit and psyche, morals and ethics, sympathy and empathy.
The term "grace" comes from the Latin gratia, meaning favor or goodwill, favoring someone, and having goodwill toward them. Gratia comes from gratus, meaning pleasing, agreeable. It gets its provenance via the theological debates I mention above. In secular parlance, grace is associated with beauty, and is a characteristic of femininity. Often it is taken to mean something like elegance and poise, and it wouldn't be wrong to say that strength is to masculinity what grace is to femininity, a physical manifestation of an internal state of character. But then again, there seems nothing better than the combination of grace and strength, such as in the figure of the gymnast or dancer...
Although she doesn't use the term grace, Hannah Arendt takes up the idea of unexpected possibilities and new beginnings with the concepts of natality, plurality, and action. What emerges between people that can't be fully controlled or predicted, a barrier against fascism (be unpredictable!) But this link is speculative and would require work beyond this write up here, so I'll put a pin in it for now.
A lateral move from grace to generosity and the sizeable literature on the Gift could prove productive. This is because the logic of the gift seems very similar to that of grace. In Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money (1991) Jacques Derrida argues that as soon as a gift enters into an economy of exchange and recognition, it ceases to be a gift and becomes an obligation. Even a "thank you" compromises the gift as such, and the only true gift is one given without recognition or the possibility of return. The recipient would not know the giver or even that it was a gift, and even more (the typical, head-scratching Derridian insight arrives in the form of an aporia) the giver him or herself would not have known that they have given. Pushing to the extreme, even the self-congratulations of the giver would need be excluded from true generosity. Derrida ends up agreeing with is main interlocutor, anthropologist Marcel Mauss who wrote of the gift that it is never truly free but always ends up obliging the recipient in a cycle of debt and forced reciprocity. The gift can never be given in the first place. It has always bothered me that according to this approach, giving and generosity is impossible and nothing more than an illusion.
Notice that grace has the same logical structure as Derrida's gift, only in reverse. The gift is compromised the moment it is given and becomes debt; grace is compromised the moment it is deserved by the recipient. Both collapse under the logic of exchange, one from the giving end, one from the receiving end. Did Derrida draw on the theological debate over grace? Derrida came to be in conversation with Jean-Luc Marion, a Catholic phenomenologist whose work on the gift (Being Given, 1997) engages Derrida directly and argues that genuine givenness is actually the structure of phenomenological experience itself. Arguably, Marion wants to recover something like grace philosophically.
This brings us back to Arendt's concept of natality, whereby the most basic characteristic of human existence is that we are born, which means we are all capacity to act in ways that cannot be determined in advance. Unexpected possibilities and new beginnings. That original openness to the world, our human vulnerability and the source of our true existential anxiety, is that which no one earns, and which one receives one knows not from where.
Derrida finds the gift is impossible as soon as it is exchanged, the theology of grace says grace is given but does not enter into an exchange, because the relation between humans and God is not one of exchange or reciprocity, it is precisely not that. Marion argues pure givenness is the ground of experience itself. Arendt calls it natality, receiving existence from nowhere, an originary openness onto the world, our vulnerability, the fundamental human condition. We did not earn our way here, we did not even ask to be here, and yet here we are. Standing in the big puppy feet of our own possibilities.
You are probably familiar with the seven deadly sins: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. Each of these have a counterpart: pride is met with humility; greed with generosity; lust with chastity; envy with charity or kindness; gluttony with temperance; wrath with patience; and sloth with diligence. I am most interested in generosity, charity, and kindness, all of which are the personal virtues related to grace.
We are living in a time of extreme greed and hatred of the other. I once read an account of xenophobia by Slavoj Žižek that has stayed with me all these years. He is explaining xenophobia in the European context, and I'll quote myself here:
"Slavoj Žižek’s theory of the theft of enjoyment, which locates the psychic roots for xenophobia and “chauvinistic nationalism” in the hatred of another’s enjoyment (real or imagined) which is, in turn, a hatred of one’s own enjoyment. “We always impute to the other an excessive enjoyment; she wants to steal our enjoyment (by ruining our way of life) and/or has access to some secret, perverse enjoyment.” At the heart of this self-hatred is an inability to take part in or understand another’s enjoyment; and an economy of scarcity that mandates that the enjoyment of one is paid for by another’s loss. It is what we feel as lacking in ourselves, and our own tortured relationship to our own desires, that makes us susceptible to racist fear, guilt and hatred..."
The hatred of the immigrant, transgender person, black or brown Americans, does not feel like superiority or empowerment, but precisely the opposite. The white nationalist Christian feels like they are a victim, like someone (the Other) has stolen something from them -- a way of life, a job, the ability to have a good life. This is why they are always whining about everything, even as they violate everyone in sight who is not like them. In short, these people are afflicted by the vice of envy, and the remedy to that is grace personified as kindness and charity. Not a claim to justice but grace is called for in this moment. Now, what forms grace and kindness takes, that is a whole other matter. Sometimes the kind thing to do is what the other didn't even know they needed.
But we know that what we are facing isn't the vice of a man or a movement, but that we all own this mess we're in. Years and years of neglect and of failing each other, and failing to take responsibility for chattel slavery, for one. I believe this moment calls for a deep change in our collective, human orientation. We must give each other more than is deserved or called for. Be each other's saviors. Can we grace our way out of the mess we're in?
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alfonso, D. Rita. "Transatlantic Perspectives on Race: Simone de Beauvoir's Phenomenology of 'Race' in America Day by Day." Philosophy Today, SPEP Supplement, 2005, pp. 89–99.
Aristophanes. The Clouds. Translated by William Arrowsmith, illustrated by Thomas McClure, University of Michigan Press, 1962. Duke University, people.duke.edu/~wj25/ereserves/WJ%20-%20The%20Clouds.pdf. Accessed 8 June 2026.
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by H. Rackham, Harvard University Press, 1926. Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University, www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0054%3Abook%3D5. Accessed 8 June 2026.
Derrida, Jacques. Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money. Translated by Peggy Kamuf, University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House, 2011.
Lipscomb, Benjamin J. The Women Are Up to Something: How Four Philosophers Transformed Modern Ethics. Oxford University Press, 2022.
Marion, Jean-Luc. Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness. Translated by Jeffrey L. Kosky, Stanford University Press, 2002.
Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Translated by W. D. Halls, W. W. Norton, 1990.
Rubin, Gayle. "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex." Toward an Anthropology of Women, edited by Rayna R. Reiter, Monthly Review Press, 1975, pp. 157–210.
Strathern, Marilyn. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. University of California Press, 1988.