Essay
No, virtue ethicists are not right to make virtue fundamental in ethical theory. Doing so undermines the usefulness of their theory as a guide to practical action and leads to instances where the theory appears to be extensionally incorrect. In this essay, I first outline what it means for some object to be fundamental to a particular ethical theory, and why virtue satisfies these conditions under virtue ethics. Then, I outline three compelling objections to virtue ethics which arise because of the fundamental importance it affords to virtue. I conclude that an ethical theory which makes virtue fundamental is less plausible than one which does not.
Since one of the primary goals of an ethical theory is to provide an account of which actions are right and why, we can say that some object is fundamental to an ethical theory if nothing is explanatorily prior to it in that account. For instance, in act utilitarianism, happiness is fundamental because actions are right when and because they maximise total happiness. There is no appeal to any further principle required: promoting total happiness just is a right-making property (Crisp 2015). In virtue ethics, a theory of right action can be formulated as follows (Hursthouse 1999, p28):
VE1: An action is right when and because it is what a virtuous agent would characteristically do in the circumstances.
Virtue is therefore fundamental to virtue ethics, since the rightness of actions is ultimately determined by their relationship with the behaviour of a virtuous agent. The explanation goes no deeper than this –virtuous character is a non-instrumental good necessary for flourishing, and the right action is that which is in accordance with virtue.
However, the fundamental importance afforded to virtue in virtue ethics makes VE1 substantially less action-guiding than one would expect of an ethical theory. Specifically, less-than-fully-virtuous individuals are generally not in an epistemic position to make decisions based on virtue theory’s criterion of rightness, because they lack the practical wisdom and moral mastery which is constitutive of being virtuous. As Hurka (2001, p228) notes, an unvirtuous individual (“Malorie”) may not know what a virtuous one (“Angela”) would do in their circumstances, or even how to identify some such virtuous person to ask for advice, since they have no access to a precisely specified standard to judge the rightness of actions by. Worse, even if one were to enumerate some list of virtues and associated simple rules of virtue ethics (or “v-rules”), an unvirtuous person would not be able to reliably apply these. Take, for example, the virtue of honesty, alongside its derivative rules to do what is honest and to not do what is dishonest (Hursthouse 1999, p36). Angela would not blindly follow these directives in all circumstances: sometimes the virtuous course of action may be to act kindly and thus withhold or distort parts of the truth, but Malorie would be unable to identify when this is the case. Without providing a set of highly specific v-rules for every conceivable situation, unvirtuous individuals cannot know what the right action to take is – but this would detract from the fundamental importance of individuals having a virtuous character and using their practical wisdom to reach decisions. By making virtue fundamental, virtue ethicists prevent unvirtuous individuals from using their theory as a guide to action, because of their poor epistemic position.
Furthermore, theories like VE1 appear to sometimes be extensionally incorrect because of the emphasis they place on what a virtuous agent would do in the circumstances. Consider the following scenario:
Malorie has the opportunity to pursue an enjoyable and highly paid career as an apple trader. If Angela were in this situation, she would accept the job, knowing that she’d behave well towards clients and donate most of her earnings to worthy causes. But Malorie’s character is such that if she took up the offer, she would swindle customers, bully farmers, and spend money ostentatiously.
What the virtuous Angela would do in Malorie’s circumstances seems wholly irrelevant in this case, since it is Malorie who is in the circumstances and whose unvirtuous character will determine her later actions. More generally, VE1 fails to account for the rightness of moral improvement (Johnson 2003). An agent like Angela would not spend time reflecting on her moral flaws and take steps towards becoming more virtuous, since she has no need to, but surely someone like Malorie ought to engage in self-improvement – particularly by a virtue ethicist’s lights! As Svensen (2010) notes, it is difficult to formulate a plausible alternative virtue-centric theory of right action which does not fall victim to similar counterexamples. Take the following attempt to refine the virtue ethicist’s criterion of rightness:
VE2: An action is right for an agent S when and because it is what a virtuous agent would advise S to do in the circumstances.
One might think that changing to an advice-based formulation like VE2 helps to accommodate instances where the right action for an unvirtuous agent is different to that of a virtuous one. But suppose that Angela is advising an unvirtuous agent Jack who reliably does the opposite of what he is told to. In this case, she would tell him to do whichever are the wrong actions – so VE2 fails as a criterion of rightness. It is the importance given to virtue which leads to these extensional failures of a virtue ethicist’s criterion of rightness, suggesting that they are wrong to have virtue as a fundamental concept.
Placing fundamental importance on virtue also creates either a shallowness or circularity in explanations of why a particular course of action is right. Imagine I have made a promise which it would be expedient for me to break. A virtue ethicist would say that it is right for me to honour the promise because that is what a virtuous person would do. When pressed on the question of why the virtuous person would do that, though, they would have little to add beyond asserting that being faithful is simply virtuous. Intuitively, this answer seems lacking – Angela would surely not claim that being faithful is right because she is doing it, but rather because it shows proper respect to other humans (or because it leads to greater wellbeing, and so on), with the fact that she is disposed towards faithfulness comprising part of what makes her virtuous. Perhaps Angela would say that being faithful is right because it leads to her flourishing, but this circular reasoning brings us back to the start: we were in search of an answer to why it is right to act as someone virtuous would, yet virtue ethicists take as a premiss that flourishing consists of acting virtuously. So, making virtue fundamental in our theory is a redundant move that causes us to fail to capture the true right-making properties of actions.
To conclude, virtue ethicists are not right to make virtue fundamental in ethical theory. We want ethical theories which provide both an evaluative standard and a guide to right action, but the centrality of virtue in virtue ethics works against both these goals, by leading to extensional failures and impracticalities in application by unvirtuous agents. In addition, attempts to make virtue fundamental lead to deficiencies in the theory’s explanatory account of rightness. For these reasons, we should look to ethical theories which do not make virtue fundamental, but instead accommodate its importance as a means to some other end.
References
Crisp (2015): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1933-1592.2012.00607.x
Johnson (2003): https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.1086/373952.pdf
Hurka (2001): https://academic.oup.com/book/3343/chapter/144416917
Hursthouse (1999): https://academic.oup.com/book/2302/chapter/142429247
Svensen (2010): https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10677-009-9201-7
Svensen (2011): https://www.jstor.org/stable/41486935