Critical Virtue Ethics

Since the publication of Anscombe’s famous paper “Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958), virtue ethics has become a matter of discussion among scholars. At least four charges have been raised against virtue ethics, one of which is the charge of promoting undue enthusiasm regarding the moral fitness of human beings. This article explores the limits of virtue ethics with regard to the frailty of human virtuousness. After giving a report of the charges raised against virtue ethics from the perspective of empirical ethics, the author presents the idea of what he would like to call critical virtue ethics as seen by three Lutheran thinkers: Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Luther himself. He will demonstrate that the empirical contestation of virtue ethics shows a remarkable resemblance to insights found in Luther, Kant and Nietzsche. And finally, the writer draws tentative conclusions about the future of critical virtue ethics.

2021

Abstract: This paper analyzes some influential ideas in virtue ethics. Alasdair MacIntyre, in his work After Virtue, and Elizabeth Anscombe, in his controversial essay “Modern Moral Philosophy”, brought fresh ideas into moral philosophy of their time changing views on contemporary morality. They strongly influenced moral philosophers who then followed their ideas. The two philosophers criticized contemporary moral philosophies such as emotivism, utilitarianism, deontology. Elizabeth Anscombe criticized also the use of the concepts of duty and moral obligation in the absence of God as the context God had no place. For solving the quests of modern morality, both MacIntyre and Anscombe proposed that the only solution was the returning to ancient Aristotelian virtues

Keywords: Virtue ethics, empirical ethics, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Luther.

This is an extract from my draft of the translation of my German book "Eine kritische Theorie der Tugendethik" that was published by Campus Verlag in 2023. The full draft can also be made available for private use only to scholars who have already published in the field.

Korean Journal of Ethics, 2016

Since Anscombe’s seminal essay “Modern Moral Philosophy (1958),” which asks us to restore the concept of virtues in moral discussions, virtue ethicists have strived either to reform the ancient Greek tradition of virtue cultivation for achieving happiness or to construct new virtue ethical systems based on modern philosophical literature, such as Hume’s and Nietzsche’s thoughts on virtues. Broadly examining the current spectrum of Aristotelian, Humean, and Nietzschean virtue ethical theories, this article argues that in order to develop virtue theories tailored to our contemporary times, virtue ethicists equally opt to dispense with the proper principles of defining virtue, which have been emphasized by the original philosophers. Given that such principles reflect the essences of their thoughts regarding the virtues of their periods, lacking the principles for defining virtue attests to the reduced practical applicability of virtue ethics to the moral problems in modern-day contemporary societies.

Ethics, 2004

These are boom years for the study of the virtues. Several new books have recently appeared that bring to the literature new ways of understanding virtue and new ways of developing virtue theoretical approaches to morality. This new work presents a richly interesting cluster of views, some of which take virtue to be the central or basic normative ethical notion, but some of which merely amend familiar consequentialist or deontological approaches by incorporating into them an articulated conception of the moral significance of virtue. We will focus on the more distinctive and ambitious recent theories of the former kind, theories that purport to exhibit virtue as the central or basic moral notion. This essay therefore focuses on Michael Slote's Morals from Motives,

Journal of Value Inquiry, 2021

Using research in social psychology, philosophers such as Gilbert Harman and John Doris argue that human beings do not have – and cannot acquire – character traits such as virtues. Along with defenders of virtue ethics such as Julia Annas and Rachana Kamtekar, they assume that this constitutes a dangerous attack on virtue ethics. I argue that even if virtues and vices did not exist and everyone accepted that truth, (1) we would continue to make attributions of character traits in our ordinary practices and institutions and (2) it would still be useful to strategically harness – rather than suppress or ignore – our virtue (and vice) attributions.

The paper reviews the history of applied ethics and applied virtue ethics in particular, before advancing to methodological issues and to a broad survey of recent work in applied areas of environmental virtue ethics, virtue jurisprudence, aretaic medical ethics, professional ethics, educational theory, civic virtue and deliberative democracy, and philosophy of love and sex. The paper concludes with reflections on the vibrancy of contemporary work in applied virtue ethics, along with discussion of prospects and challenges.

Critics of virtue ethics have argued that its focus on character rather than action, as well as its rejection of universal rules of right action renders virtue ethics unable to shed much light on the question of what ought and ought not to be done in specific situations. According to them, this explains why so few attempts have been made to apply virtue theory to specific moral questions. In this paper I aim to go some way towards developing a version of virtue theory that satisfies four constraints that applied ethics places upon moral theory: (1) the requirement that it present standards of right action; (2) a sensitivity to the complexity of moral life in multicultural and pluralistic societies; (3) an acceptance of the principle of universalisability as a necessary property of an ethical theory, and (4) the provision of a non-egoistic justification and explanation of universal rules and principles.

2001