Virtue Rules and Thick Concepts
Julia Annas
Virtue ethics guides us to act. In the jargon of ethical philosophers it provides an
account of right action. It does this by pointing out our use of ‘virtue rules’ or ‘v-rules’,
first brought to attention in the contemporary debates by Rosalind Hursthouse.1 A
number of philosophical issues are raised by our use of virtue rules, which I won’t be
able to explore today.2 Here I will take up only one, namely the point that virtue rules use
virtue terms like ‘generous’, ‘brave’ and so on, and also vice terms like ‘greedy,’ ‘stingy’
and the like. This is obvious common sense, but common sense can become
philosophically problematic, and the problem here is that these terms pick out what
philosophers call thick concepts. ‘Thick concepts’ is a philosophical term, and I shall be
looking, in this short paper, at a philosophical debate, but the debate has, as I shall point
out at the end, implications for the psychology of virtue development and our study of it.
I will not be able to do more than raise these implications here.
What are thick concepts? The term was introduced into ethical philosophy by
Bernard Williams.3 Williams took it over from the ethnographer Clifford Geertz, who
was himself influenced by the philosopher Gilbert Ryle’s contrast between ‘thick
descriptions’ and ‘thin’ ones, so the term has a mixed ethnographic and philosophical
origin. The term has figured in many debates over the last twenty-five years, which have
done much to clarify it.
The root idea is that a thick concept like cowardly or generous has a lot of
content; to say that someone is cowardly is to say something specific, which requires
similarly specific backing-up in terms of the person’s actions, reasons and (expressed)
thoughts. Contrasted with these are thin concepts, which have little or no content; to say
1
Hursthouse (1999).
2
Particularly issues of ‘action guidance’, about which I say some things in Annas (2014).
3
Jenkins (2006), pp 133-34.
1
that an action is right or good, or that you ought to do it, is not to make the same kind of
specific claim.
The contrast is not merely that of rich versus meagre content, though. Thick
concepts are those which ‘seem to express a union of fact and value’,4 and this is the
important point. A thick concept is not only ‘world-guided’, in Williams’ terms, but also
‘action-guiding’5; it not only provides description of how the world is but also motivation
to act on the world in some way. A term like ‘refrigerator’ has a lot of descriptive
content, and its correct use is determined by looking at the way the world is; but it is not a
thick term in this sense, because when we use the term ‘refrigerator’ we are not saying
anything evaluative. A thick concept is one which is used to pick out an item in the world
in an evaluative way, with implications for our attitude and motivation. Calling an action
(even more, a person) cowardly, is not to pick it, or her, out in a neutral way, like calling
something a refrigerator, but to pick it, or her, out in a way which also involves a
negative evaluation of it, with implications for our attitude and motivation. Thin
concepts, in contrast, are those whose use is evaluative, but not via descriptive content. If
I’m told that an action is the right thing to do, or that I ought to do it, I get the point that
some attitude or motivation of mine is in play,but I have so far been told nothing about
what it is that is the right thing to do, or what it is that I ought to do.
Debates about thick and thin concepts are distinct from debates about virtue and
virtue ethics, but it’s easy to see why virtue terms give us prominent examples of thick
concepts. Virtues (and vices) are obvious examples where in applying a descriptive term
we also make an evaluation, as with cowardly just now. Virtue (and vice) terms are
obvious examples of our use of thick concepts.6 Here I shall mention three points at
which virtue ethicists should note that virtue concepts stand out as a distinctive kind of
4
Williams (1985) p. 129.
5
Williams (1985) p. 141.
6
In this paper I will just be cavalier with the details of the metaphysics of concepts in
contemporary discussions. I take it that the issues I am interested in don’t require
attention to metaphysical details.
2
thick concept, and, in two cases, are not subject to some objections that are often made
about thick concepts in general.
Thin content
Whatever their other disagreements, and whether or not they think that there is a
division, or a difference of degree, between thick and thin concepts, people in debates
over thick concepts agree that what most clearly marks out thin concepts is their poverty
of content. What’s striking is that philosophers discussing thin concepts generally give a
list like, ‘goodness, badness, rightness, wrongness, obligatoriness,’7 in which good and
bad figure alongside deontic terms like right and ought. There is clearly an assumption
here, namely that just as you are told practically nothing when you are told that an action
is the right thing to do, so equally you are told practically nothing when you are told that
an action is a good one, or a good one to do. However, from a virtue ethics perspective
there is an important difference here.
Firstly, as has been continually stressed ever since the early work of Philippa
Foot, the apparently bland and unspecific term ‘good’ is not in fact available to be
attached indiscriminately to just anything. ‘Good’ is not a virtually contentless term
which can be attached to anything on the grounds that what it does is just to commend, or
express liking or approval. ‘Good’ functions to evaluate the kind of thing that is said to
be good, according to the criteria for goodness of that kind of thing. There are criteria for
the goodness of cacti, trees and lions, criteria we recognize and make use of all the time.
People, traits and actions are also good (sometimes); so there are criteria for the goodness
of people, traits and actions – though of course these are more complex and variable than
in the case of other kinds of living being. Sometimes philosophers evade this obvious
point by talking of people, traits and actions as ‘morally good,’ assuming that our
grounds for applying the term in these cases are quite different from the kind we use
when applying it in the other cases. There are no independent grounds for this claim
about ‘good’, however. Moreover, this claim implies that ‘good’ is systematically
7
Smith (2013) p 97.
3
ambiguous between its uses as applied to people (and traits and actions) and it uses as
applied to cacti, animals and plants. However, it is clearly false to claim that ‘good’ is
ambiguous in this way.8
With deontic terms like ‘right’ and wrong’, however, we can learn to apply them
without having any clear independent idea of why they function as they do. While ‘good’
always implies some content, ‘right’ and other deontic terms do not. If I say to you, for
example, apropos of nothing, ‘You ought to jump out of the window,’ this is an
outrageous thing to say, but has a perfectly good, precise sense, although absolutely no
grounds have been given for you to jump out of the window. If I say, again apropros of
nothing, that you have a good window, I need to then come up with some grounds for
saying this. Perhaps it is convenient, well-made, and so on. These are perfectly general
points about goodness and rightness, but they show why for virtue ethics ‘good’ is not on
the thin side of the thick/thin distinction.
Secondly, we can see even from everyday usage that ‘good’ carries implicit
further content. In the 50s children were urged to, ‘Be good!’ and knew perfectly well
that this injunction was not at all contentless: they were to be good children, understood
as children behaving in the conventionally disciplined ways of the time. We can see the
amount of implicit content conveyed when we reflect that at that time, ‘Be a good
boy!’carried quite distinct implicit content from, ‘Be a good girl!’, given that being a
good boy had quite different content from being a good girl. ‘Right’ and ‘ought’ do not
have this kind of implicit content. ‘Behave as you ought/should,’ or, ‘Do the right thing,’
tells you nothing until you are told what it is that you should do, or what the right thing to
do actually is.
We can put the point in terms of relation to context. ‘Be a good girl,’ tells you (if
you are a girl) a lot about how to behave in any context. ‘Right’, ‘ought’ and ‘should’
have no implicit content to unfold in any context. In general, deontic terms indicate that
you should act on the result of your deliberations, but they do not do so by introducing
8
This is of course extremely abbreviated. See the papers in Foot (1978), especially
‘Goodness and Choice’, and Foot (2001).
4
content evaluatively. This is one reason why they do not introduce a distinct kind of
reason for acting that should be part of those deliberations.9
Although not all participants in debates on thick and thin concepts do use good
and bad as examples, there is to my knowledge no discussion of the ways they contrast
with the deontic terms. From the virtue ethics point of view, however, ‘good’ and ‘bad’
don’t belong with deontic terms at all. Deontic terms are thin, but ‘good’ and ‘bad’
belong with the thick virtue terms. We could perhaps express this point by saying that the
deontic terms are essentially thin, but once the point is made it is probably better to carry
on with the usual terms and just call them thin.
Thick concepts and virtue terms
Thick concepts are well thought of as having descriptive content with an
evaluative aspect. Putting it this way discourages the thought, which still has some
supporters, that thick concepts are not unities, but can be ‘disentangled’ into a purely
descriptive part and a purely evaluative part. It’s because of this thought that thick
concepts have had such prominence in contemporary ethical discussions; this issue,
namely whether terms that ‘unite fact and value’ can be decomposed or disentangled into
a purely factual, value-free bit and a purely value, fact-free bit, is central to many longrunning problems in ethics, especially meta-ethics.10 Some contemporary philosophers
are still producing ingenious ways of disentangling an evaluative bit and a descriptive bit
9
I am aware that this last is a controversial claim, which I have defended in Annas
(2014).
10
Kirchin (2013a) pp 6- 7. ‘Arguably it is this issue that people associate most with the
idea of thick concepts. In effect, we are asking whether thick concepts are whole
concepts, or whether they can be broken into more basic elements such that we use thick
terms only as a convenient shorthand. On this issue hangs a lot of the point of modern
metaethics. This issue gets to the heart of our thoughts about how the evaluative relates to
the descriptive, and what the evaluative is.’
5
in thick concepts.11 I take it that these attempts are doomed, but can’t argue fully for that
here. It is worth point out, however, that prior to espousing a theory there is no good
reason to think that a thick term is decomposable into these two quite distinct bits. Those
who carry on trying to decompose them have a theory about distinctness of fact and value
that requires them to do this. It is not something that is thrust on as a problem by the way
we employ the terms.12
Virtue concepts, then, are thick concepts. They contrast with deontic concepts,
which are essentially thin, and so they do not contrast with all terms regularly considered
to be thin in thick-thin debates (especially not ‘good’). They have specific descriptive
content which has an evaluative aspect. This evaluative aspect is in some way actionguiding, but there is a variety of ways in which it might guide action. Not every use of a
virtue term is such as to provide a reason for acting right away; finding that someone is
disloyal might guide you to change your attitude to them, for example, rather than doing
anything there and then.
Among the issues which arise for thick concepts there are two where virtue
concepts turn out not to be liable to problems raised for thick terms in general. These
problems and their resolution are, I think, interesting for psychological as well as
philosophical research into virtue, since they both concern the ways we can study the use
of virtue terms, and whether they are amenable to empirical study of the kind thought
appropriate to the use of factual or descriptive terms.
The evaluative point of view
One point which figures largely in debates about thick terms is that when we
consider the use of such a term from an outsider’s point of view, it becomes clear that the
correct use of a thick term can’t be picked up simply from an external point of view, one
in which the observer is ignorant of, or does not share, the agent’s evaluations.
11
Smith (2013), Blackburn(2013), Elstein and Hurka (2009).
12
This is a point Williams made right from the start (1985 p. 129).
6
Someone from another culture unfamiliar with English-speakers might first learn
that ‘brave’ is applied to those who engage in conflicts with opponents, particularly in
fights and battles (mostly fictionally, on screen). Such a person would likely be baffled to
find that ‘brave’ is applied also to people who persist when they are physically
challenged, or persist against obstacles which are not physical, as when defending a
controversial thesis in print, or resisting pressure to change the results of scientific
research to please a wealthy patron. A native speaker has no problem in using the term
‘brave’ of behaviour in all these very different situations, and in refusing to use it of
behaviour which is merely aggressive, or resistance to intellectual pressure which is
merely stubborn. Someone in the role of the visiting anthropologist would, however, be
hard put to learn the use of the term until they got the point that behaviour is brave if
(very roughly) it involves resistance to or endurance of danger or threatened harm for the
sake of a worthwhile goal. This point has long been made to counter the idea that thick
terms in general can be successfully disentangled into a purely descriptive bit and an
evaluative bit. For it is only when we understand the agent’s evaluations from the agent’s
point of view that we can properly discern whether what she does is brave or not.
Regardless of whether this point holds of all thick concepts or not, it is certainly true of
virtues.
This point, that to grasp the use of virtue terms we need to grasp the agent’s
evaluative point of view, and indeed that we have little hope of grasping it if we focus
just on the situations in which it is used, has actually been raised as an objection to use of
thick terms. Simon Blackburn puts the point sharply. ‘[T]hinking in terms of thick
concepts does a disservice to ethics. It discourages critique.’13 His example is that of a
group happy to call women cute. If we regard ‘cute’ as doing one indissoluble thing,
namely picking out certain women descriptively, but with an evaluative aspect to doing
so, then appreciating women as cute will be inseparable from using the term in the way
accepted as correct. This is taken to be an objection because it becomes hard to see how
someone who has learnt this correct use of the term can come to see what is objectionable
13
Blackburn p 123.
7
about using this term, or persuade herself and other people who do this to change, or to
produce articulate criticism, and so forth.
This argument fails for virtue terms (whether for other thick terms I leave open).
At least it does so where virtue is conceived along the lines of the neo-Aristotelian
account of virtue defended by others, and also by myself in Intelligent Virtue. (Differing
conceptions of virtue will need different treatment.) On the neo-Aristotelian conception
of virtue, we understand virtue in understanding how we develop it, and we develop
virtue the way we develop practical skills; we learn, from other people and the
surrounding culture, and we learn how to do it (whatever the practical skill is) for
ourselves, coming to see the point of what we have learnt and to practice it in a way
independent of the path by which we have learnt it. This is a point which I have
repeatedly made about learning practical skill in the context of seeing it as an analogy for
learning virtue ( a case where I have been delighted to find that philosophers have been
converging with psychologists in their study of virtue development and the relevance of
practical skills.) The analogy of learning a skill makes it clear that the point about
perspective applies to skill too. It is the expert who can tell well-made from badly-made
shoes, good from bad tennis backhands. The point of view of a practical expert is an
evaluative point of view – otherwise we would hardly have a use for experts to teach us
how to make good, rather than faulty, products of skill.14
Similarly with virtue. When we are not, or not yet, virtuous we are not clear about
generosity, and so we get it wrong. We offer help to people who don’t need it, or don’t
want it from us, or offer it in inappropriate ways. We improve in generosity as we learn
that giving in the right way, at the right time and with all the other Aristotelian
refinements requires understanding what generosity is, and that generosity is not
expressed in publically giving a huge gift to someone who manifestly can’t reciprocate it,
for example. Thinking that you are more generous the larger gift you give is naïve, and
giving naively is not generous. (Though it is on the way to getting there, and better than
giving nothing). As I said, this applies to the Aristotelian conception of virtue; a defender
14
As often in this debate, defenders of disentangling seem to prove too much, to be
committed to a disentangling position about expertise and its products.
8
of, for example, Christine Swanton’s pluralist account of virtue will say that in not giving
a large gift you are, correctly, not being generous. I think that the Aristotelian account is
more in tune with our everyday way of thinking about virtues, but will not argue that
here.
With virtue terms, then, Blackburn’s point is entirely mistaken. We cannot
successfully learn how to employ a virtue term without making its use our own and thus
reflecting on the way we we have learnt it. We may endorse what we have learnt, or we
may criticize that and go on differently. Whichever way we go, we go on for ourselves.
We do not mindless repeat what we were told. As Aristotle says, people seek the good,
not what their parents did.15
Shapelessness
The so-called shapelessness hypothesis is the claim that evaluative concepts are
‘shapeless’ with respect to the descriptive: that is, that there is no way of characterizing
evaluative concepts in a purely descriptive way such as to pick out all and only the
instances that the evaluative concept is use of. (This is clearly related to the point about
evaluative point of view.) If asked to characterize in a ‘purely descriptive’ way all
instances of bravery, I will fail, because bravery marks out no ‘shape’ at the level of the
purely descriptive.
This point has been used to counter the idea that description and evaluation can be
disentangled; and the point has in turn been met by a claim that we can disentangle them,
for we can provide disjunctions of descriptive terms to account for the evaluative one.
Presumably each disjunction is made up of instances each of which is an agreed instance
of the evaluative kind in question. So ‘brave’ would apply to standing firm in fights OR
not giving in to inappropriate pressure OR… and so on. But this is obviously hopeless.
An understanding of virtue terms is an understanding of the virtue as a way of dealing
with situations, an understanding that is not limited to the situations already encountered.
It is a striking point about the way we learn virtue terms that we do not find it difficult to
15
Politics II 8.
9
extend our use of virtue terms to new situations and new cultural contexts. Faced by an
unfamiliar situation, we work out how to characterize it in virtue (or vice) terms by trying
to understand the reasoning and the character producing the action. We do not go back
over past situations in which we have used the term and try to work out what those
situations have in common and how much of that is expressed in the situation before us.
The whole point is that this is a different situation to which consideration of past
situations is useless. What is relevant is understanding, which we develop (we hope) to
greater degrees, of the virtuous way of dealing with different situations; it is this, not the
situations themselves, that enables us to distinguish, to the extent that we can, between
kindness and condescension, bravery and foolhardiness.
For virtue terms, then, shapelessness, as it figures in debates about thick terms, is
not a problem. It is just what we would expect. Learning how to use a virtue term is not
learning how to act in a string of different situations and hoping that you can see what is
similar to all those situations in the new situation. It is learning the point of acting in the
ways you have been taught to act and continuing to discover what is involved in giving
money, distributing goods, enduring pain and so on in the right ways, to the right people
and all the rest.
Conclusion
This has been a very brief look at a philosophical debate. I have indicated why
virtue terms are not liable to objections that have been brought to that kind of term in the
debate. This may not seem to make much of a contribution to discussion of virtue
development, especially in the context of co-operative discussions with psychology
experts. However, I think it is relevant that a great deal of the heat in the philosophical
debate about thick terms comes from philosophical worries about terms where evaluation
cannot be extracted from description, and this is a worry that has implications for
empirical enquiry.
There is a worry frequently articulated here. While ‘purely descriptive’ terms
apply in ways that can be recorded and studied empirically, and subjected to scientific
methods, an inextractable evaluative aspect introduces a complication which is seen as
10
threatening to this. For the evaluative aspect will mean that the application of such terms
can’t be in the same way recorded and studied empirically. This is the source of the
continuing, increasingly implausible, project of disentangling the evaluative from the
descriptive in thick terms. This has been seen, sometimes explicitly, as an attempt to save
the ‘scientific respectability’ of the terms.
I agree with most other philosophers that ethics should not develop by insulating
itself from empirical study, and I applaud the recent coming-together of philosophers and
psychologists, especially in studying virtue and its development. I do so especially
because my own use of the ‘skill analogy’ for virtue, familiar from ancient ethical
thinking, has been helped and inspired by much of the work of Darcia Narvaez and Dan
Lapsley, and by being introduced to the kinds of ways in which virtue and its
development are now being investigated in psychology departments. I think that both
philosophers and psychologists might benefit from taking stock of the points presented
here about virtue terms. Because virtue terms are used for thick concepts, investigation of
them and their use is unlikely to succeed if it is based on methods that try to isolate a
‘purely descriptive’ aspect of them, or if it ignores the person’s own point of view as to
what is taken to be greedy, generous or whatever. When philosophers go on insisting on
this kind of isolation, they are defending an increasingly old-fashioned and irrelevant
approach to virtue. As for the psychologists, I come to this conference to increase my
understanding of your methods and their results, and how these align, or don’t, with the
distinction between thick and thin concepts, and the implications of this; so I will end
here.
11
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Hursthouse, Rosalind (1999) On Virtue Ethics, Oxford University Press.
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