Proliferating Virtues:
A Clear and Present Danger?
A talk by Nancy E. Snow
Professor and Director of the Institute for the Study
of Human Flourishing, The University of Oklahoma
At the Margaret Beaufort Institute of Theology,
12 Grange Rd, CB3 9DU
Friday 27 October, 5 pm – 6.30 pm
A possible pitfall of the explosion of work in virtue ethics is the needless proliferation of virtues. In this talk Professor Snow will discuss three positions on proliferation. The first is the situationist approach, taken, for example by Doris (2002), in which virtues are conceptualized as behavioral regularities that are indexed to objectively describable features of situations. This gives rise to virtues such as “office-party sociability,” and “answer-key honesty.” Russell (2010) takes a second approach, arguing that virtue ethical right action is impossible unless we adopt a finite and specifiable list of the virtues. Hursthouse (2007) takes a third approach, looking first to standard Aristotelian virtues, and adding virtues only when the standard set fails to capture something of moral importance for our dispositions and actions. Professor Snow develops a position similar to Hursthouse’s approach. She opts for parsimony in the development of new virtues, and offers explanations of when and why we should seek to bring new virtues into play based on changing articulations of the human good. Any new virtues, she argues, should be clearly grounded in what is good for humans. Thus her position remains within the ambit of neo-Aristotelianism, and rejects situationist accounts.
Professor Snow is the author of Virtue as Social Intelligence: An Empirically Grounded Theory (Routledge, 2009) and over thirty papers on virtue and ethics more broadly. She has also edited or co-edited six volumes:In the Company of Others: Perspectives on Community, Family, and Culture(Rowman & Littlefield 1996)Legal Philosophy: Multiple Perspectives (Mayfield, 1999),Stem Cell Research: New Frontiers in Science and Ethics (Notre Dame, 2004),Cultivating Virtue: Perspectives from Philosophy, Theology, and Psychology(Oxford, 2014), The Philosophy and Psychology of Character and Happiness (Routledge, 2014) and Developing the Virtues: Integrating Perspectives, co-edited with Julia Annas and Darcia Narvaez (Oxford, 2016).
The event is free but booking is essential -- to book please email your name to Ela Wolbek with ‘Proliferating Virtue’ in the subject box .
Drink reception will follow after the talk.