Is Ambition a Vice?

A Written Interview with Dr. Justin Hawkins

In a recent article, titled “Christians Should Be Successful,” the author Dr. Justin Hawkins describes a successful 17th-century Christian’s worries that our faith often sets our sights too low:

When he was not busy inventing chemistry, Robert Boyle worried that a misconceived version of Christianity would rob humans of their grandeur. So when his personal papers were posthumously published in 1691, included among them was “The first chapters of a discourse, entitled, Greatness of Mind promoted by Christianity.” The phrase “greatness of mind” is one English translation of the ancient virtue of magnanimity. In antiquity, magnanimity gathered and perfected the concepts of grandeur, nobility, and virtuous striving. Boyle’s aim in this discourse was to show that “on account of future Rewards, the Christian has much greater Motives to heroic virtue, than the heathen moralist, or philosopher.” By arguing that Christianity promotes human greatness rather than suppresses it, Boyle was anticipating and refuting Nietzsche’s argument to the contrary by about two centuries.

In short, the Christian faith should inspire greatness, not mediocrity.

I’ve been thinking about ambition ever since

Aaron M. Renn

’s discussions of ambition a couple months ago. In November, I defended ambition as one of the secular virtues Christians should practice. (

Brad Littlejohn

offered another helpful reaction to Renn.)

But Hawkins offers a corrective, or a clarification. He distinguishes magnanimity from ambition, arguing that the object of a Christian’s aspiration should be things that are worthy, rather than ambition’s endless desire for more.

Hawkins’ Ph.D. at Yale was on the virtue of magnanimity in a Christian context, and titled, “Crowned with Glory and Honor: The Virtue of Magnanimity, and Its Discontents.” He is now a postdoctoral researcher in bioethics at Columbia University.

To learn more, I sent Justin a few questions about the difference between ambition and magnanimity, and the corresponding vice of pusillanimity - aspiring to too little. Here is our exchange.

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1. Is Ambition a Vice?

Photo by Ilse Driessen on Unsplash

Joel: Justin, you write, “Christians sometimes get queasy when talking about ambition,” and argue that Christians should pursue success. Is ambition a vice?

Justin: In antiquity, ambition was always considered a vice. Etymologically, the English word comes from the Latin “ambire,” which meant something like “going around” — specifically going around the city canvassing for votes. We (especially those in swing states) are accustomed to politicians doing that now, but ancient philosophy was always suspicious of people who wanted power and influence so very much. It seemed to them to be one of the markers of a potential tyrant. So early in the concept’s history there is this ambiguity at the heart of ambition: it is simultaneously marked by a desire for office, and marked by a willingness to abase oneself by groveling before those who might make that possible.

We can see the idea that ambition is a vice of the tyrant even as late as Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Brutus gives Caesar’s ambition as the reason why he needed to be killed: “As Caesar loved me, I weep for him; as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it, as he was valiant, I honour him; but, as he was ambitious, I slew him.” Marc Antony, in his rebuttal, admits that if the charge of ambition were true, Caesar was rightly slain:

              The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer'd it.

But of course Marc Antony goes on in the speech to deny that Caesar was, in fact, ambitious. Both Brutus and Marc Antony condemn ambition; they just disagree about whether Caesar is an instance of it.

Joel: Wow, ambition was condemned that universally! So how did ambition come to be thought a virtue?

Justin: In today’s American society of strivers, ambition is almost uniformly considered a virtue. The story of that transformation is told in William Casey King’s Ambition: A History from Vice to Virtue. Americans today think ambition is a sign of industriousness, a willingness to work hard in order to advance, and is intimately tied up with the American ideal of one who goes from rags to riches by the sweat of their brow. But ambition, if it were to be a true virtue, would have a set object at which it aimed. Ambition today has no such object except the desire for more. This is why I say it is rare to find an ambitious person who dies happy, since happiness is a kind of rest in the attainment of one’s object, but one never truly acquires the more at which ambition aims.

There is one more feature of modern ambition worth noticing. Alexis de Tocqueville inquired “why so many ambitious men and so little lofty ambition are to be found in the United States.” He saw that everyone was eager to rise, but the kinds of ambitions the Americans had were all fairly trivial. Everyone wants granite countertops but nobody wants to become a saint. Everybody wants to be an influencer with a million followers but nobody wants to be a sculptor whose work will be studied 500 years from now. In other words, the Americans are people of bourgeoise virtues, not of grand virtues:

“Thus amongst democratic nations ambition is ardent and continual, but its aim is not habitually lofty; and life is generally spent in eagerly coveting small objects which are within reach. What chiefly diverts the men of democracies from lofty ambition is not the scantiness of their fortunes, but the vehemence of the exertions they daily make to improve them. They strain their faculties to the utmost to achieve paltry results, and this cannot fail speedily to limit their discernment and to circumscribe their powers. They might be much poorer and still be greater” (Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 3.19).

This critique of the smallness of bourgeoise desire will be familiar to readers of Nietzsche, or to fans of the movie Fight Club, which is about what happens when a person tries to break out of the life of conformity and consumption into something more grand, demanding, and real. So in some ways modern ambition is just like ancient ambition: it is an ardent, feverish desire for objects that might not be worthy of that desire. Ambition empowers you to want with ardency, but it cannot tell you what is worth wanting.

“[Ambition] is simultaneously marked by a desire for office, and marked by a willingness to abase oneself by groveling before those who might make that possible.”

2. How Is Magnanimity Different than Ambition?

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Joel: So the problem with ambition isn’t desiring more per se. The problem is what we desire, or the fact that we don’t desire worthy objects. How is magnanimity different or similar to ambition?

Justin: Though today the word “magnanimity” means something like generosity or the willingness to overlook faults, in its ancient meaning it a virtue that perfects the right relationship to honors. Aristotle, in the first systematic treatment of the virtue, says that the magnanimous man “believes himself worthy of great things, and is worthy of them.” He also says that magnanimity is a virtue concerned with great honors and the right relation to them. One way I think about it is as follows: all of the virtues help their possessor live excellently in the world, no matter what challenges come our way. Wisdom allows us to navigate the complexity of the world skillfully. Temperance allows us to moderate our desire for pleasures that might distract us from excellent living. Courage allows us to endure in the face of difficulties and pains that might distract us from excellent living.

As I understand it, magnanimity is the virtue that helps us relate rightly to the economy of giving and taking honors. Every society has multiple, overlapping economies of honor and dishonor. We esteem some acts and the agents who perform them, and withhold honor from other acts and the agents who do them. In a morally imperfect society, the apportionment of honors and dishonors is among the features of the society that have gone wrong. So we might think that the inventor of a social media network is worth attention, regard, and emulation, even though there is ample evidence to suggest that he made his billions by creating a platform whose effects are prejudicial to democratic society at large and to the mental health of that platform’s users. Meanwhile we might overlook and refuse to honor diligent parents, whose labor goes uncompensated and whose task is not thought to be worthy of teaching at elite universities. At Yale, where I spent over a decade of my life, there are dozens of business classes you can take for credit, but so far as I can tell, none that deal with how to be a good parent. This is one indication of how a society apportions honor and dishonor.

But it might also be the case that one is capable of being honored even if one does not deserve those honors. You might think of an author who has her book ghostwritten by another, but who herself accepts all the awards and attention for having written the book. In such a case, the person is honored, but not honorable. So a society might also go wrong in apportioning its honor and dishonor simply through ignorance, rather than through vice.

I said that magnanimity is a virtue that helps relate one to the economy of honors and dishonors, and here is what I mean: it is that virtue that allows you to do what is praiseworthy and honorable, even if you are not, in fact, praised or honored for having done it. In this sense it has a kind of independence from opinion that ambition, in its classical sense, did not have — since the ambitious person had to run around the city courting the esteem of the citizenry. So magnanimity inclines one toward acts of great virtue and cultivates a healthy disdain for the honors and dishonors that are given out by those who may be uninformed or poorly formed. Aristotle would say that we ought not cultivate perfect disdain for our reputations, but only that we ought to seek honors only from the wise and good — that is, only those who themselves know how to give out honors justly.

Joel: Still sounds a bit secular. How did Christians receive this Aristotelian teaching?

Justin: When the earliest Christians theorized magnanimity, they followed the Stoics in claiming that the one from whom we ought most highly to seek honor is God. God is the one who perfectly gives out honor in perfect proportion to our worthiness to receive that honor. This introduces a real revolutionary or critical potential into the virtue of magnanimity. It means that a person might be seeking the highest and noblest form of honor — the kind that comes from God — and thereby stand athwart all the gatekeepers of honor among human beings. We call such people “martyrs.” They are the who seek the glory that comes from above rather than the glory that comes from man (John 5:44).

So magnanimity includes the work of noble striving, but unlike ambition, it has a concrete object: to be worthy of the honor that comes from God, and (to the degree possible) from wise, well-formed human beings. Aristotle never settled upon which form of life was most worthy of this honor. Christians have an incredibly expansive account of the forms of life that might be honorably. One of the functions of saints is to hold forth for our attention, admiration, and emulation persons from all different kinds of lives who sought in those lives to be the friends of God. So on my account, magnanimity is a virtue that can be exercised in a wild and raucous variation of forms of life.

“[Magnanimity] is that virtue that allows you to do what is praiseworthy and honorable, even if you are not, in fact, praised or honored for having done it.”

3. How Can We Avoid the Vice of Pusillanimity?

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Joel: So if ambition is a vice of excess, help us understand the vice of deficiency: pusillanimity. What is it, and how can we avoid it?

Justin: Pusillanimity, or “smallness of soul” is the vice corresponding to magnanimity by deficiency. It is possessed by a person who believes himself less capable of acts of virtue than, in fact, he is. In this way it is a corrupted or debased counterfeit of humility. It can be cultivated either through sloth and indolence — which are both varieties of cowardice, since they flee from the difficult tasks of our humanity. It can be cultivated through devoting oneself to that which is below the dignity of one’s humanity — say, spending dozens of hours a day scrolling or gaming or lending money at interest or obsessing about one’s reputation before strangers on the internet. All of these shrink the soul by forcing it to attend to what is trivial. In other cases, pusillanimity might be the unhappy result of varieties of oppression. Tyrants want their subjects small in soul because then they become less threatening to the tyrant’s unjust rule.

In each case, the remedies against pusillanimity are the same: reflect carefully upon the fact that you, as a creature of a good God, have received from that God good gifts — the only kinds of gifts that God gives. The gifts are to be used rather than allowed to lay dormant. So the magnanimous person strives to cultivate and make good use of the gifts that God has given her to undertake acts of great virtue, in blithe disregard for what reputational harms she might endure for pursuing those acts of virtue amidst a society that prizes other things more. The theological intuition behind such a posture is that typically the Holy Spirit works by renovating and empowering human agency, rather than replacing it. This means that exertion and striving magnanimously will frequently feel difficult. But to flee from that difficulty would be to flee into a lesser and smaller way of being human.

Joel: Thanks for your responses and your research into the under-studied Christian virtue of magnanimity.

Find out more about Dr. Justin Hawkins at his website.

I especially enjoyed reading his review of David Van Drunen’s Politics After Christendom.