Week 12 – Virtue Ethics.
Lecture Order:
1. My (brief) Intro to Aristotle.
2. Waluchow on Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics
3. Louden on the Limits of Contemporary
Virtue Ethics.
1. Aristotle… the man, the myth, the legend.
He was the student of Plato, who had been
the student of Socrates. Aristotle broadened
the scope of philosophical questions;
creating epistemology, metaphysics,
physics, etc… During the Medieval period,
Aristotle’s work was so influential that he
was simply referred to as ‘the Philosopher’.
To this day, Aristotle’s work drives, and has
defined the terms of debate, in a wide
variety of scholarly enterprises. You can
never underestimate the significance of
Aristotle’s thought in shaping Western
civilization.
The view that Waluchow presents is taken
from Aristotle’s most important work on
ethics, The Nichomachean Ethics. The
significance of the name of this work is that
Aristotle’s eldest son’s name was
‘Nichomachus’. Some have suggested this is
an important clue as to how this work ought
to be read, i.e., the work is a guide Aristotle
composed for his son to help him lead a
good life.
2. Waluchow on Aristotle (Ar) – pgs. 201 –
221.
To this point, all of the philosophical
theories that we’ve examined have been
focused on determining what makes a
specific action right or wrong. That is, as
moral agents, we have been trying to
determine what we should do when faced
with a moral dilemma.
Ar, by contrast, did not focus on the
rightness or wrongness of specific actions,
but thought that the key to ethics was the
character of the agent. Specific actions are
only moral significant inasmuch as they
reveal a specific character trait.
We can have knowledge of the virtues on
Ar’s account in the same way as we do math
or the planets. We need to learn about them
theoretically, then put that theory into
practice.
Ar’s ethics is teleological, i.e., goal-based.
The goal of all human life is ‘eudaemonia’;
happiness or well-being. So the goal of a
virtuous life is living well.
Ar is using a unique definition of
‘happiness’; on his account it is not a
momentary sensation but an assessment that
applies to a lifetime. And what’s more,
virtue is not a means to happiness, but part
of it; to live virtuously is to be happy. Or in
other words, for Ar, virtue is its own reward.
Ar’s precise definition of virtue is: “a state
of character concerned with choice, lying in
a mean, i.e., the mean relative to us, this
being determined by a rational principle,
that principle by which the [person] of
practical wisdom would determine
it…”(Waluchow, p. 206).
Character = dispositions. Dispositions are
not aspects of one’s personality; they don’t
involve a tendency to feel certain ways as a
result of our natural make-up, but are instead
predictors of how we’ll act in specific
situations. Note that ‘dispositions’ do not
determine action, but are simply predictors
of it.
A virtuous disposition is one that chooses
well. Ar believed that choosing presupposes
the following four conditions:
1. alternatives
2. ability to recognize the relative merits of
the alternatives
3. ability to rank the choices on preferred
moral grounds
4. voluntarism
All choices are made with eudaemonia in
mind, and this fact is fixed by nature.
Morality is therefore objective because it is
grounded in the natural human tendency
toward well-being. Variations in cultural
norms can be explained by recognizing that
all humans strive for eudaemonia.
Ar is not simply presenting another version
of Utilitarianism because he does not
advocate that happiness be maximized.
Instead, an action reveals a virtuous
disposition when it aims at the mean
between two extremes of possible
behaviour.
By ‘aiming at a mean relative to us’, and
seeking guidance from the ‘person of
practical wisdom’, Ar is acknowledging the
indeterminacy of moral judgments. We
don’t get precise guidance because often
there is no uniquely right moral answer.
Virtue lies in the mean between vices of
excess and deficiency.
E.g.
Courage: a mean between cowardice and
brashness.
Temperance: a mean between the over and
under consumption of the pleasures of life.
3 Strengths of Aristotle’s Theory
1. May better describe our actual moral
reflections. Might also provide a better
account of the complexity of our moral
lives.
2. Provides a more accurate description of
our moral motivations. Do we really think
those that care only about abstract moral
principles, and not other people, are
morally superior?
3. There are degrees of morality with respect
to alternative courses of action. Our
available options will often be more or
less right or wrong in respect of one
another.
Weakness:
We have no specific guidance as to what we
should do when faced with actual moral
dilemmas. Like Ross, Ar’s ethics seems to
‘run out’ when we need it most.
Maybe the solution is to combine Ar’s
position with one or more of the modern
moral theories we’ve looked at.
Louden: Character and Obligation. (G&H,
pgs 231 – 244).
C: The recent attempt to rekindle an agentfocused Virtue Ethics (VE) can be a
valuable addition to the study of ethics, but
it cannot replace the traditional actionfocused theories.
Section 1: Exegesis by contrast (pgs. 231 234)
VE has reappeared as a doctrine that
advocates abandoning traditional actioncentered theories in favour of character
analyses. Neither of the clearest
presentations of this view advocate
abandoning normative ‘oughts’, they simply
believe an ‘ought’ should be derived from a
consideration of virtue.
So the strategy of VE is the same as
traditional moral theories, but the focus is on
the quality of the moral agent instead of the
actions that agent performs.
Section 2: Four Aspects of Moral Life VE
fails to Capture. (pgs. 235 – 244)
1. Five problems with looking at agents of
acts.
a. can’t help us with applied ethics… will
an analysis of courage help us
determine the morality of abortion?
b. can’t account for those times that good
people do bad things
c. can’t identify the really bad things that
threaten the possibility of society
d. character often changes over time, so
we need to be able to assess specific
actions
e. allows for the occasional immoral act to
be justifiable by a person of otherwise
good character
2. We have no means of determining who
qualifies as a good character, i.e., the
person of practical wisdom. If we can’t do
this, then we don’t know what the virtues
actually are.
3. They favour style over substance… VE
only focuses on character, and fails to
provide an account of the substantive
value of specific questions.
4. Utopian… we live in a pluralistic world,
so the idea that there’s a single set of
virtues that will guide our moral lives
borders on the offensive.
There is good reason to think that character
is morally significant, and that traditional
action-focused moral theories ignore that
significance, but that’s no reason to abandon
the traditional theories. We just need to
work at finding a way to coordinate these
disparate approaches.