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.

  1. 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 agent-focused Virtue Ethics (VE) can be a valuable addition to the study of ethics, but it cannot replace the traditional action-focused theories.

Section 1: Exegesis by contrast (pgs. 231 - 234)

VE has reappeared as a doctrine that advocates abandoning traditional action-centered 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.
  1. can’t help us with applied ethics… will an analysis of courage help us determine the morality of abortion?
  2. can’t account for those times that good people do bad things
  3. can’t identify the really bad things that threaten the possibility of society
  4. character often changes over time, so we need to be able to assess specific actions
  5. allows for the occasional immoral act to be justifiable by a person of otherwise good character
  1. 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.
  2. They favour style over substance… VE only focuses on character, and fails to provide an account of the substantive value of specific questions.
  3. 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.