Recommended Reading

Pojman, L. P. (1995) Ethics: Discovering Right and Wrong Belmont, CA:Wadsworth. Pp. 160-185

Rachels, J. (1999) The Elements of Moral Philosophy Boston:McGraw-Hill College. Pp. 175-193.

Aristotle (Thomson/Tredennick/Barnes) (1976) Nicomachean Ethics Middlesex:Harmondsworth

MacIntyre, A. (1981) After Virtue University of Notre Dame Press

Text of Aristotle

Nicomachean Ethics extract in Perry and Bratman pp. 564 ff.

Aristotle

Born 384 BC, Stagira. Father was a physician. Student of Plato. Tutor of Alexander the Great. Founded Lyceum. Died 322 BC, Chalcis.

Return to Virtue

Ethical theories that focus on the character or attributes of the good man are at least as old as Aristotle, but they went out of fashion in the period of the Christian ascendancy. At that time the dominant form of ethics concentrated upon the notion of the obedience to the laws laid down by God for human behaviour; and when the influence of dogmatic Christianity began to wane, the ethical theories did not change their style so much as search for a new principle for their laws. Recently, however, there has been renewed interest in the earlier model of ethics. Here are some reasons why.

1.         Moral Vacuity of Duty-Following

There’s a standard criticism of deontological, duty-based ethical theories that they ignore the moral character of a person in cases where that seems to be relevant to moral evaluation. Here’s an example that’s often used to make this point (Stocker, M. ‘The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories’ Journal of Philosophy 73 (1976) pp. 453-466). Suppose you are sick in hospital and someone you know comes to visit you. They stay and chat and keep you company and you are feeling grateful for their friendship. Unfortunately you mention this to them, and they tell you that, no, friendship and a desire to make you happy had nothing to do with their coming to visit. It just happens that they had reviewed their duties and discovered that a visit to you was required, and so here they are. How do you feel about that? Probably you’re not very impressed. You probably also have a pretty low opinion of the actual moral character of your visitor. (Maybe you think they’re using you as a means to the end of their performance of duties?)

2.         Lack of a Motivator for Moral Action

The modern interest in virtue theories can actually be traced back to an article by Elizabeth Anscombe (‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ Philosophy 33 (1958) pp. 1-19) where she complained that the modern moral theories were all hopeless because they depended conceptually upon notions of obligation, law, duty, and so on that required there to be a lawgiver, but they simultaneously denied the existence of any such creature. Without the idea of a lawgiver there is no way to make sense of the fact that we have a motivation to follow moral rules. Suppose we have Kant’s duties before us: why should we care? Why not just ignore them? Suppose we had the principles of Utilitarianism explained to us? Why should that make any difference to our actions? What is it actually that makes us do moral acts. Those old theories are no good, so let’s try to make virtue ethics work.

We shall not address the question of whether proposing God as a motivator really gets you out of that difficulty; instead we shall recognise that this difficulty does exist. Why should an appeal to character based ethics be thought to help? Well, the answer is that a person’s character is taken to be at least partly constituted by the dispositions to action of the person. So if a person has a character of a certain kind, he is disposed to act in a certain way. And that disposition can play the role of the motivator to action that we are searching for. The very specific form of motivator or disposition to moral action that is of interest to us we can equate with the virtues. Thus, if we could make virtue ethics work we could solve the motivator problem. And it would also address the ‘problem’ of the unpleasantly morally vacuous character of the duty-bound person. In the example of the hospital visitor they would be visiting us and doing good because they were disposed to do so, because they wanted to. And we would surely approve of that.

What is Virtue Ethics?

So what does a virtue ethics look like? Well, it’s a bit hard to tell, because we only have a couple of reasonably well worked-out exemplars. The state of virtue ethics is very ‘dynamic’ because it has only recently really got going again and thus there is no real consensus on what are the most promising ways to approach solutions to the problems that currently bedevil it. FYI, the best known modern theory is that of Alasdair Macintyre but we won’t be talking about that here. Instead, if we talk about any particular theory, it will be that of Aristotle.

Aristotle begins the Nicomachean Ethics with a deceptively simple statement.

Every skill and every inquiry, and similarly every action and rational choice, is thought to aim at some good; and so the good has been aptly described as that at which everything aims.[1]

Aristotle then describes a hierarchy of ends: some ends are subordinate to others. Bridle-making has as its end making bridles. But the making of bridles is subordinate to horsemanship in general because we make bridles to facilitate the riding of horses; we do not ride horses in order to facilitate the making of bridles. And horsemanship is subordinate to military science, because we ride horses in order to achieve victory in battle (as the Greeks would have it), we do not seek victory in battle in order to have an excuse to ride horses.[2] Aristotle takes this hierarchy of ends, and the sciences and arts that facilitate their attainment, to be pervasive: all human ends fit in the hierarchy somewhere.

Aristotle next argues that there must be an ultimate end or supreme good to which we aim. This is an end at the top of the hierarchy of ends. An ultimate end is one that is valued for its own sake and is not valued for the sake of anything else; it is something complete and sufficient, not lacking any good. Every other end is valued, ultimately, for the sake of this supreme good. Aristotle can’t prove that there is only one such goal, but he thinks that as a matter of fact there is only one such goal. That is, he thinks there is one common supreme good for human beings, and Aristotle also believes that he has a clear and obvious candidate for the one supreme good of human life that could do this.

Happiness

According to Aristotle, the one ultimate end of all rational human endeavours is happiness. This sounds a bit odd at first, because happiness doesn’t seem to be the sort of thing that, for example, intellectual achievement is appropriately seen as instrumental to. We don’t study dead languages in order to make ourselves feel all tingly and smiley – there are easier ways to do that. But this oddness is only apparent, and once again, it’s mostly due to a difficulty in translating. More strictly, we should use the Greek work ‘eudaimonia’ to describe this ultimate end. ‘Happiness’ is close in meaning to ‘eudaimonia’, but the translation is not precise. The sense of the term ‘happiness’ that is closest to the meaning of ‘eudaimonia’ is that of a ‘happy life.’ This sense of ‘happiness’ is brought out when we say of a couple that they have a happy marriage. We also see this usage when we claim that we have the right to ‘Life, Liberty , and the Pursuit of Happiness’ – that isn’t a claim that we must be allowed to do anything that gives us some passing pleasure. Eudaimonia is not a temporary mental state, like pleasure, joy, bliss or tranquillity. Eudaimonia is an overall-condition of a person’s life.

Eudaimonia is the supreme good for human beings because: (1) it is the ultimate end for which we pursue anything; (2) it is unconditionally complete (we don’t seek our ultimate happiness for the sake of anything else); and (3) it is self-sufficient (we don’t say of a happy life that it lacks something – though of course we could always say of a life that it could be more happy).

Characteristic Activities

Aristotle develops his own account of human happiness in terms of his account of human nature. Everything has a natural ergon, or characteristic activity. For example, the ergon of a lion seems to be to mate with other lions to produce future generations of lions, raise cubs to such and such an age (if female) and so on. Aristotle contends that human happiness is to be discovered by discovering the ergon of human beings.

But perhaps saying that happiness is the chief good sounds rather platitudinous, and one might want its nature to be specified still more clearly. It is possible that we might achieve that if we grasp the characteristic activity of a human being. For just as the good – the doing well – of a flute-player, a sculptor or any practitioner of a skill, or generally whatever has some characteristic activity or action, is thought to lie in its characteristic activity, so the same would seem to be true of a human being, if indeed he has a characteristic activity.[1]

The characteristic activity of human beings is to use reason. Our capacity to reason and everything that follows from it – including language, technology and culture – are what distinguish us from all other species. It is what makes us special. Thus, thinks Aristotle, it is also the key to making us ultimately happy – in the eudaimonic sense. One way of looking at this – and it’s what Aristotle thinks – is that the ultimately good life is one spent just using your reason, not by solving problems in geometry or the like, but simply in contemplation of the things that you know. According to the Aristotelian view the truly good life is one in which the wise man passes in review the things that he knows in much the same way that a connoisseur or aesthete tastes his wines one after another or contemplates his paintings.[2] This is a goal that no-one thinks will appeal to many people, so perhaps Aristotle has to allow that not everyone is able to achieve this really good life, but there is nevertheless a version of eudaimonia that will suit everyone and which, if they are not completely mistaken, will form the goal of everyone’s actions in life.

Another way of looking at the idea that reason is the key to ultimate happiness is to realise that we live happily or well, only when we use reason with great skill. The use of reason with great skill is virtuous activity. In fact, for this and other reasons which we’ll look at now, Aristotle does say that a happy life is one lived according to virtue. 

Excellences

When Aristotle talks about virtues he uses the word ‘arete’, which may also be properly translated as ‘excellences.’ What he has in mind here is a comparison of the qualities that go to make a knife a good knife or a flute a good flute with the qualities that make a man a good man. In the case of the knife, for example, we look for the qualities of sharpness, ability to hold an edge, and so on. These are the qualities that contribute to the knife performing its characteristic function of cutting in the best way possible. In the case of the flute, we look for whatever qualities contribute to its performing its characteristic function of making music. And in the case of a man, in just the same way, we look for those qualities that contribute to his performing his characteristic function of living rationally. These excellences then are the virtues.

On Dispositions that Could Be Virtues

An extensive list could be made of potential virtues. Aristotle does make such a list, and it’s quite remarkable how closely we would agree with it, even though we take virtues to be moral qualities in a way that Aristotle does not. Aristotle merely takes them to be the sorts of dispositions that will tend to lead to our having a successful life. Let’s consider just one of these virtues .

An Exemplar Virtue: Courage

Everyone needs courage. Life is filled with little traumas, and some not so little, that we must all face. Surely it is of value to us to be able to face these traumas and dangers and challenges in the most effective way possible. And to do this we will need to conquer our fears. I think we all have a general idea of what courage is. The soldier who faces death willingly to save his chums on the field of combat is said to be brave; the whistleblower who risks unemployment and ruination in order to uncover wrongdoing shows courage; Marge Simpson risking the contempt of her peers and the media commentariat to clean up children’s cartoons shows courage. There are, however, difficult cases.

Firstly, do we think that the bank robber, Jesse James, who risked his life to steal from rich and poor alike for his own fun and profit, showed courage? Was this a virtue? Do we think that the Arab terrorist who struggles on through great danger to kill Israeli schoolchildren is a brave man? Perhaps we don’t want to call this courage. That’s the conclusion of Peter Geach, who denies that ‘courage’ in the service of an evil cause is courage at all. (Perhaps we’d agree with the moral of that Simpson’s episode: one person really can make a difference, but mostly they shouldn’t.) I don’t really see why we shouldn’t call it courage. I think it’s just a reluctance to admit the moral complexity of human beings that makes one hesitate in those cases.

Secondly, courage can come in degrees. We don’t simply compare courage with cowardice; we also compare it with foolhardiness. An absolute refusal to consider the risks at all, or an obliviousness to those risks, or, even worse, an embrace of those risks, is a perversion of the virtue of courage, and we do not count that as a virtue.

The Doctrine of the Mean

An awareness of this problem, and a recognition that it had its analogues in all the virtues he had listed, led Aristotle to define a virtue as the mean between two extremes of disposition: one of deficit and one of surfeit.

We can experience fear, confidence, desire, anger, pity, and generally any kind of pleasure and pain either too much or too little, and in either case not properly. But to experience all this at the right time, towards the right objects, toward the right people, for the right reason, and in the right manner – that is the mean and the best course, the course that is the mark of virtue. (NE, 1099^a)

Aristotle used this doctrine to distinguish the virtues from the vices, so that for every virtue there would be two corresponding vices of deficit and surfeit. Thus he would come up with a scheme such as:

(Adapted from Hinman, L. (1994) Ethics p. 298)

Unfortunately, other things that Aristotle says about the mean make it quite unusable as a guide to discriminating vices from virtues in real-life situations. For instance, Aristotle is clear that a disposition that counts as a virtue for a person need not be a virtue for all persons. The appropriate mean of any disposition differs from person to person. What is appropriate pride for a king is not appropriate for a peasant, who is likely to be seen as conceited. The doctrine of the mean does not help us in determining just how much pride either character can properly assume. The only advice that the doctrine gives is – whatever is right for you. So, though it looks like an interesting attempt at a criterion we would have to count it as one of Aristotle’s failures. (I think he would too since at 1138^b18-32 he recognises just this problem.)

Problems for Virtue Ethics

Epistemology

The problem of finding a criterion for the virtues has not gone away. The fundamental problem for any virtue ethics, given the resources that we’ve outlined above, is that it is not clear how it can answer the question: what, then, is the right thing to do? The only answer it seems able to give is: you should do what the virtuous man would do. But then you will ask: and how shall I recognise the virtuous man? And what answer can there be but: he is the one who always does the right thing. Unless we have a criterion for virtue which is non-circular, this looks like it’s going to be a permanent problem for any virtue ethics.

Conflict

Suppose we have a choice of actions that are honest but disloyal, loyal but unkind, kind but dishonest. How are we to make the judgement about which of these virtues is to take precedence?

Incompleteness

If aretaic ethics is going to be a competitor for the same philosophical ground as deontological or teleological ethics then it is going to have to be able to provide reasons for all the moral judgements that we think are required. That means that for every moral evaluation the virtue ethicist is going to have to maintain that there is a virtue whose expression in an action is going to be a sufficient reason to make the moral evaluation required. We have, as yet, no reason to believe that any such systematic correspondence between right actions and right dispositions will emerge. Rachels (p. 192) gives an example of a legislator who has to make a choice of allocations of moneys to various projects. If you select the one that seems likely to save the largest number of people in the long run, of what virtue is this an expression? The virtue of acting-like-an-utilitarian?