Slote (2001): nested hierarchy of virtue ethics theories.
Agent-focused: the weakest claim, just that virtue should be the central object of ethical inquiry.
e.g. some readings of Nic Eth
Agent-prior: criterion of rightness is defined in terms of what actions issue from a good character.
But virtues themselves can still be grounded in something further, like eudaimonia
e.g. Hursthouse
Agent-based (Slote’s preferred): rightness is derived solely from the agent’s motivational states, and the goodness of that motive is morally primitive
So you don’t appeal to flourishing or anything else.
This is Slote’s preferred approach.
Once challenge for only agent-focused views: if right action isn’t defined in terms of what virtuous people do, why treat virtue as central to ethics?
Particularism (McDowell 1979) can help with this: right and wrong are uncodifiable, and to determine them we need to develop perceptual sensitivity to context-specific moral demands.
So we should give up the search for correct ethical principles and focus instead on what it means to have the right kind of character.
Note that Hursthouse says that VE isn’t committed to uncodifiability; it would reject strong codifiability though (that you can write universal rules that are a decision procedure and will be understood by unvirtuous agents)
What makes for a virtue?
On other theories, virtues (and virtuousness of an agent) are defined after the right; they’re the character traits which reliably dispose us towards acting rightly.
But an agent-prior virtue ethicist can’t do this, they need to define virtues separately.
Our focus: eudaimonistic theories, which say character traits are virtues insofar as they’re necessary for and/or constitutive of a happy/flourishing life.
Neo-Aristotelian theories are a subset, on which flourishing consists in realising our essential nature as human beings. A good character is simply that which allows us to flourish in accordance with our characteristic way (i.e. the human function).
There are also non-eudaimonistic theories.
Slote’s theory is non-eudaimonistic and agent-based, and he argues there’s no need for an answer to what makes a character trait a virtue: “the moral goodness of (universal) benevolence or of caring about people is intuitively obvious and in need of no further moral grounding”.
Non-eudaimonistic means the motives aren’t to be grounded in flourishing to be good. And agent-based means that moral evaluation bottoms out in motives, so they’re not grounded in anything.
The unity of the virtues: they’re all inter-linked, with practical wisdom at the centre of it.
Attractions of virtue ethics
Explaining whether or not abortion is moral: it turns on the person’s reasons for having an abortion, and whether these are commensurate with the seriousness of the action. Some grounds might be self-indulgent, some are not.
It’s not enough that the pregnant person has a right to control their own body, because you could act within your rights even while doing something a virtuous person would not.
And the personhood of the foetus cannot matter; surely whether or not one is a good person doesn’t turn on difficult metaphysical problems. [hmm]
Beneficence and shallow ponds.
Slote: it’s not a terrible moral failure to not donate to Oxfam, like failing to save the drowning child, because the latter exhibits a very bad lack of virtuous empathy in a way that the former doesn’t. [Hmm.]
Maybe helps with metaethics (Foot 2001), because description of character as good or bad is similar to describing other biological traits as good or bad – and these are just grounded in natural facts.
[hmm. But most people agree that moral facts supervene on natural facts anyway. This seems like it’s trying to go beyond that, by saying that they’re explained in terms of them – but seems dubious. For all the reasons that Aristotle’s inductive function argument fails, similarly how can you derive moral goodness as a form of biological goodness?]
It can draw on a wider range of resources (e.g. psychology, anthropology) to ground the good in, rather than just intuitions (which other moral theories rely on). (Annas 2011)
i.e., we start from the idea of flourishing, then try to understand which ways of acting constitute it (Nussbaum 1985).
In a modern, secular era, concepts like “obligation” or “duty” might not make much sense; they were often first formulated in a divine-law framework.
Anscombe (1958) says this is a good reason to return to virtue and character as the central concepts.
Maybe it can explain our intuitions about tragic dilemmas: where you need to choose between two dreadful-seeming actions and this seems bad either way.
A consequentialist would say there’s no (first-order) reason for guilt, provided you took the least-worst action. And moreover, they struggle to explain why there would be irresolvable dilemmas at all.
A virtue ethicist can say: no, it really is a bad situation to be in – either way, you’ll be taking an action that is characteristic of a vicious agent, and you’ll be stained by the “moral residue” afterwards. Maybe there’s even no right answer, if you’re of a particularist persuasion.
And this holds whether it was bad moral luck, or your own viciousness, that meant you ended up here.
Hursthouse says the virtuous agent doesn’t act “badly” but does do something “terrible”.
On the other hand, there are perhaps some technical difficulties here about decision criterion.
If the virtuous agent would never find herself in such a situation (i.e. it’s off-path), then it’s plausibly undefined what she’d characteristically do in the circumstances – e.g., if somebody made two incompatible promises.
Maybe you appeal to the “what the virtuous person would want to have done” formulation, instead – e.g., breaking the less important promise.
A theory is self-effacing if it implies (at least sometimes) that agents ought not to be motivated by that theory’s justification for rightness of an action. (Stocker 1976)
Keller (2007) applies this to VE: if you’re visiting your friend in hospital just because it’s what a virtuous agent would do, that surely is not the right sort of motivation.
So VE’s justification for the action can’t serve as the agent’s motive.
But on balance, it doesn’t seem like this is a substantial problem for VE.
Criterion of rightness is different from decision procedure / motivation.
Right action is identified by reference to virtuous agent, but there’s nowhere in virtue ethics it says that agents must act because the virtuous agent does it.
Indeed, Aristotle often says that the virtuous agent is acting for the fine.
Maybe you argue that eudaimonia is the justification, and yet a virtuous agent cannot have that as her motivation for acting (since that’d be excessively selfish). But this doesn’t go through either.
Acting virtuously isn’t a means to eudaimonia – it is constitutive of eudaimonia.
For developing agents, there is some self-effacement: they mimic a virtuous agent, even though that’s not the virtuous motivation (which would be to be driven by the right reasons).
But this seems alright: they know they’re mimicking, it’s only temporary, and in general we can accept people developing their own taste by initially relying on others'.
In any case, although self-effacingness does count against a theory, it’s not a decisive flaw of VE.
All else equal, it would be preferred to not have to brainwash oneself into false moral beliefs (Martinez 2011).
But all three major moral theories, as well as egoism, suffer from it.
Indeed, perhaps Slote’s agent-based view can escape self-effacingness entirely, because the motive is taken as the foundational justification – e.g. benevolence (Pettigrove 2011).
Though it might still be true that the criterion of rightness (actions stemming from virtuous motivation) shouldn’t be the object of the agent’s reflection at the moment of action.
Egoistic?
Hurka (2001): virtue ethics seems unattractively focused on the agent’s virtue, and doesn’t pay attention to moral reasons that come from outside the agent – i.e. the good of others.
E.g. shallow pond: on VE’s account, the moral requirement to save the child does not stem from the fact that it spares her dying, but rather because we’d be exhibiting virtue in saving here. That sounds objectionably egoistic!
But superficially at least, virtue ethics really couldn’t be egoistic. A virtuous person’s motivations are the right concerns, so acting virtuously is incompatible with acting selfishly, insofar as acting selfishly is objectionable.
Virtue ethicists don’t claim that the virtuous agent acts as she does because she believes that doing so will cause her to attain eudaimonia!
Related discussion about self-effacingness above.
And although the virtuous agent does always do her actions gladly & without inner conflict, that needn’t mean she’s egoistic. She’s just correctly aligned her emotions with selflessness!
But maybe the objection goes deeper: with eudaimonistic theories, the justification for virtue is ultimately grounded in the agent’s own flourishing, rather than anyone else’s wellbeing.
Annas (2007) objects though: on neo-Aristotelian accounts, it’s simply the same thing to live virtuously and flourish. They’re not saying that reasons to do the former are derived from independent, selfish reasons for the latter.
Besides, of course I would focus on living my life well, whose else would I live? [hmm, idk, feel like this is missing the point a bit?]
In any case, non-Aristotelian versions seem like they can avoid charges of egoism.
e.g. for Slote – virtues are admirable character traits, and that’s where it ends.
Similarly Swanton (2003) thinks that virtues are dispositions to respond excellently to the demands of the world, and are good in a variety of ways, not united by eudaimonia.
And separately, the Aristotelian account that virtues are always good for the possessor just seems quite implausible. So that gives us an independent reason to reject them.
e.g., a soldier dying nobly in battle. Aristotle says he’s attaining the fine/noble, but intuitively it is surely prudentially very bad for him.
Can someone really be in miserable circumstances but flourishing? (e.g., Priam)
Recall that according to Aristotle, although external goods are necessary for blessedness, happiness is meant to be stable.
There’s a dilemma: either external goods are required for happiness, in which case virtue isn’t sufficient, or they’re not, in which case flourishing has been very gerrymandered.
Action-guiding?
How are we meant to figure out how the fully virtuous person would act?
Well, on McDowell’s particularist account we just shouldn’t expect to figure it out algorithmically. Cf Annas (2004) rejecting “technical manual model” of ethics.
Still, then it’s unclear how we ought to develop moral sensitivity, or how unvirtuous agents are meant to act at all.
All of the formulations of VE involve some kind of appeal to what a virtuous agent would do – but these people are (a) rare, and (b) not obviously identifiable by unvirtuous agents.
Cf Mill’s competent judges, to whom everyone else must defer.
Either you need to know who they are, to explicitly defer, or have a robust internal model of what they would do, to simulate it.
A reply: it’s like learning a skill, where you can recognise a good teacher even as a novice.
But skill-learning normally has independent success criteria; the telos is much clearer than it is in “how to be a human being”.
Hursthouse: we can easily derive some “v-rules” like “act bravely”, “act justly”.
But these might be very difficult to apply in practice! Other moral principles also are.
There are many layers of epistemic difficulty, for an imperfectly virtuous agent:
Knowing what counts as brave or just in a specific situation.
Knowing how to balance e.g. courage vs justice.
Aristotle comes into this too, of course.
Habituation.
Doctrine of the mean – what is the mean between?
About the action [but then, is honesty between two types of dishonesty]?
Or the feeling that the virtuous person experiences [but surely sometimes it’s right to feel lots of anger, and sometimes none at all]?
Criterion of rightness
Slote: X is right iff it’s done from an overall virtuous motive.
But can’t you do the right thing for the wrong reasons? Example: Kant’s “prudent merchant” who charges a fair price, but only because he thinks it’ll benefit his business. (Kant thinks the merchant acts rightly.)
Hursthouse: X is right iff it’s what a virtuous person would characteristically do.
Counterexample: Professor Procrastinate (this ties into possibilism vs actualism; as SEP says “an agent’s imperfect moral character […] seems to be the driving force behind many points of disagreement between actualists and possibilists”).
Or, a virtuous agent need not do self-improvement, but an unvirtuous agent must.
What a virtuous agent would advise
Counterexample: the obstinate agent.
What virtuous agent would want to be done
Here we are becoming perhaps unattractively removed from what a virtuous agent actually does.
What facilitates the agent’s development towards virtue
Or, relatedly, the criterion of rightness might be relative to an agent’s level of virtue-development – though it’s unclear where exactly you derive the right action from.
Crisp (2015): it would seem that the theory of right action is presupposed by virtue ethics, not given by it. This targets agent-prior views in particular.
e.g. for Hursthouse, one question you might ask is “how does the virtuous agent decide what to do in a situation?” Well, she weights up the morally salient features appropriately – but then can’t you explain rightness in terms of whatever the features of the situation are that she’s correctly responding to?
VE is, on this view, just adding a further observation that virtuous people are responsive to the right reasons. But the reasons exist already.
[but a VE would say: no, they don’t exist already, the virtuous agent is primitive. Where does the dialectic go?]
Other objections
Maybe virtue ethics is just psychologically implausible: “situationist critique”.
Empirical evidence suggests that situational prompts, rather than character, are the primary explanations of our actions.
So there doesn’t seem to be such a thing as character, as a stable state (hexis)
Replies are mostly that maybe the experiments aren’t testing for the right things – they looked at narrow isolable behaviour, not unity of virtues. And besides, virtue is rare & difficult to attain, so maybe didn’t show up in the experiments at all.
It seems like VE doesn’t have the resources to handle the fact that some non-right actions are nonetheless less bad than others.
Unlike consequentialism, which has a continuous measure of value, there’s not an easy way to fall back on a scalar version.
Maybe they can appeal to the number/severity of virtue violations. But it’s not clear this works very well.
VE seems like it struggles with the distinctiveness of injustice.
It doesn’t say why my wronging other people, as opposed simply being, say, cowardly or intemperate, is particularly bad. But we have an intuition that the sphere of justice is a distinctly moral concern.
Cf Aristotle’s struggle to explain justice as a virtue. Even if you establish it’s a virtue, why is it an especially important one?
VE also struggles to explain why the “dikaiological order” (justice) is the way it is: it doesn’t say why there exist rights / claims / obligations between people.
So maybe it will end up having to rely on some other theory of justice.