In defense of the primacy of the virtues

2001

2016

This paper explores two objections to virtue ethics: the self-effacing objection, which holds that virtue ethics is problematic insofar as it presents a justification for the exercise of the virtues that cannot be appealed to as an agent’s motive for exercising them, and the self-centeredness objection, which holds that virtue ethics is egoistic and so fails to accommodate properly the sort of otherregarding concern that many take to be the distinctive aspect of a moral theory. I examine the relationship between these two objections as they apply to eudaimonistic virtue ethics. While defenders of eudaimonistic virtue ethics often appeal to self-effacement in order to deflect the selfcenteredness objection, I argue that there is nothing in the structure of eudaimonistic virtue ethics that makes it problematically self-centered. Analysis of the self-centeredness objection shows that self-centeredness is problematic only on the assumption that the self is egoistic. Because eudaimonisti...

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.

The Journal of Value Inquiry, 2021

Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy

In “Virtue and Right,” Robert Johnson argues that virtue ethics that accept standards such as Virtuous Agent (A’s x-ing is right in circumstances c iff a fully virtuous agent would x in c) are incomplete, since they cannot account for duties of moral self-improvement. In this paper I offer four solutions to the problem of incompleteness. The first discards Virtuous Agent and counts actions as wrong iff a vicious person would perform them. The second retains Virtuous Agent but counts self-improving actions as countererogatory: wrong but nonetheless good to do. The third replaces Virtuous Agent with a standard appealing to the Mengzian virtue of righteousness, understood as situational appropriateness. The fourth replaces Virtuous Agent with a standard that holds an action right if it promotes the agent’s virtue. Each solution accommodates duties of moral self-improvement, so a virtue ethics embracing any of them would not be incomplete.

American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 1997

In his "primer" on virtue ethics Steven Duncan attempts an interesting synthesis. He states that "there has been no full scale attempt to reconstruct morality . . . on the basis of an ethics of the virtues" [1]. He shoulders this heavy undertaking, hoping "to present a credible alternative to the other great traditions in ethics" [1]. For his new synthesis he draws on the natural law theory of Grisez and Finnis as well as the AristotelianThomistic theory of the virtues. This "modern" theory he hopes will withstand the scrutiny of contemporary criticism.

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 philosophical Investigations , 2023

What confers their value on genuine virtues, it is argued, consists in the intrinsic value that instantiating them in thought and action standardly brings about. This granted, virtue theory is argued to be capable of plugging a gap in consequentialist theories of the kind that make actions right which either exemplify optimific practices or are directly optimific. Compliance with optimific practices like truthtelling makes the relevant actions right, subject to certain exceptions. But even if such compliance is combined with the optimificity of beneficent actions, considered singly, that do not exemplify these practices, the resulting theory of rightness remains gap-ridden. The gap can be filled if it is granted that virtuous actions are generally optimific, and this knowledge is incorporated into consequentialist theories of rightness. Thus where no optimific practices are relevant, and no actions are manifestly directly optimific, dispositions of a generally optimific character (virtues) can rightly be adopted.

"The Collapse of Virtue Ethics"

Virtue’s Reasons, 2017

I. BACKGROUND TO THE VOLUME Over the past thirty years or so, virtues and reasons have emerged as two of the most fruitful and important concepts in contemporary moral philosophy. Virtue theory and moral psychology, for instance, are currently two burgeoning areas of philosophical investigation that involve different, but clearly related, focuses on individual agents' responsiveness to reasons. The virtues themselves are major components of current ethical theories whose approaches to substantive or normative issues remain remarkably divergent in other respects. The virtues are also increasingly important in a variety of new approaches to epistemology. Many writers have commented on the close connections between virtues and reasons: for instance between the ethical virtues-justice, courage, temperance, honesty, and so on-and the different ranges of morally relevant reasons that seem to be intimately, or even conceptually, tied to them. 1 Even so, the relationship is complicated, and it seems safe to say that no one has yet done justice to the complexity of the interconnections between virtues and reasons. To compound matters, the more recent growth of virtue epistemology, with its focus on the intellectual virtues, only makes the interconnections between virtues and reasons that much more challenging for anyone attempting to understand their relationship.