Virtues, Particularism and Reasons for Action
Andrew Jordan
In her recent paper “A Dilemma for Particularist Virtue Ethics”1 Rebecca Stangl
considers the relationship between virtue theories and moral particularism. The conclusion that
she draws is that the conjunction of a robust particularism with virtue ethics requires the virtue
ethicist to “either adopt an unattractive model of moral motivation or to embrace a fairly strong
version of the unity of the virtues.” (666) This would naturally be an unwelcome result to many,
as virtue theories and some form of particularism have been plausibly thought to be mutually
supportive. In what follows, I argue that Stangl conflates several senses in which something may
be called “virtuous”, and that it is this conflation that leads her to the conclusions she draws
concerning the conjunction of virtue theory and particularism. This leads to a further discussion
about the relationship between moral reasons and moral virtues. I argue that there are
independent reasons for rejecting the thought that moral reasons are normatively grounded in a
prior account of virtuous agency. Further, I pursue a few implications of this discussion for
moral particularism. Specifically I consider the possibility that particularism, conceived as a
doctrine rejecting the normative grounding of reasons by principles is compatible with there
being a set of general principles cast in terms of the virtues that are both morally informative and
provide an intelligible structure to the normative domain.
1. Particularism and Valence Shifting
In Stangl’s article, she is specifically concerned with a particularism that allows for socalled valence shifting amongst thick ethical properties that can be characterized in terms of the
1
Philosophical Quarterly Vol. 58, No. 223, October 2008
virtues. Examples of such properties include kind, cruel, crass, courageous, thoughtless, rash et
cetera. To see what is at stake, we need to turn to Jonathan Dancy’s book Ethics Without
Principles. There he defines particularism as the thesis that: “The possibility of moral thought
and judgment does not depend on a suitable supply of principles”2 He initially motivates this
thesis by pointing towards a series of examples of what he calls “valence shifts”. A valence shift
would occur in cases where a putative reason counts to favor or disfavor a type of action in one
case, but counts in the opposite way, or ceases to count at all, in relation to a similar action in
another case. For example, suppose I am considering hitting my dog for barking. One might
think that the fact that so doing will cause pain counts as a reason not to do it. Now, the
particularist proceeds to point out that there can be other cases where the very same reason—
namely that some act causes pain—either does not count at all as a reason against the action, or
counts in favor of the action. For example, if I am legitimately trying to show someone else
what his cruelty feels like, I may reasonably think that the pain I am inflicting counts so as to
favor the action that causes the pain. Or consider another case: If I were to hide the fact that I
broke your prized teapot, the fact that this would be intentionally deceptive is a moral reason not
to do it. But in another context, suppose I am playing poker, or a game of diplomacy, then the
fact that my obscuring something would be intentionally deceptive is not any reason not to do the
action, and may even be a reason that counts in favor of doing the action. From the fact that we
happily recognize certain considerations as reasons for or against action, while at the same time
acknowledging that those reasons may count differently in different contexts, Dancy infers that a
consideration’s standing as a reason does not depend on its being specified by some general
exceptionless principle that applies cross-contextually. Further, and this is what is at issue in
Stangl’s article, Dancy claims that even thick properties can have variable valence. For instance,
2
Dancy, Jonathan Ethics without Principles, Oxford University Press. 2004
sometimes an act’s kindness counts in favor of it, and sometimes it counts against. If commuting
the sentence of a heinous war criminal would be kind, it may nevertheless not count as a reason
to commute the sentence. In fact, the kindness of such an act may plausibly here count as a
reason not to do it.
2. Stangl’s Dilemma
Stangl argues that the possibility of valence shifts amongst certain thick ethical properties
presents a challenge for the particularist virtue theorist. Her argument has the form of a
dilemma. On the first horn of the dilemma, we are to conceive of a virtue, compassion, for
instance, as involving a standing disposition to do compassionate acts. If we conceive of the
virtues in this way, then a problem arises for the particularist virtue theorist. The problem,
Stangl claims, is that if a person has developed the disposition to so act, they will have developed
a disposition to get things wrong in precisely those cases where the valence of the virtue term
shifts from its standard status, where, for instance, the act’s status as courageous, or kind, or
compassionate counts against so acting. Furthermore, the problem gets exacerbated, Stangl
argues, if we allow that typically virtuous people won’t act with an eye towards their own virtue.
This seems plausible since a person who acted with an eye towards her own compassion rather
than towards the need of the person to whom she is rendering aid would to that degree be
exhibiting a failure of compassion. So the problem becomes exacerbated because if
compassionate people aren’t attending to the fact that their actions are compassionate, but are
rather attending to the needs of another, then they aren’t even in a good position to recognize the
act as potentially wrong by virtue of its being compassionate. In other words, they wouldn’t
even be in a good position to self-correct for the possibility that the compassionate nature of their
action counts against it. On the face of it, then, if having a virtue, courage, for instance, involves
a standing disposition to do actions of that type, i.e. courageous ones, then having the virtues
would no longer figure to ensure right action, and this might plausibly lead us to the conclusion
that virtue has lost some of its appeal as a normative theory.
Stangl further argues that even if we bite the bullet and claim that possession of the
virtues isn’t sufficient to ensure right action we have further reasons to reject the conjunction of
particularism and virtue theory conceived in this way. If we accept the conjunction of these
views, then in order to ensure right action the virtuous person would have to “step back” from
and evaluate her dispositions in order to determine whether her disposition towards kindness, for
instance, is appropriate in the case at hand. Stangl argues that if the virtuous agent has to step
back in this way, then we get an unattractive picture of moral motivation. The virtuous agent has
to act, at times, in ways that are at odds with deeply cultivated dispositions towards kindness,
courage, generosity, et cetera. If an agent both has the virtues and acts rightly there will be cases
where her will is conflicted. A kind person will find herself inclined to do kind actions and will
have to fight this inclination off in cases where kindness counts against an action. This result is
at odds with the attractive idea that a virtuous person is not internally conflicted when deciding
what to do.
This brings us to the second horn of the dilemma. If we reject the presupposition that
“possessing a virtue implies a disposition to produce actions of that kind” (673) it becomes open
to the virtue theorist to claim that having the virtue of courage, for instance, involves not just a
disposition to perform courageous actions, but rather a more complex disposition such that “the
courageous person is motivated to perform a courageous actions when its courageousness is
right-making motivated not to perform it when its courageousness is wrong-making, and not
motivated to perform it when its courageousness is, deontically speaking, irrelevant” (674-675)
In other words, on this view the character trait is understood as a complex disposition that builds
in the possibility of valence shifting into the possession of the virtue itself.
According to Stangl, though this account would resolve the previous problems, it leads us
to a unity of the virtues thesis. This result follows, she argues, because if the virtues are
supposed to provide an account of the normative basis of right actions, then we cannot have
recourse to something outside of the virtues to explain why it is that the compassionate nature of
an action, for instance, counts against it in some context. So, the explanation of why the
compassionate nature of the action is wrong in this case must be cast in terms of some other
virtue, justice, for instance. As a result, though, it will turn out that one cannot fully possess any
virtue unless they possess all of them, or at least many others. She thinks this conclusion follows
because the courageous person, for instance, needs to know when the courageousness of her act
counts against so acting, and to know this requires having other virtues, and to have those will
likely require having yet others given the fact that it is only through having other virtues that an
agent can come to know when the valence of the thick virtue property has shifted. Given the
plausibility of the thought that a person can be kind without being brave, the unity of the virtues
seems somewhat unpalatable, and hence, the marriage of particularism and virtue theory is not as
happy as might have been thought. So, on both sides of the dilemma, that is, regardless of
whether or not we conceive of a virtue as involving a standing disposition to do actions of that
kind, once we additionally allow for the possibility of valence shifting, we get a result that is at
least somewhat unpalatable.
2. The Conflation Problem
It is tempting in to think that Stangl’s arguments raise significant doubts about the
plausibility of a conjunction of particularism and virtue theory. This temptation, however, is the
result of a failure to pry apart several different senses in which something may be said to be
virtuous. I submit that once we’ve distinguished the different senses of the term “virtuous”, her
grounds for rejecting a particularist virtue theory dissolve. There are at least four different
senses in which someone or something might be described as “virtuous”.3
1) An action’s having a property where that property shares the name of a character trait.
E.g. Peter’s decision to take care of Sam’s children while Sam was in the hospital was
kind.
2) An action’s being a direct product of an agent’s having a character trait. E.g. it is
because of Peter’s kindness that he volunteered for Doctors without Borders.4
3) An action’s being the general sort of thing that a person with a particular character
trait would do. E.g. taking the time to help the poverty stricken is the sort of thing that
a kind person would do.5
4) A person having a certain character trait. E.g. Peter is a very kind man.
There are some important differences to note between senses 1, 2, and 3. Sense 1, I submit, just
picks out a feature of the moral environment that can stand as a reason for action just like pain,
pleasure, fragility, shyness and many other things besides. It makes perfectly good sense to say
of an agent that they ought to act a certain way because doing so would be kind, or that they
ought to avoid some sort of behavior because it would be cruel. It is important to note for now,
and this is something I’ll return to shortly, that to act with an eye towards these considerations is
3
Further I think that this conflation is in play in a range of other cases, for instance when people argue that the
virtues can’t be unified because it seems quite obvious that a Nazi could act in a kind manner (to his children, for
instance). The answer to this question for the virtue-unity theorist, is that of course a Nazi can act kindly, but
nevertheless, a Nazi cannot be a kind person. Of course, this response won’t help to explain away the intuitive idea
that a person (here presumably not a Nazi) can be very kind but lacking in courage.
4
To ward of any potential confusion, I should clarify that what I mean by direct product here, is that it is in because
of the possession of a virtue that the range of reasons for which the virtuous person acts strike the virtuous agent as
they do in favoring or disfavoring some action. Having the virtue causes certain reasons to appear to the virtuous
agent as the salient reasons for acting within some context. For instance, it is because Peter is compassionate, that
Sam’s mother’s illness strikes him as a reason to call and send his regards.
5
The difference between 2 and 3 can explain the sense in which people who lack certain virtues can still do the
same kinds of actions that the virtuous can. We might correctly say of a child that sharing her toys was generous
without really thinking that she has the virtue of generosity, and hence without it being possible for her act of
sharing to be the direct result of that virtue.
to act with an eye towards some feature of the moral environment, and not with an eye towards
one’s own character. In other words, if an agent chooses to do some act because it is kind in
sense 1, this should not necessarily impugn her kindness, nor the kindness of her action.6 Senses
2 and 3 in contrast aren’t really reasons for action, if by reasons for action we mean those
considerations that count in favor of or against an action so as to render it right or wrong.
Rather, they are simply conditions that are either fully reliable (sense 2) or mostly reliable (sense
3) indicators of the fact that there are good reasons to so act. So, while for us non-virtuous
people such thoughts as “It’s what Gandhi would do” can be action guiding, and hence in some
sense we might call them reasons for action, this consideration, if it is a reason at all, is a merely
derivative one dependent for its status on the underlying reasons for which Ghandi would have
acted. The character attribution captured in the 4th sense of virtue above relates not to actions but
to facts about a person7. If they have a further role, it is to explain why certain reasons figure for
an agent as salient case by case. This 4-part distinction is important because according to the
particularist what shifts valences are reasons for action. Hence, if I’m right, then only “virtues”
in the first sense are open to valence shifting.
Once we recognize these four senses of “virtue” we are in a position to see how Stangl’s
argument rests on a conflation. Presumably people who have a virtue, kindness say, (Sense 4)
have a standing disposition to do acts that are kind in either of the 2nd or 3rd senses. After all, a
kind person will, when making her kindness manifest issue forth with actions that are the direct
6
This is in contrast to the previous suggestion where for an agent to consider his own character traits, or the fact that
the action is the product of his character traits would cast doubt on his having that character trait.
7
I suppose that character attributions can in some sense be reasons for action. For instance, the fact that Peter is
kind could be a good reason to ask him to watch my children for a couple hours while I run some errands. In these
cases, though, they too can admit valence shifting (perhaps my children have been badly misbehaving recently and I
ought not to reward them with a few hours spent at kind Peter’s house). In contrast, when it comes to evaluations of
people, particularists need not allow for the possibility of something analogous to valence shifting. For instance, we
can allow that in the evaluation of people kindness always counts in their favor, and stinginess always counts
against.
product of her kindness, and in so doing she will, naturally, be doing the sort of action that a kind
person does. Does a kind person have a standing disposition to do actions that are kind in the
first sense? Perhaps often, after all, it is hardly an accident that the feature of the action and the
character trait share a name. That said, we should not insist that this need always, or even
usually be the case. If we survey the range of reasons that might plausibly figure in the
judgments of a person with a certain virtue, we will find that they can include all kinds of
considerations that may or may not involve the property of an action that shares a name with that
virtue. For instance, Peter’s kindness may lead him to see Lisa’s distress as a reason to invite her
out for a drink.
Supposing that a virtuous person will have dispositions that will cause them to get things
right as regards what reasons for action obtain case by case. It would follow, as Stangl suggests,
that in so far as an act’s kindness can count in favor of it, a virtuous agent will be aware of that
fact and respond accordingly and likewise if the acts kindness counts against it. Once we’ve
made the distinctions between the different senses of “virtuous” we are in a position to realize
that accounting for thick property valence shifts pose no more of a problem for a particularist
virtue theorist than any other kind of valence shift might. The virtue ethicist, as Stangl conceives
her, has to claim that all apparent reasons for action are grounded in a prior account of the
virtues, so, wherever there is a reason that counts in any way, this is explained by some virtue or
other. Stangl’s line of argument that gets us to the unity of the virtues rests on the implicit
presumption that the virtue of kindness has, by default, a tendency to push a kind agent towards
kind actions, and that if this tendency is to be over-ruled, then there has to be some other virtue
that pushes in a different direction that either overwhelms, or silences the tendency of the kind
person to take the kindness of an action as counting in its favor. In a related manner, she seems
to assume that it is only the virtue of kindness that could push an agent towards actions that have
the property of kindness. Hence, Stangl thinks that the unity of the virtues thesis comes up
specifically for the particularist virtue theorist because any valence shift involving one of the
thick virtue-named concepts requires more than one virtue. But both the presumption that the
possession of a virtue always pushes an agent towards actions that share its name and the
presumption that it is only that virtue that so pushes are mistaken.
First, there can be cases where it is because of the person’s having a virtue, compassion,
say, that they will recognize that an action is wrong because it has the property of being
compassionate. Consider the possibility that it might be in light of an agent’s being
compassionate (sense 4) that it strikes him that he ought not act compassionately (sense 1)
towards a sadistic individual who is currently practicing his sadism, and that he ought not do so
precisely because doing so would be to treat the sadist compassionately (sense 1). Alternatively,
we might find that it is because of some other virtue that the kindness of an act strikes an agent
as a reason to do it. For instance, a person who has the virtue of friendliness (by which I mean
being a good and loyal friend) may not in any way be generally kind, but because of her
friendliness the kindness of an act done for a friend strikes her as a reason to do it. So, even if
we accept that the virtues explain why it is that certain considerations figure in the thoughts of a
virtuous agent as reasons for action, reasons that share the name with a virtue should not be
assumed to function differently from other reasons for action in terms of their relation to the
virtues. For instance, the fact that Jimmy would be disappointed by her canceling of their plans
will be taken by Susan as a reason to not cancel their plans, and what explains why she takes
Jimmy’s disappointment as a reason is the fact that Susan is kind. That said, we shouldn’t think
that character trait of kindness involves anything like a standing disposition to not disappoint
others. Similarly, we should not simply assume that the character trait of kindness involves
anything like a standing disposition to do kind acts.
The problem for particularist virtue theory comes only if we mistakenly assume that
people who have a virtue will be pulled towards favoring actions that share the name with the
virtue. This is what Stangl explicitly presumes on the first horn of her dilemma, and is still
implicitly assumed even on the second horn, and this presumption is precisely what we are in a
position to reject once we recognize that properties that share a name with the virtues are just
standard reasons for action. The unity of the virtues thesis really comes out of a pair of
assumptions: 1) that recognition of a reason or set of reasons pertinent to the case at hand can
take more than one virtue, and 2) the possession of any virtue never leads an agent to be moved
by considerations that aren’t good reasons in the given context. While there may be cases where
multiple virtues, both kindness and justice, for instance, are required for an agent to be properly
aware of the relevant reasons at hand, this is a standing possibility whether or not one accepts
particularism.
3. Virtues and Reasons
In this last section I have two main goals. First is to consider the question of what, if
anything, the relationship is between a virtuous character and the typical range of reasons for
which a virtuous person will act. Second, I want to make some observations about my answer to
this question in relation to the debate over moral particularism. As regards the first issue,
typically virtue theorists accept that it is the possession of the virtues that explains why an agent
takes some consideration as a reason. For instance, it is Jim’s friendliness that explains why he
sees Kelly’s shyness as a reason to go talk to her at a crowded party. It is this thesis that explains
why virtue theory might be attractive to a particularist, after all, the virtues provide a unifying
account of why an agent thinks as they do that does not require any commitment to general
principles. Jim’s friendliness can make sense of his action without it needing to be the case that
Jim has in mind any principle that relates friendliness, shyness, and talking to a person at a party.
Virtues can descriptively capture the radical context sensitivity of a good moral agent’s
judgments in ways that principles relating reasons to might plausibly fail to do. If we have the
virtue theorist go further, though, and claim that the virtues stand in a relation of normative
priority to the reasons to which a virtuous agent responds such that those reasons inherit their
normative status because they are the kinds of considerations that a person who had the virtues
would countenance we get a somewhat unsettling result. Specifically, we’ll find that in many, if
not all cases, what grounds the normativity of the actions that a virtuous agent chooses to do is
something that must stay out of the reach of the ratiocinations of the virtuous agent. After all, as
already discussed, and as Stangl rightly points out, in certain cases, an agent would show herself
to not be in possession of the virtue of kindness exactly to the degree that her attention was
focused on her own kind character, rather than either on the need of the recipient of her actions
or on the nature of her act itself.8 My worry here is that if we think that the virtues normatively
ground all reasons for action, then in principle there will be cases where the virtuous person
cannot have in mind the very thing that makes her action right. This result should not be
confused with certain utilitarian positions that upon recognizing how complex utility calculations
might become suggest that we would in fact maximize utility through the use of certain shortcut
rules, or, as is sometimes joked, thinking and acting as Kantians might. In the utilitarian cases,
there is nothing that in principle rules out doing a utility calculation, and hence basing one’s
action on exactly the thing that normatively grounds the rightness or wrongness of the action.
8
I would like to thank Bennett Barr for impressing this worry upon me.
Rather, for these utilitarians it’s just that given the contingent finitude of the human mind, we are
probably better off seeking other alternative decision procedures. In the case of virtue, if I am
correct to claim that in many contexts a person ceases to act as a virtuous person would in so far
as she ponders her own character, then it is necessarily the case that she cannot think about what,
presumptively, grounds the rightness or wrongness of her acts. It is this result that I believe to be
unsatisfying, and stands as a reason to reject any virtue theory that seeks to ground the normative
status of an action in terms of the virtues.
9
So, if we reject the idea that all reasons for action are normatively grounded in the
virtues, what role do the virtues play as regards our understanding of ethics? One thing that I
think the virtues do is to provide a kind of framework that makes intelligible why the range of
reasons for which a virtuous agent acts hang together to form a coherent practical world view.
On this view, then, the role of the virtues is not to ground the rightness of an action; that will be
done by just whatever reasons are at play to favor or disfavor the possible range of actions that
an agent might pursue. Rather, the role of the virtues is to answer a different kind of question,
namely the question of why reasons for action, in all their variability and context dependency are
coherent, or non arbitrary. Aside from references to the virtues, the range of reasons for which a
virtuous agent acts may have no other intelligible unifying structure. Once we have the virtues
on the table, though, we have a way of making sense of the structure of a virtuous agent’s
9
In any case, a virtue ethics in which reasons for action are normatively grounded in the virtues would be
at odds with particularism conceived as a theory about the nature of moral reasons because on such a view, any
particular reason for action will be just an implementation of a more general virtue-rule. For instance, Kelly’s
shyness will be a reason for Jim to go talk to her, because doing so is an implementation of the more general
principle that one ought to act as a kind person would. This would be much like how asking for someone’s consent
several times in a non-pressuring manner because you know them to be a push-over might be what counts as
implementing a general principle to the effect that one ought to respect the autonomy of others. In this case, a
proper conception of moral agency will depend on a suitable supply of principles, even if how we implement those
principles case by case will require lots of context sensitivity and judgment.
thinking about morality in a way that doesn’t presuppose that she would, even ideally, utilize a
set of principles to guide her deliberations.
This result invites us to take seriously the possibility that particularism as a doctrine
about the structure of moral reasons may come adrift from particularism as a doctrine about the
indispensability of moral principles. Moral reasons need not stand in need of any codification in
terms of principles in order to have the normative status that they do, but nevertheless, there can
still be true general moral principles that play an ineliminable role in understanding important
features of moral reasoning. If non-arbitrariness is a condition on an acceptable conception of
morality, then there may need to be some principled generalizations. But these principles as I’m
conceiving them are metaphysically inert as regards the normative status of any putative reasons.
That is, it is not in virtue of satisfying a virtue-rule, for instance, that some reason for action has
the normative status that it does. The role of the virtue-rules, on this conception, is simply
organizational. Their function is neither to explain what it is in virtue of which an act is right,
nor to explain what it is in virtue of which a reason is a reason within a context. The virtues
function to explain the coherence of the reasons for which an agent acts when they are acting
rightly. The upshot of all this is that we can admit, as Dancy would have us do, that reasons for
actions need not be grounded in any general principles and still maintain that the architecture of
moral thinking has a place for principles that serve some other function.