Of Law, Virtue and Justice

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

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.

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.

2001

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.

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,

Virtue Ethics: Retrospect and Prospect

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American Philosophical Quarterly, 1990

THE past fifteen years have witnessed a dramatic resurgence of philosophical interest in the vir? tues. The charge that modern philosophical thought neglects the virtues (Becker 1975, Von Wright 1963, Taylor in French, Wettstein, and Uehling 1988), once apposite, is by now outmoded; and the calls for a renewed investigation of virtue and virtue ethics are being answered from many quarters. What has been missing to date is any systematic guide to the plethora of issues, charges, claims, and counter-claims raised in recent work on the ...

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.