On the Practicality of Virtue Ethics

The Journal of Ethics

Several philosophers have recently claimed to have discovered a new and rather significant problem with virtue ethics. According to them, virtue ethics generates certain expectations about the behavior of human beings which are subject to empirical testing. But when the relevant experimental work is done in social psychology, the results fall remarkably short of meeting those expectations. So, these philosophers think, despite its recent success, virtue ethics has far less to offer to contemporary ethical theory than might have been initially thought. I argue that there are plausible ways in which virtue ethicists can resist arguments based on empirical work in social psychology. In the first three sections of the paper, I reconstruct the line of reasoning being used against virtue ethics by looking at the recent work of Gilbert Harman and John Doris. The remainder of the paper is then devoted both to responding to their challenge as well as to briefly sketching a positive account o...

2003

Recently there has been a striking revival of what has been called virtue ethics: a kind of ethical theory whose basis is virtue and character, and which takes the primary ethical issue to be that of what kind of person I should aim to be. In everyday life we trouble and the more familiar kinds of objection would not even be necessary. It is this objection I will be discussing today. To construct a virtue ethics, we have to begin by answering the question, what is a virtue? We can come up with a few examples-courage, generosity and fairness are virtues. But what makes them virtues? A reasonable and intuitive answer is that a virtue is a disposition-a way I am as a matter of disposition and character. This is common to most accounts of virtue. For if someone is generous, say, that is an aspect of his character, and that is just to say that it is true of him that he is generous-not just on occasion, but as a matter of disposition, across his life. Even otherwise thin accounts of virtue, such as Hume's, make this point: a virtue is something stable and reliable. Virtues, then, are dispositions or what are called in psychology character traits. (Of course there is a lot more to be said about what virtues are, but this is the point most relevant to the current debate.) Recently some philosophers, using psychological research, have claimed that a dispositional, character trait account of virtue presupposes claims about our moral psychology which are false. We just don't have dispositions or character traits of the kind the virtues would have to be. If so, then virtue ethics would be stymied at the very start, since it would rest on a false view of our psychology and what we are capable of. For we do take virtues to be dispositions in a substantial way. We see Jane act bravely on one occasion, say in rescuing a child from a dog. We think that Jane is brave, where this includes two thoughts: that Jane will continue to act bravely in this sort of situation (physical danger and risk), and that Jane will act bravely in a wide range of different situations where bravery may be called for. When, that is, we ascribe a virtue, we are ascribing a disposition which is robust, producing brave actions in a reliable way and one which is relevant to Jane's life overall, and thus global. In everyday life, we often recognize that seeing Jane act in one type of situation is insufficient grounds for thinking her to be brave, period. The recent claim is that we are in worse shape than we think; our ascriptions of virtue and character are deeply in

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.

Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society ( …, 2000

"The Collapse of Virtue Ethics"

Journal of Research in Personality, 2009

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Philosophical situationists regarding the infl uences on moral behaviour like Harman, Doris and Merritt, argue that personality is far more fragmented than virtue ethicists are prepared to acknowledge. Because of this, they claim that moral character and virtue as traditionally conceived are not psychologically robust. Nancy E. Snow rightly takes the situationist challenge seriously. Her Virtue as Social Intelligence: An Empirically Grounded Theory reports that contemporary virtue ethics remains largely divorced from psychology, and thus is vulnerable to the philosophical situationist challenge. Snow is devoted to solving this problem by articulating an empirically grounded theory of virtue, which is used to respond to the philosophical situationists’ scepticism.

2001

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.