What role should the notion of �virtue� play in ethics?

Greg Detre

Wednesday, May 30, 2001

Jeremy Watkins, Hertford

Ethics VI

The modern revival of virtue theory began with Elizabeth Anscombe�s paper, �Modern moral philosophy� (1958), and was bolstered by Alasdair McIntyre�s After Virtue (1981). Virtue ethics returns the emphasis to an individual�s life when answering the fundamental question in ethics of �How ought I to live?�, rather than just �How ought I to act?�.

Both consequentialist and deontological ethics neglect the preferences, life history, abilities and commitments of the agent. Although the agent�s individual goodness is derived from a sort of running total of all his actions, in a sense he is irrelevant to the moral worth of those actions, except as their executor. This is especially clear in any form of consequentialism, where coincidence and twists of fate can make the most dastardly act of malice into the best possible of all available actions, quite independent of the agent�s motives, character or how many bad things are subsumed within the general utility maximisation. In the case of Kantianism, the agent�s intentions and adherence to the call of duty rather than inclination is paramount. However, his own integrity (to use Williams� term) is still compromised. He remains little more than the subject of his moral actions. To actually live the life of an ideal Kantian moral agent, one would need to become an almost characterless, inhuman robot � a boon to society, no doubt, but lacking all the jagged, personal, agent-centred qualities which contribute to one�s status as a moral agent in our eyes. Indeed, both these major ethical schools all but ignore the majority of daily life as morally insignificant, dismissing the minutiae that make up a life as �morally indifferent�, which hardly seems encouraging for a system about how we should live our lives.

If we had to use a single word to describe the life of a Kantian, it would be �onerous�. Both consequentialism and Kantianism derive their force from obligations, restrictions and impositions � rules, in short. This is where the thrust of Anscombe�s rather Nietzschean attack lies. Given the prevailing atheism (or more strictly, reluctance to rest arguments on belief in a personal, Christian God) in modern ethics, she argued that there is no basis for the legalistic �ought� that modern moral philosophers have tried to establish. Without a divine law-giver, there can be no sanction for morality. She pointed towards the virtue theory prevalent in ancient Greece as a possible resolution of this dead end.

Broadly speaking, moral worth in the Aristotelian system stems from being a good, or virtuous, human being. Of course, as many modern ethicists have pointed out, in order to make evaluative judgements (about man), we need to have a standard against which to measure. This idea of the function of man is crucial to Aristotelian virtue theory. All of Aristotle�s thought contains this idea of teleology, a telos, an �end, purpose, ultimate object or aim� (OED).

Aristotle begins by seeking the ultimate goal or aim for man, and concludes that the final end which admits no other ends, is happiness. All other ends, such as health, honour or wealth, are all good in virtue of some other end (they are �hypothetical�, in the Kantian sense), whereas happiness is good in and of itself (i.e. �categorical�). Having established that happiness is the ultimate good for man, Aristotle looks for the �proper function� of man, in which the good resides. Just as �the proper function of a harpist, for example, is the same as the function of a harpist who has set high standards for himself� (Nichomachean Ethics, 1098a 8), and just as the proper function of an eye, or foot, is clearly defined, so must there be a proper function of man as a whole in which he can excel. He disregards the most basic functions, like �simply living� or �nutrition�, since we share these with the plants and animals. Mankind�s proper function must be something specific and special to him, which Aristotle concludes to be the active use of man�s rational element. Simply obeying rational dictates is not enough � the rational element must be employed in the conception of rational rules.

He contrasts the arts with the virtues, since, �In the arts, excellence lies in the result itself, so that it is sufficient if it is of a certain kind� (105a 28), whereas in the case of the virtues, in order for an act to be virtuous, the agent must have certain characteristics as he performs it:

First of all, he must know what he is doing; secondly, he must choose to act the way he does, and he must choose it for its own sake; and in the third place, the act must spring from a firm and unchangeable character (105a 30)

In MacIntyre�s terminology, Aristotle is building a tri-partite moral structure, containing:

untutored human nature

man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realised-his-telos

the moral precepts which enable him to pass from one state to the other, i.e. ethics

In his view, the Enlightenment project failed because Hume, Diderot and Kant tried to operate without this third leg of the tripod in their certainty that one cannot get from an �is� to an �ought�. That is, no statement of fact can lead to a statement of moral fact; just because someone is in pain does not entail that I ought to help them. However, an example shows that:

From such factual premises as �This watch is grossly inaccurate and irregular in time-keeping� and �This watch is too heavy to carry about comfortably�,� the evaluative conclusion validly follows that �This is a bad watch�. (After Virtue, pg 58)

This is the idea of excellence (or �virtue�) of a functional concept as goodness which has derives directly from Aristotle.

MacIntyre�s attack on modern moral theory takes a different tack from Anscombe�s. He targets the implied discontinuity in the series of decisions that a consequentialist has to make as one of its most serious flaws. This tends towards a view of life as an unconnected series of individuated actions. MacIntyre pokes fun at this idea that life can be understood or evaluated like the carefully separated steps in a recipe, where we have to make an explicit choice at set points. Instead, a theory based on the virtues stresses one�s self-development, character and life as a whole. We cannot divide up our lives into a series of basic actions, of the kind that armchair philosophers address in their actions-based ethics. MacIntyre shows how every action can only ever be an action under a description. If I am rearranging the mud in a garden, this action is only intelligible if one understands that I am trying to dig up weeds, which might be understood in the context of my job as a landscape gardener or my heart condition which requires me to get lots of fresh air or my particular sense of the aesthetic in nature. �The concept of an intelligible action is a more fundamental concept than that of an action as such�, since so much of our lives revolves around human discourse. Unless an action is humanly intelligible, we cannot account for it, describe and categorise it, or narratise it. MacIntyre completely redefines the virtues, by placing them within the context of a quest to unify one�s life.

Virtue ethics does not seek transcendental justification for or obligation upon our actions. It sits neatly with our intuitive feelings of the good life, far more than other modern ethical theories, by defining the good in very human terms. These terms need not even be entirely universalisable to humanity as a whole � in fact, they may be localised to a particular social role in a particular culture living in a particular historical period. Most importantly, virtue theory provides a deeply appealing system which works for human lives rather than disembodied human actions in a secular world.