The Marquette Lecture was established in 1969 to “recognize and honor theologians of international renown.” Jean Porter is the 49th annual lecturer, and Perfection of Desire is the book version of her talk. There are various strategies for giving such a lecture; one of these strategies includes reflecting on one's life's work in a summary way, and another is continuing the outstanding, cutting-edge research that precipitated the invitation to give the lecture in the first place. Porter decisively adopts the latter by extending the boundaries of recent research about the most technical aspects of virtue. In this book we see a master moral theologian practicing her craft, and for Porter, that has always meant not broad stroke narratives about the field, but rather precise analyses of technical questions that rely primarily on the thought of Thomas Aquinas.

What unifies all three chapters is her effort to substantiate Aquinas’ claim that virtue is a perfection of desire, rather than a reduction to practical rationality. In chapter 1, the particular arena for this overall argument is an explanation of how well-habituated passions have their own “proper motion” (24) and thus play an “active role” (27) in “shaping an agent's overall conception of the good” (52). The passions, in other words, although never without the contribution offered by the cognitive powers (23, 26), do indeed influence one's reason and (indirectly) one's will. This means that habits of the passions are necessary for the virtuous life. Porter relies heavily on the claim that habits (including those of the passions) orient a person toward characteristic types of acts (41).

Chapter 2 can be understood as a defense of the connectivity of the virtues in a manner that does not reduce all virtue to prudence. Aficionados of Porter's scholarship will detect here a possible development in her thought from her 1995 essay on the “flawed saint.” Porter argues against what she calls (Christine Korsgaard's) “good dog” view of the passions whereby they are trained simply not to get in the way of judgments of practical reason. Though Porter grants the unity of the moral life through practical reason (and thus connectivity of the virtues), her emphasis on the distinctive “fields of operation” (63) means her account is not a “unity of virtue” reducing all virtue to prudence (as the Stoics did), but a “reciprocity of virtue.” She reads Thomas as harmonizing “distinct construals of an ideal of reasonableness, in such a way as to give priority to particular ideals associated with the specific virtues, while still acknowledging the value of a general quality of reasonableness” (60). This is a stance against neo-Kantian accounts of virtue (Korsgaard) and their Catholic morality counterparts (Butera), and is ultimately an endorsement of a Thomistic and Aristotelian anthropology whereby the passions participate in reason rather than a Stoic (or Augustinian) anthropology that reduces all virtue to phroenesis (or charity).

Chapter 3 turns to the distinct perfection of “desire” (in this case intellectual appetite) that is justice. Given the distinctively rational character of justice, it is a different sort of chapter from the previous ones. The centrality of “doing good and avoiding evil” as integral parts of justice, and their similarity to the first principle of practical reason, leads Porter to explain how justice, too, should not be reduced to a norm of practical reasonableness. She again relies on the centrality of paradigmatic sorts of actions for justice (115), and attends to the development of this virtue from childhood (110–121). Porter (in line with her recent monograph, Justice as a Virtue) is offering a response to the longstanding critique of virtue as failing to be truly other-regarding, and in doing so she posits a Thomistic account of justice as more satisfactory than accounts offered by contemporary thinkers such as Korsgaard and Hursthouse (124–25).

The Perfection of Desire is an invitation to readers to think through, with an outstanding contemporary moralist, issues at the cutting edges of research on virtue and justice. The book is a far cry from a distinguished lecturer reflecting in broad strokes on her field or career, yet Porter does manage in this small book to further scholarship on distinct topics of emphasis that have been front and center throughout her career, from virtue to natural law and to justice.