The Unity of Virtue and Goodness

2001

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,

The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, 2013

This essay examines the different answers that British moralists gave to the question ‘what does virtue consist in?’ Rather than as a royal road to present-day views in ethics, their answers are best understood when considered against the background of early modern natural law theories and their projected metaphysics of morals. The emerging ‘science of morality’ dealt with the metaphysical problem of determining what sort of thing virtue is. Considered from this vantage point, the British moralists struggled with the problem of deciding whether moral concepts signify laws of nature, rational drives in human beings, irrational drives in human beings, volitions of a legislator, or social institutions. British moral philosophies in the eighteenth century can be divided up according to whether they defended the thesis that moral qualities are artificial, the thesis that they are part of nature, or the thesis that they are the product of historical experience.

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.

To have a virtue is to possess a certain kind of trait of character that is appropriate in pursuing the moral good at which the virtue aims. Human beings are assumed to be capable of attaining those traits. Yet, a number of scholars are skeptical about the very existence of such character traits. They claim a sizable amount of empirical evidence in their support. This article is concerned with the existence and explanatory power of character as a way to assess the possibility of achieving moral virtue, with particular attention paid to business context. I aim to unsettle the so-called situationist challenge to virtue ethics. In the course of this article, I shall defend four claims, namely, that virtues are more than just behavioral dispositions, that at least some virtues may not be unitary traits, that psychologists cannot infer virtues from overt behavior, and that the situationist data do not account for the observational equivalence of traits. Since it rests on a misconception of what virtue is, the situationist objection remains unconvincing.

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...

Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy, 2009

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.

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.

Philosophical Quarterly, 2017