Notes on Virtue Ethics
for the ‘Five Stands’ approach to Religious and Values Education
1
VIRTUE ETHICS
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VIRTUE THEORY
------------------Virtue Theory is an attempt by some modern philosophers do move away from what can be seen as a sterile
attempt to arrive at a theory which would explain which actions are right and which are wrong and instead
sees to examine what it means to live a virtuous life. This is to return to an Aristotelian approach which looks
to foster individual virtues. Virtue ethicists do not look at individual actions so much as to the whole way in
which an individual’s life is conducted.
Virtue theory is not so much interested in the question ‘What should I do?’ but rather in the question ‘What
sort of person should I become?’. This has more to do with character and the nature of what it is to be
human than with the rights and wrongs of specific actions. The saints or heros that stand out as examples of
exemplary behaviour are rarely if ever motivated by one or other ethical theory - instead their behaviour
stems from the consistency of the sort of person they are. Virtue Theory needs to seek to determine
whether there are any key virtues that underpin the life of an admirable human being. There are many
different virtues and they may all be good - moral choices may depend on how one ranks different virtues
and which ones outweigh others.
In a way, Virtue Ethics is about an individual seeking to develop a vision for his or her life and then to live by
this vision. It is a matter of personal goals but these goals are also grounded in what it is to be human.
Aquinas said that all human actions are moral actions1 and by this he meant that in all the things human
beings do character and dispositions to act are being formed. Virtue Ethics rests on developing a consistency
of behaviour in accordance with certain general ethical principles. St. Thomas says that we should examine
all our actions, even those that are insignificant, and ask ourselves ‘Are these ways of acting making us more
just, prudent, temperate and brave?’2 Aristotle considered that virtue was a habit, or at least it become a
habit if practised regularly. Just as an athlete has to train and practice, so the person who would be virtuous
has to train him or herself in virtuous behaviour. It follows from this that whilst normal discussion of ethics
concentrates on the ‘exciting issues’ such as euthanasia or just war or abortion, virtue ethics concentrates
more on the day to day activities of life and the sort of characters which human beings develop. A contrast
can be drawn between:
1.
The Ethics of Dilemmas - which uses ethical discussion to decide on how moral problems are to be
resolved, and
2.
Virtue Ethics - which seeks to determine the sort of person should become.
The background to modern Virtue Theory lies in the work of Elizabeth Anscombe and, more important, that of
Alastair MacIntyre whose book ‘After Virtue’ is of central importance. Anscombe rejected the whole idea of
moral duty, particularly the Kantian sort of approach which saw duty as a Categorical Imperative - to be
undertaken for itself alone and with no other motivation. She rejects the whole idea that ‘duty’ should be an
end in itself and sees an emphasis on duty as being divorced from the needs and aspirations of human
beings. She is recognising that ‘morality’ like ‘charity’ can be cold and dehumanising and can become the
reverse of what it is intended to be. Alastair MacIntyre extended Anscombe’s analysis.
MacIntyre rejects the idea that modern society has inherited any single tradition from the past. We have
accumulated a disconnected mixture of different views. For instance we may be
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Platonists in admiring perfection,
Aristotelians in praising virtue,
Utilitarians in trying to apportion medical resources equally so as to maximise the good that is done,
Christians in praising compassion and charity,
Followers of Locke in maintaining the right to personal property and
Kantians in insisting on the importance of individual freedom and autonomy.
Given this background it is not surprising that individuals have no clear moral sense since we are inheritors of
a web of different ideas and there is no single view that will support all the ideas that we have.
1
2
Cf ‘Ten Reasons why Thomas Aquinas is important for ethics today’ New Blackfriars 75 1994. Pps 354 - 373
Quoted in James Keenan’s ‘Virtue Ethics’ in ‘Christian Ethics’ by B. Hoose
Notes on Virtue Ethics
for the ‘Five Stands’ approach to Religious and Values Education
2
MacIntyre’s claim is that instead of looking for moral excellence in a series of tasks that human beings
should or should not perform, the time has come to return to examine the Virtues. Moral excellence, he
claims, is to be found in leading a virtuous life. A virtuous life comes, MacIntyre believes, when a person
belongs to a moral tradition which allows for a narrative order of a single life - in other words there is a
consistency of purpose and endeavour running through the whole of such a life. MacIntyre’s claim is that the
virtues can only develop in certain types of society where an integrated life is a possibility. A worker in a coal
mine may be made redundant and may see no hope of getting a job - within such a person’s life it may be
difficult to develop a consistent narrative story which would foster the development of the virtues. By
contrast someone in a profession such as a lawyer, teacher or doctor may be able to find consistent meaning
and value in the life they live - both in terms of having a purpose, seeing the values of the efforts that they
put into their tasks and finding the tasks themselves inherently rewarding.
James Keenan likens parents to Virtue ethicists:
‘I have always thought that parents think this way. Parents are not primarily concerned with what action
Johnny is doing. Rather, hey want to understand how Johnny is growing. Certainly there are times when,
with young children, parents talk like deontologists: ‘Don’t ever talk to strangers’; ‘Don’t ever talk back to
another person’; ‘Don’t ever cross the street unless the traffic light says so’. But behind all their judgements
is a more basic concern about how Johnny is turning out..... Generally parents judgements about their
children focus on what type of people their children are becoming and whether they can help their child
become more fully integrated.’3
Aristotle put forward key cardinal virtues:
Courage, temperance, wisdom and justice
and these were also accepted by Plato, Cicero and St. Augustine. To these St. Thomas Aquinas, writing in the
C13th century, added the theological virtues of:
Faith, hope and charity.
Aquinas was a theologian but he nevertheless believed that one could work out what it was to be virtuous or
moral by looking at what it was to be human - to live fully in accordance with human nature. In so doing he
largely appealed to Aristotelian categories. Immanuel Kant emphasised the importance of reason and human
free will and autonomy in coming to live the good life - to be perfectly rational was, he considered, to be
perfectly moral and the correct moral actions could be worked out by following the Categorical Imperative
(‘Act so that the maxim of your action can be a universal law’). For Kant, each human being was of intrinsic
worth and could never be used as a means to some wider end. MacIntyre effectively maintains that we must
move back from the idea of formulating moral rules (in the way that Natural Law, Kantian Ethics,
Utilitarianism, Emotivism, Intuitionism, etc. chooses to do) in order to decide how to cultivate the virtues.
MacIntyre, like Anscombe, thought that Kant led the study of morality astray by concentrating o duty as an
abstract concept. They thought that ethics based on moral principles and duties could be eliminated
altogether by concentrating solely on the virtues. Greg Pence argues that this is not possible and he does so
by concentrating on discussion of one of the virtues - namely courage.
The philosophic discussion of courage started with Socrates who, in argument with the Athenian generals
Laches and Nicias, maintained that courage requires wisdom. He rejects the idea that any brave act is
courageous. Courage, argues Socrates, cannot serve evil ends. What is more, Socrates considered that real
courage serves an individual’s own interests - courage is not the same as being foolhardy or daring as
courage is directly related to fostering some ethical ideal. It is not an abstract virtue on its own. This, of
course, can be disputed and some may argue that one can be courageous even if one is serving self-interest
- for instance a bank robber may be held to be courageous or a traitor may show courage. Socrates would
deny that courage can exist if the ideal is unworthy. Greg Pence maintains that Socrates was mistaken in his
analysis of courage - for instance because he would have praised courage in the service of the Greek state
yet this state was based on slavery. It is one thing to say that courage is only genuine if practised in the
interests of a morally virtuous ideal, but who is to decide what this ideal should be? There is a great
difference between modern democracy and the Greek city state where slavery was common and a small elite
had the leisure to contemplate philosophy and the ‘higher things of life’.
Temperance is the Aristotelian mean - it calls people to live by the middle way, avoiding extremes.
Temperance calls on people to avoid extremes of conduct. A small amount of wine may be beneficial, none
3
‘Virtue Ethics’ in ‘Christian Ethics’ ed. B. Hoose
Notes on Virtue Ethics
for the ‘Five Stands’ approach to Religious and Values Education
3
may impair one’s pleasure and too much may lead one out of control. Some sport may be a good thing, but
none will mean your body is out of condition and if life is all sport then the balance is lost. Life is multidimensional and to live life to the full means keeping a proper balance between many different aspects.
Justice is another of the Cardinal virtues which has a long history Christian approaches to Justice have their
origins in the Hebrew scriptures where two different words are translated as ‘justice’:
I.
‘Mishpat’ represent duties or responsibilities undertaken in a life lived in covenant with God and with
other human beings, whilst
II.
‘Sedakah’ represents God’s justice which relates not just to individual acts but to the whole conduct
of a society.
Christianity, as Karen Lebacqz points out, has traditionally seen the world as fallen which:
‘...means that the original sedakah or righteousness has been broken and violated. On the the primary
manifestations of sin is injustice. Because the world is permeated with injustice, justice is corrective or
reparative - it is dominated by the principle of.... setting things right.’4
This led to the idea of justice as being to do with right relationships between God and human beings and also
between human beings5. This, however, is not the only way of understanding justice. Western philosophy
sees justice as closer to ‘giving each person his or her due’ and his heavily based on the use of reason. In the
Roman Catholic tradition, justice has often been associated with Natural Law which is based on Aristotle’s
philosophy and is heavily based on reason which enables human beings to arrive at an understanding of
human nature and thereby to work out how humans should live together. It has more to do with fairness
than with the richer Hebrew tradition and may be more closely associated with the law.
Many contemporary understandings of justice in the Christian tradition are returning to the Hebraic idea of
‘right relationships’ and see social justice as being primary. This will affect political action, economics, world
trade and other areas and will emphasise the injustice of the exploitation of the poor and weak by the strong
and rich. As Karen Lebacqz says:
‘The Early Church Fathers maintained that the poor were robbed simply because the rich were rich.’‘ 6
Social Justice is also the basis for Jose Miranda’s claim that the poor would never have agreed to the wages
they received that keep them locked in poverty’.7 Social justice has to do with the duties of the individual to
the society in which they live. Everyone should have the ability to participate in society and structures that
exclude or marginalised their weaker or ‘less significant’ members will therefore be judged as unjust
societies.
The problem with concentrating on certain moral virtues as being the foundations for morality is that there is
no clarity as to which these virtues should be or how they should be understood. The problem only arises if
the virtues themselves are meant to determine what is morally right or wrong - courage may well be a good
thing but there may be a separate issue where it is properly used. This separate issue however, critics of
virtue ethics maintain, can be resolved by having regard to the virtues themselves.
Instead of concentrating on a whole range of virtues, ‘essentialism’ maintains that there is one single,
dominant virtue for all human beings. or at least that some common core was necessary if there are to be
any virtues at all. Unlike later Christians, Aristotle did not think that a stupid human being could have any
virtues at all as the practice of virtues requires intelligence. It is far from clear that there is any single
common set of virtues and different virtues will be prized in different societies. In some humility and
conformity will be central, in others it is individuality, single mindedness and autonomy. The values prized in
a nomadic society or in a tightly knit group which prizes the family in, say, Iran or Spain may be very
different from the valued in New York or London. The virtues recognised in an African tribal society may not
be those in the trenches of the first world war.
Virtue ethics is concerned with persons and it can be argued, it is therefore incapable of providing guidance
with specific ethical problems. There are various possible replies to this:
4
Cf Ch. 11 on ‘Justice’ by Karen Lebacquz in Bernard Hoose’s ‘Christian Ethics’
5
John Donahue ‘Biblical perspectives on Justice’ in ‘The Faith that Does Justice’ Paulist Press, NY, 1977
6
Op. Cit. Ch. 11
7
Jose Miranda ‘Marx and the Bible: A critique of the Philosophy of Oprression’ Maryknoll, 1974
Notes on Virtue Ethics
for the ‘Five Stands’ approach to Religious and Values Education
4
1.
Traditional ethics may not actually help to change behaviour so that people act more ethically.8
2.
In medical ethics, and particularly in nursing, Virtue Ethics has succeeded in bringing about changes
in relationships which have not be achieved in other ways and has also changed some practices
which other ethical theories do not address.9
3.
Virtue Ethics maintains the view that there is no single way to be good - human beings are diverse
and St. Teresa of Lisieuz and Martin Luther King are radically different. As Owen Flanagan puts it:
‘persons find their good in many different ways’10. Many of the great moral heros and saints have
been radically different from the societies in which they lived but, in spite of their differences, we can
still recognise about them qualities of compassion, concern for others, passion and integrity by which
they lived their lives.
Perhaps the cardinal virtues still have application but in a way that translates them into concern for our
relationships. James Keenan suggests that each individual is relational in three ways: generally to all
humanity, specifically to certain individuals and uniquely to ourselves and ‘that each of these
relationships demands a cardinal virtue.
1. As a relational being in general we are called to justice and to treat all people fairly
2. as a relational being specifically we are called to fidelity and to sustain the specific relationships
that we enjoy, and
3. as a relational being uniquely, we are called to that self-care that no one else can provide.’11
Keenan maintains that the fourth cardinal virtue is temperance (or prudence as he terms it) which balances
the three interests and the other cardinal virtues. This balancing is not easy, but that is what wrestling with
ethical and philosophical issues may be about.
Iris Murdoch is one of the few modern philosophers who have sought to maintain objectivity in ethics and she
does this by appeal to Plato. She sees ‘the Good’ as something like a Platonic form, unanalysable (and she
recognises her debt to G.E. Moore here who held that ‘good’ was, like yellow, an unanalysable property) but
nevertheless real which draws human beings with a power of attraction and which can be recognised and is
not simply created. However turning to the good is not a matter of simple conversion - indeed Murdoch is
sceptical of the idea of sudden conversion. She believes human beings are free and can bring our gradual
change, but such change is painful and difficult. She sees the Platonic idea of goodness as the way forward
after the death of God:
“....the new version of the man of faith, believing in goodness without religious guarantees, guilty, muddled,
yet not without hope... man as frail, godless and yet possessed of genuine intuitions of an authoritative
good.”12
Murdoch’s insistence on the importance of ‘the good’ as existing and drawing human beings towards it may
have links with the more Aristotelian idea of Virtue Ethics. For Murdoch, ‘the good’ is real, independent of
human psyche and possibly virtue ethics can be seen as the attempt by human beings to orientate
themselves towards this reality.
As Murdoch herself puts it:
“We ordinarily conceive of and apprehend goodness in terms of virtues which belong to a continuous fabri of
being.... Where virtue is concerned we often apprhend more than we clearly understand.. This conclusion is
feared and avoided by many moralists because it seems inimical to the operation of reason because reason is
construed on a scientific model.”13
In the end, Virtue Ethics may be a valuable corrective to an academic search for abstract moral rules.
Perhaps instead of an emphasis on finding the right set of rules to guide human conduct (which does not
seem to have been successful) we should instead concentrate on the rather different issue of what it is
to be fully human. If we calculate the higher virtues, then the precise actions we perform may have to be
decided in the complexity of the particular situation in which we find ourselves. However if we have cultivated
8
Leon Kass ‘Practicing ethics: Where’s the action?’ Hastings Centre Report 20.1 Pps. 5 - 12
9
James Drane ‘Character and the moral life: a Virtue approach in biomedical ethics’ in E. Dubose’s ‘A matter of Principle’
10
11
Varieties of Moral personality p. 158
James Keenan in ‘Christian Ethics’ ed. B. Hoose
12
The Sovereignty of the God p. 37
13
The Sovereignty of the Good p. 31
Notes on Virtue Ethics
for the ‘Five Stands’ approach to Religious and Values Education
the virtues, the likelihood that our decisions may be fair and just may be considerably increased.
Dr. Peter Vardy
Vice-Principal
Heythrop College
University of London
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