Virtue ethics

‘The considerations to which a virtuous person is sensitive are more fundamental than the virtues themselves.’ Is this true? If so, is the project of ‘virtue ethics’ doomed? (2000 Q16)

• No, theories of virtue ethics do make the virtues themselves fundamental.
  • Agent-based: rightness comes from if an action is done with a virtuous motive.
    • [hmm, is this the counterexample? I feel quite confused by this question]
  • Agent-prior: the fundamental thing is the virtues, downstream of that we have that a virtuous agent considers & weighs things correctly, so their conduct is the standard & reference for right action.
• It is true that the considerations are important, and these are what someone trying to attain virtue would need to develop
  • Cf Aristotle on habituation, virtue is about phronesis and balancing etc
• But not the case that they’re more fundamental.
• Now, suppose it were true. Would virtue ethics be doomed? No.
  • Part of the project, showing that virtue is central to ethical inquiry, would remain entirely intact
  • The cost would be that perhaps you could discard thinking about virtue entirely, and skip straight to the considerations.
  • But we have in our minds a conception of what a virtuous agent is, so this is useful / means virtue retains value as a means of analysis [?]
  • [what are the other reasons to be doomed?]

Post-Claude & examiner report notes

• This is primarily a problem for agent-prior views.
  • Crisp (2015): they presuppose a theory of right action, in that the virtuous agent does X because she correctly perceives and weighs the morally-salient features – but then, that’s what’s doing the normative work
• Other types of views are less vulnerable:
  • Agent-based: motivational states as primitive, so no prior considerations being tracked at all. Virtues like benevolence are just good.
  • Neo-Aristotelian: virtues are grounded in human nature/flourishing. This is the fundamental thing, separate from consideration-sensitivity. So the virtuous agent tracks considerations because they constitute flourishing.
  • Agent-focused: basically unaffected, it isn’t making any claims about priority.
• Different ways to understand the project of virtue ethics:
  • A project about the grounding of right action
  • A project about moral epistemology / decision procedure
  • A project about moral education and psychology
• So even if (1) is undermined, (2) and (3) might survive – perhaps the way we gain moral knowledge is by thinking about virtue; developing virtuous character is the best way to reliably reach the right actions.

Can the right and the good be defined in terms of what a virtuous agent would do? (2001 Q9)

• It can be defined with reference to the virtuous agent, but not what they’d do, because of difficulties around appealing to an external agent who is necessarily morally different from the person actually in the situation. Moreover, it’s not very action-guiding.
• But agent-prior and agent-based theories do define rightness wrt what the virtuous agent does.
  • The good wouldn’t really be defined in these terms; you might pick it out (under agent-prior theories) as something that results from the virtuous agent’s action, but that’s not what *makes* it good. On agent-based theories, the good is the virtuous agent’s motivational states, independently grounded as morally valuable without further justification.
• Slote: X is right iff it’s done from an overall virtuous motive.
  • But it seems like we can do the right thing for the wrong reasons.
• Hursthouse: an action X is right iff a virtuous agent would characteristically perform X in the circumstances.
• Counterexamples
  • Procrastination (not what V-agent characteristically does); self-improvement (something a V-agent never needs to do)
  • Reformulation: would advise? But the obstinate agent
  • What virtuous agent would want to be done
    • You probably need to settle with this because otherwise doesn’t work, but now it’s quite removed from what she does.
  • These all suggest that the approach is misconceived.

Post-Claude & examiner report notes

• Distinguish between:
  • Definitional role, i.e. where rightness consists in what a virtuous agent would do
  • Epistemic role, i.e. where what a virtuous agent would do is a reliable guide to what is right
  • The question asks about the first. VE is most convincing about the second, but then it’s not making distinctive normative claims.
• Note that the good definitely isn’t defined about what the virtuous agent would do.
  • On eudaimonistic VE, the good is flourishing, and it’s non-derivatively good. Indeed, the virtues are what dispose us towards the good.
  • On Slote’s view, the good is identified with certain motivational states directly, not V-agent’s actions.

Do the virtues benefit their possessor? Must a defender of virtue ethics claim that they do? (2002 Q8)

• No, seem like they needn’t benefit possessor, unless you appeal to counterintuitive accounts of wellbeing. A defender needn’t claim they do, although it’s tempting to want to because this can address the egoist and amoralist – but it seems far more plausible that they don’t.
• Prima facie example: soldier dying bravely in battle.
  • Aristotle would say that virtue benefits the possessor insofar as he attains the fine, because that is what eudaimonia (flourishing) consists in.
  • But it’s hard to see how exactly one attains flourishing in dying a noble death, even if that death is the most noble and fine one could imagine.
  • This does come down to your account of welfare.
• [more examples? Feels like a bit thin]
• One argument could be that although there are individual cases where virtue fails to benefit possessor, over the course of a lifetime being virtuous is best for oneself.
  • But this needn’t be true either. Consider: you are an emblem of virtue in the land of the vicious. So you’re constantly exploited, etc. Seems bad.
• So, they don’t benefit possessor. Is this a problem for VE? Not really.
  • You might want to claim that they benefit possessor because then there’s *prudential* rationality in being virtuous. Can address the amoralist who asks “why be moral”: the answer is that this is how you attain eudaimonia.
    • Surprising and suspicious convergence; evolutionary debunking perhaps
  • But actually, this is an unreasonable goal to aim for.
  • In fact, part of what morality seems to require is some sacrifices! Cf Elizabeth Ashford. So overall it’s more plausible that a VE defender doesn’t claim the virtues benefit possessor.

Post-Claude & examiner report notes

• A few different claims:
  • Every individual virtuous act benefits agent in that moment
  • Virtuous character benefits possessor over a lifetime
  • Virtue is constitutive of (not merely instrumental to) agent’s good.
• Aristotle is committed to (3), and via that to (2). But not (1); bad luck might strike, or external goods intervene.
• Note that for eudaimonistic VE, the defender must claim that the virtues benefit the possessor, because that is exactly what the view says.
• On Slote’s view, there’s no need for virtues to benefit the possessor; they’re admirable no matter what.

Are virtue ethicists committed to the view that those who find it easier to be good are more praiseworthy for being good? What does your answer imply about the plausibility of virtue ethics? (2019 Q11)

• Yes, a version – but it’s not objectionable, and in fact highly intuitive.
• Two readings of the view:
  • (i) Weak: the individuals who are most praiseworthy for being good are, as a matter of fact, those who find it easier to be good.
  • (ii) Strong: the individuals who are most praiseworthy for being good are thus because they find it easier to be good.
• No version of VE is committed to (ii), which is the more objectionable claim. But some versions are committed to (i). I’ll explain why, and argue that this isn’t objectionable.
• Different VE theories have different accounts of why virtue is admirable and praiseworthy.
  • Eudaimonistic theories, like Aristotle’s, say that virtue is admirable because it consists in doing the human function excellently – but also, as Aristotle notes, difficult to achieve, since it involves a great deal of careful weighing of relevant factors (phronesis).
  • Non-eudaimonistic theories ground the value of virtue elsewhere
    • e.g., Slote has an agent-based theory which thinks the virtues just are, as a brute fact, admirable. So the person who is virtuous is praiseworthy on account of having these admirable, good qualities
    • Swanton’s view is that the value of virtue comes from responsiveness to demands of the world; similarly this is what explains why virtuous people are praiseworthy – they respond well to what is required.
• From these accounts of virtue, we can then progress to praiseworthiness of character, which is central in all VE theories.
  • For Aristotle, his theory of habituation (that one attains a character by doing actions distinct to a particular character repeatedly over time) suggests that the virtuous person will find it easier to be good.
    • Indeed the virtuous person is contrasted with the continent person, who still takes right actions but finds it difficult to do so.
    • So, he thinks the people who find it easier to do good are more praiseworthy. The virtuous person isn’t tempted by other actions.
  • Slote doesn’t need to say this. [is that right?? Thought: maybe even the virtuous person finds it hard to be good, though surely they’re not tempted by bad…]
    • But, if he thinks that one attains a virtuous character in a habituation-like way, then he would accept (i).
• But VE is not committed to (ii); indeed it would reject it. The thing that makes those individuals admirable could be on Aristotle’s view that they correctly take pleasure in the fineness of right action; on Slote’s view that they’re reliably responsive to the demands of the world.
• And (i) seems like not a problem at all. Contra Kant, it seems like it is better to be an agent that does the right thing without hesitation, rather than needing to do so unwillingly or with great pain.

Post-Claude & examiner report notes

• Two senses of praiseworthiness; can come apart from admirability. (Sort of like how the consequentialist decouples them, in fact).
  • Backward-looking admirability – this is the Aristotelian claim, and seems perfectly reasonable
  • Being the sort of thing that’s apt to be praised, as a tool of moral motivation – but for moral education / development, it might be even better to praise the continent agent (so she develops morally) since the virtuous agent doesn’t need it.
• Also, two senses of how it is “easier” to be good, apart from (i) vs (ii)
  • How easy was it to reach goodness → difficult (virtue is hard to acquire!)
  • How easy is it to be good from the current state → easy (no temptation)
• On Slote’s caring/benevolence-based view, probably (i) does hold.
  • Remember, Slote thinks that rightness is derived from the agent’s motivational states, and the goodness of that motive is morally primitive.
    • (He says X is right iff it’s done from an overall virtuous motive. And then these are what are brutely good.)
• Some ways that the virtuous person might find it harder to be good:
  • Tragic dilemmas – they feel genuine distress, perhaps more so than an unvirtuous person
  • Courage – the excellent person has more to lose, so self-sacrifice can be harder & more painful (per Aristotle)
  • In the land of the vicious, it might be prudentially bad for them (although the VE theorist could reject this)
  • → Virtue removes internal friction but not external costs or appropriately painful emotional response

(a) ‘Since virtues can conflict in difficult situations, virtue ethics cannot guide us in those circumstances in which we most need moral theory.’ Is that right? Does it tell against virtue ethics as a moral theory?

• VE is indeed a poor guide to action, in part (but not exclusively) because of conflicts between the virtues, and this does count against it as a moral theory.
• It’s not merely because virtues can conflict that VE isn’t action-guiding. If they conflicted but VE had a ranking over virtues, or there was a transparent standard / mechanism for seeing what the virtuous agent would do, then it’d be fairly action-guiding.
• The problem arises from the fact that virtues can conflict, and unvirtuous agents do not know how to balance them, nor even necessarily how to identify virtuous agents to learn from.
• Hursthouse on v-rules: we might be able to derive “be brave”, “be faithful”, but not how to balance.
  • Cf Aristotle, one cannot have phronesis (practical wisdom) without all the virtues.
• Yes, we want theories to be action-guiding.
  • Morality is a public practice, a theory ought not only to specify the criterion of rightness but also a decision criterion. These needn’t line up, but there should be some decision criterion specified!
  • The particularists would say: this isn’t a difficulty, there’s no way to codify morality. Also, perhaps you think it’s attractive that virtue ethics seems to be able to account for moral dilemmas.
  • Insofar as VE can’t guide us in circumstances, it also makes it less plausible [hmm is that right? Or just that we don’t like it, not that its truth-value is affected]

Post-Claude & examiner report notes

• An example of where virtues might conflict: loyalty vs justice when whistleblowing; high-stakes honesty vs compassion
• Different things we could distinguish:
  • VE being false
  • VE being unusable as a guide to action
  • VE being unattractive as a moral theory to adopt
• Other ethical theories also struggle in hard cases – e.g. consequentialism if you have incomparable goods; deontology with conflicting duties.
  • And VE can bite the bullet to say that there are some tragic dilemmas which seem bad either way, which vindicates an intuition we might have

(b) ‘It is virtuous to tell someone the truth because they deserve it; it is not that they deserve it because it is virtuous to tell them the truth.’ If that is true, would it be a problem for virtue ethics? (2020 Q10)

• Not necessarily a problem, but it’s more of a challenge for agent-based accounts where the final grounding of goodness / rightness is about agents’ motivational states. [hmm is that right?]
• Assuming that as the statement says, virtue is grounded in some further fact (e.g. desert), that isn’t so much of a problem for a statement like:
  • X is right iff it is what a virtuous agent would characteristically do in the circumstances.
  • If you inserted in a “and because”, then it’d be more of a problem.
  • Or, if you have X is right iff it obtains from an overall virtuous motive, then the motive could be “giving the other person what they deserve”.
• [hmm]

Post-Claude & examiner report notes

• Should focus on self-centredness / egoism.
  • One reading of the question: a V-agent should respond to facts about the recipient (that they deserve the truth), not a fact about her own character (it’s virtuous to tell the truth).
    • You could also acknowledge the other reading, about Crisp-based challenge – explanatory priority, redundancy objection
    • But maybe self-centredness more natural since it’s about what the virtuous agent is responsive to, not the metaphysical grounding of rightness
  • If VE tells us the grounding is the latter, then it makes moral action about virtue-attainment matter rather than what we owe others.
• Why is self-centredness a problem?
  • An agent who told the truth “because it’s virtuous” would seem objectionably self-interested, for what’s meant to be the moral realm
    • Morality is paradigmatically other-regarding. But if VE forces the agent to direct moral attention to her own character, it mischaracterises the appropriate locus of moral motivation, and makes the V-agent overly egoistic.
    • Cf Hurka (2001) on objectionable egoism
  • Cf Aristotle; if you’re acting for the sake of the fine, then it looks like she is trying to secure the fine for herself rather than do right by others.
• VE can first respond that there’s a criterion/motivation distinction: the right-making feature is that it’s what the V-agent would do, but the V-agent’s motivation is the moral desert.
  • This gets around Keller (2007)’s objection, that visiting your friend in hospital because it’s what the V-agent would do is the wrong sort of motive.
  • And in fact, the idea of acting for her own virtue doesn’t come into her reasoning at all: she just thinks something like “they deserve the truth, so I’ll be honest” (Hursthouse)
    • So this can solve the Williams objection one thought too many.
• But now we have self-effacingness / moral schizophrenia.
  • If desert is what we’re responsive to, then why should virtue come into right-making at all?
  • Stocker: it’s a major flaw of the theory if it can’t unite our motivations with what makes an action right!
  • This is also a problem for neo-Aristotelian views, where flourishing consists in virtuous activity.
    • The agent wouldn’t be acting for the sake of her flourishing (that seems selfish), but then motivation comes apart from right-making.
    • When we say “for the sake of X”, that can mean “in a manner that produces X” rather than “instrumentally with X in mind as the goal” (Annas 2007).
• If you use an agent-based account like Slote’s then the motive is primitive, but it’s directed outwards.
  • So it’s not objectionably egoistic; we have a motivation like “benevolence” / “caring”, and that is what grounds value, but these motivations are admirable because they do attend to others’ wellbeing.
• Alternatively, Swanton (2003) has virtues as dispositions which respond excellently to the demands of the world. So there’s no worry at all about virtue coming first.
• Overall, challenge for VE is to explain how it is distinctive, in terms of adding something beyond what we can get from a desert-based account of rightness.
  • i.e., if we solve the problem about egoism, then it looks like the virtues are no longer explanatorily prior.

‘Virtue ethics is an attractive account of the value of acting virtuously, but it has nothing distinctive to say about moral obligation in particular.’ Discuss. (2021 Q12)

• Notice that there are different kinds of demands a theory might make of an agent:
  • T says it is right to do X; X is permissible
  • T says that one ought to be praised for X
  • T says that it is wrong to do not-X; X is obligatory
  • T says that one ought to be blamed for not-X
• When T says that X is obligatory, it means: in all morally acceptable worlds relative to the current one, an agent does X.
• What does a virtue ethicist have to say about moral obligation?
  • They can say which actions are right: e.g., per Hursthouse, an action X is right iff and because it is what a virtuous agent would characteristically do in the situation.
    • Actions are wrong if virtuous agents would not do them in the situation.
  • Nowhere does it say that someone is obligated to do something particular, however.
  • Consider: Shallow Pond.
    • The virtue ethicist can say that a virtuous agent would save the child, but it doesn’t seem to have the resources to explain why twiddling one’s thumbs as the child drowns is more unacceptable than, say, failing to pick up some litter on the ground nearby.
    • Perhaps by appealing to vices, duals of virtues, it can deliver these verdicts (cf Aristotle).
• It’s not that it has nothing distinctive to say, so much as it has nothing to say at all. This is, in a sense, distinctive.
  • For example, maximising act-utilitarianism says an action X is right iff and because there’s no other action open to the agent with better expected consequences, and wrong otherwise (ignoring ties); all other actions are wrong and impermissible. So the agent is obligated to do X.
  • Contractualism, and deontology, similarly have obligations in the sense of binding constraints on what is permissible.
• Indeed, in some ways what virtue ethics implies about obligations is counterintuitive and counts against the theory.
  • Virtuous agents would not spend time taking actions to develop their virtue, since they have no need to.
  • But presumably we think that nonvirtuous agents ought, and perhaps are obligated to, develop virtue.
• Is its account of the value of acting virtuously really that attractive?
  • There are different theories which ground the value of acting virtuously in different places.
  • On eudaimonistic theories, e.g. Hursthouse’s, the value is derived from the fact that being virtuous completes human nature in some way.
    • But this is perhaps rather unattractive – cf Hurka, on how grounding the value of virtue in one’s own eudaimonia seems to make morality objectionably egoistic.
  • Slote avoids this with an agent-based theory – i.e. one which takes the value of virtue as fundamental. But this is hardly an account of its value at all.
  • Other theories, e.g. Swanton, are more promising. He argues that the virtues (and by extension, acting virtuously) is valuable because they dispose us towards meeting the demands of the world.
    • There is something a little circular about this reasoning that might concern us, though – it looks like it’s reliant on an independent source of value / goodness, which makes the virtues valuable insofar as they promote that.

Post-Claude & examiner report notes

• A better way to express the idea that VE doesn’t say much about obligation in particular: collapses the deontic into the aretaic.
  • It can tell you what’s admirable/right, but has nothing distinctive to say about obligation qua obligation.
• If VE has anything to say about obligations, we might think that it’s contained within the virtue of justice – after all, that’s the virtue concerned with what is deserved / owed to others.
  • A complaint we can make here is that VE treats justice as simply one virtue among many, and isn’t able to capture what’s important about justice.
    • Cf Williams on Justice as a Virtue.
  • Similarly, it doesn’t have anything to say about the deontic order – it is parasitic on some other theory about who deserves what.
    • Recall that it’s Crisp who objects that VE presupposes a theory of right action.
    • For an agent-prior view, you’d ask: “how does the virtuous person know what action is right?” by weighing up the morally-salient features of the situation, but then surely this, not what the virtuous agent does, is what determines rightness?
• Sharpening the point about how VE can derive obligations: maybe X is forbidden iff & because it’s unthinkable for a virtuous agent / characteristic of a vicious one; X is obligatory iff & because failing to do it would be vicious.
  • And we can attach force to them: omitting an obligatory action is blameworthy precisely because it’s characteristic of vice, which just is blameworthy.
  • However, it’s still not totally clear in what way you wrong the specific person you did something impermissible to, on VE’s account.
    • Put differently: it looks like we can sometimes blamelessly fail to fulfil obligations, or do something blameworthy without wronging anyone.
    • For the first: e.g. I do a vicious action but not out of vice (instead from memory lapse, say). For the second, I am cowardly but nobody ends up hurt.
    • But then VE is not capturing what we think is special about interpersonal obligations – the person to whom something is owed should have a special standing in claiming X from you, more so than some other bystander blaming you for bad character.
• For Shallow Pond, note that VE isn’t really able to distinguish between obligatory and supererogatory – the virtuous person does both!
  • So saying it’s obligatory to do what a virtuous person would do will (intuitively) over-generate obligations.
  • Remember also that Slote claims failing to save the drowning child exhibits a worse lack of empathy than failing to donate to Oxfam, and this is the respect in which it’s worse. So, perhaps VE does have resources to compare how bad actions are, in terms of their distance from virtue.
• It’s not clear that all obligations are located inside of justice, though.
  • For example, one might have obligations to oneself, or impersonal obligations – e.g., to be virtuous / complete one’s function / do what God wants.
    • Many philosophers would reject the idea that you can have obligations to yourself – they think that moral obligation is essentially directed / “bipolar”: B has a claim to X from A ⟺ A has a duty to do X ⟺ A wrongs B by failing to do X.
    • But if we think there are duties to oneself (e.g., Ross thinks there’s duty of self-improvement), then VE fails here – it can say that it’s imprudent to waste your talents, but not impermissible.
    • Duties to e.g. promote the impartial good are just foreign to VE. But that needn’t be a complaint.
  • For doing what God wants, perhaps piety captures this.
    • Recall that Anscombe is sceptical of the “moral ought”; she thinks that these are remnants of divine-law philosophy – so this turns VE’s lack of commentary on obligation into a desirable feature.

* Must virtue ethics be objectionably self-effacing? (2022 Q11)

Must virtue ethicists regard childlessness as a vice, since the human species is perpetuated via childbearing? Is it a problem if they must? (2023 Q12)

• No, virtue ethicists need not regard childlessness as a vice. If they did have to, this might count against their theory in that it would seem to deny (a) aspects of human bodily autonomy, and (b) depending on the kinds of childlessness under censure, that vice is voluntary
• Distinguish between voluntary and involuntary childlessness.
  • The first is cases where someone is childless because they have a partner and chose not to have children
  • The second includes cases where someone would like to have children but cannot, because of (i) biological constraints e.g. infertility, and plausibly also (ii) lack of a partner
  • It would be strange for virtue ethicists to treat involuntary childlessness as a vice, because in general they hold that vicious behaviour is voluntary.
• Now, focus on voluntary childlessness. There are different accounts of what makes for a virtue / vice.
  • Aristotle and neo-Aristotelian virtue ethicists think that virtues are states of character whose exercise (partly) constitutes the agent’s flourishing (where flourishing is excellent performance of the characteristic human function)
    • Childlessness does not really seem like the right kind of object to be a vice. It’s not really a dispositional state.
    • The argument might be that some dispositional states causally upstream of childlessness are the locus of vice though.
  • For non-eudaimonistic virtue ethicists, there’s certainly no need to treat childlessness as a vice.
    • Swanton thinks that the virtues are traits which well-dispose us towards meeting the demands of the world. Vices, presumably, are states that do the opposite. Although one demand of the world might be for the human species to continue, presumably we could contribute to that demand in other ways – for example, by caring for others’ children. So childlessness need not be a vice.
    • Similarly, on, say, Slote’s agent-based account of virtue ethics, virtues derive their goodness from the motivations of the agent; likewise vices their badness. So if one has the right sort of motivations to be childless (say, because one thinks one would be an inadequate parent), then this seems entirely admirable and virtuous.
• As mentioned, it would be a problem if virtue ethics held that all childlessness were vicious.
  • Some cases are wholly involuntary, in that they’re determined by nature. But then this diminishes the moral force of vice, if we’re meant to usually blame people for being vicious, but the childless infertile person doesn’t seem responsible nor blameworthy.
  • Also, we might object even to the narrower vice formulation that it denies the intuitive fact that there is a certain domain of our autonomy into which morality should not enter, including whether or not to have children.
    • But this isn’t unique to VE; cf consequentialist theories.

Post-Claude & examiner report notes

• Rather than taking the question literally as whether childlessness is a locus of vice, reframe it to be about the dispositions which generate childlessness, and motivate why that might be the case.
  • Flourishing as human beings might involve reproduction, since that is part of (what looks like) our biological function.
• Then, the reason this is a bigger problem for VE is that it shows how attempts to ground the virtues in humans’ natural functions might lead to counterintuitive moral verdicts.
  • For virtue ethics to be distinctive, we’d want it to give us an account of the virtues independently of prior notions of the good/right.
  • One such grounding would be human function, i.e. neo-Aristotelian theories [as mentioned].
  • But if we’re appealing to that, then maybe childbearing is a part of this good.

/ (b) Can virtue ethicists adequately account for the categorical nature of moral demands? (2024 Q11)

* (a) Can virtue ethicists make sense of conflicts between morality and self-interest?

* (b) Could it be true that I ought not to do what the virtuous person would do, precisely because I’m not virtuous? Discuss the implications of your answer for virtue ethics. (2025 Q11)

Bonus

• Is singlemindedness a virtue? (2001 Q15)
• Are we morally responsible for our character? (2002 Q18)