Originally, virtue meant excellence and it was something worth pursuing as its own reward. For the Greeks and Romans moral law was relatively unimportant. Aristotle acknowledged that you had to have laws but they were of relatively minor importance.
That all had to change with Christianity for it was heir to a whole lot of scripture that said that moral law was very important. So what's the relationship between virtue and the law? For Aquinas, virtue seems to still be its own reward. Later, in the manualist period (17th to early 20th century) moral law became supreme. Virtue was worth pursuing because it made you better at obeying moral laws. Virtue by itself was nothing. And so a virtuous person became not someone who was good at doing something but a person who was good at not doing things. By the early 20th century, the expression "a virtuous woman" came to mean a woman who had not had sex if single and had had sex with only her husband if married. And it was generally taken that the when the married woman had sex she did so out of duty rather than enthusiasm on her part. (Men were held to the same standard in theory but not in practice.)
Sexual "virtue" in women was only the most extreme example. Morality came to mean our duty to follow the law both in Catholic and protestant teaching. Today, the reigning conception of ethics for most liberals remains deontology, that is, a morality of duty. To be sure, liberals have discarded many of the sexual duties as well as filial piety towards parents and state but duty remains the central concept and, as social justice warriors demonstrate daily, woe on the person who failed to recognize the reigning notions of duty and wore a sombrero on the Cinco de Mayo. Not surprisingly, some people rejected, and continue to reject, this sort of morality as duty as something cold and inhuman. Because it is cold and inhuman!
Pietas means many things but it definitely includes duties to other human beings and not just God. In a world where we define virtue not as a quality that a human being has, not as something they are, but as a matter of performance, we are going to tend to see the pious son as the one who always does what his parents want him to do. His virtue doesn't make him anything because he is only valued to the extent that he performs as desired.
HIGH PERFORMANCE ORIENTATION societies have characteristics such as...
LOW PERFORMANCE ORIENTATION societies have characteristics such as...
Piety towards your parents is going to be a very different thing depending on which sort of environment you are operating in. Presumably, we will all travel between both. That is to say, our job will be a high performance orientation environment and our family and friends less so. It makes sense to fire someone because you think you can find someone who can perform better. It makes sense to value the high-performing employee above the low-performing one. It makes sense to value these people for what they do more than for what they are. In fact, we judge it a vice to hire friends and family over others. In this world, I and others will judge my piety as being indistinguishable from obediently conforming to the expectations my superiors have of me.
Someone might object that conforming seems not to match modern liberal society where rebellion and competition are valued. Yes they are valued but only to the degree that they serve a shared set of values. Our "rebels" all conform to a narrowly proscribed set of values. Try being a conservative rebel and nonconformist on a university campus and you will be sneered at and maybe even brutally suppressed. You may only rebel according to accepted models.
The limit for liberal deontology is Kant's principle that we never treat others solely as means. So, while you will treat the hired hand—for instance, the barista who makes your coffee this morning—as a means, you will not treat them solely as such. Assuming an opportunity ever comes up for you to think of them as anything else but the means to get a good cup of coffee but it probably won't. At the other end of the scale are the people who you see primarily as ends in themselves. But only primarily; there could be kinds of performance that would lead you to sever relations with them but there probably won't; most of the time, their performance will not affect your relationship for you value them for who they are (as ends in themselves) rather than what they do (as means).
Now, it may also seem that families will be low performance oriented environments where people are valued for what they are. Well, they should be but they tend not to be. My family certainly wasn't. A standard of performance according to expectations set down by management was very much the reigning morality. One of my mother's frequent admonishments to her children was "If you want to be part of this family." My mother wasn't a horrible person. She just didn't get what a family should be and she didn't because she grew up in a high-performance-orientation society that didn't (and still doesn't) get what a family is supposed to be. Her understanding, like that of many (perhaps most) mothers of her generation of filial piety was always that her children should do what she wanted and share her values. (See Betty Draper as the supreme example this.)
"Name don't blame," as therapists say. It's pointless to blame our parents for this. My mother was as much a victim of this as a perpetrator, which is to say she learned it all from a very ambitious Irish mother who had driven her children to success. (We blame WASPs for this mentality but there is nothing peculiarly white or protestant about the work ethic.)
So what can we do about all this now? The solution our liberal culture pretends to offer us is a rejection of piety but it does this by substituting one kind of piety for another. For example, we used to be puritanical hypocrites about sex and now we are puritanical hypocrites about food and the environment. Besides, I think piety, including filial piety, is a very important virtue that is essential for us to have a happy, healthy state and to pursue happy, healthy lives. "Honour your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you." This is, St. Paul tells us, the first commandment with a promise. If all it means, however, is a requirement that we live up to our parents' expectations it is a cold and inhuman law and no virtue at all.
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