Overview
Virtue ethics is at least three things: a thriving research program in contemporary analytic philosophy (critiquing and defending neo-Aristotelian, neo-Kantian, and neo-Humean virtue theories); a thriving research program in the history of philosophy (discovering fresh readings of Confucius, the Stoics, and even Nietzsche) – and a dynamic system of concepts finding their way into applied sciences (such as medicine) and social sciences (such as sociology, psychology, and political science). This confluence of activity makes virtue ethics broadly construed one of the most dynamic and exciting areas of academic inquiry today.
Wisdom
Philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom. Some acquire it. Some do not.
Sophistry is false wisdom – the appearance of wisdom without the reality. Real wisdom sometimes appears wise, but sometimes does not. So if someone appears wise, you must test them to see if they really are so. And if someone does not appear wise, you still must test them to see if they really are. If someone appears wise, they may be a mere – brilliant – sophist, or they may really be a wise man.
Our goal is to acquire wisdom. What is wisdom? The Greek word is phronesis. The Latin, prudentia. Prudence, discernment, practical wisdom.
Wisdom is more than knowledge, something different than skill. It is a combination of “know-that” and “know-how.”
Practical Reason
Wisdom is the excellence of practical reason. What is practical reason? Practical reason is the human capacity to act according to reasons. Put differently, it is the human capacity to deliberate and to act upon the deliberation.
Virtues
So the wise man (using ‘man’ gender neutrally) assesses all the relevant reasons for and against an action and chooses wisely. The wise man acts well. Since life is a series of actions in given circumstances, the wise man lives well. Wisdom is partially revealed in knowledge and skill; it is most perfectly demonstrated in a life well lived.
All the excellences are virtues. All the virtues are excellences of practical reason, but there are many other excellences of a man corresponding to his other faculties. Speed, flexibility, and beauty of face and figure are virtues of the body. These do not make a man as admirable as honor, honesty, or courage, but they do make him admirable. We admire the fleet of foot – we watch them on the Olympics on TV! Memory, good humor, and patience, and are excellences of the mind and heart. The excellences of practical reason are the most admirable, the most humane, and the most human.
Wisdom as Virtue
These do not make a man so admirable as the virtuous man, but we do admire them. So what makes wisdom different? Wisdom is a virtue. And it is the first and last virtue. Courage without wisdom becomes rashness. Honesty without wisdom becomes tactlessness. Honor without wisdom becomes pride. So wisdom is the touchstone virtue; it is the root and crown of the other virtues, a sine qua non.
Practical Reason as human nature
Practical reasoning is human nature. What we are is practical, rational animals. Animal is our species and practical reasoner is our differentia. Dante Alighieri said:
What this functìon is will be evident if we point out the distinctive capacity of humanity as a whole. I say, therefore, that no faculty shared by many things diverse in species is the differentiating characteristic of any one of them. For since the differentiating characteristic determines species, it would follow that one essence would be specific to many species, which is impossible. So the differentiating characteristic in man is not simple existence, for that is shared by the elements ; ^ nor existence in combination, for that is met with in minerals; nor existence animate, for that is found in plants;^ nor existence intelligent, for that is participated in by the brutes; but the characteristic competent to man alone, and to none other above or below him, is existence intelligent through the potential intellect.(Intellectus possibilis)
Other beings (if such exist) might have active intellect; we alone have passive intellect, that is, potential intellect. The most significant fact about humans is that we can learn. And we don’t just learn via adaptation or instinct; we learn via reflection, planning, deliberation, discussion. By means of this rational activity we don’t just more than our animal neighbors about concrete situations and objects; we learn about abstract, formal, necessary relations like mathematical and logical relations, conceptual truths, language and images, art and science, and so on.
That we learn in such a way about such things accounts for all the differences between us and our animal neighbors: our clothes, our odd and varied houses, our societies, our sins and crimes, our jokes and movies, our tools and farms, our beer and cheese – all these depend on the perilous possibility that we might actualize potential intellect.
Happiness
Happiness is the human telos, end, or purpose. It’s what we are here for. It’s why we live. We do not thrive in order to survive, we survive in order to thrive. What is happiness?
The Greek eudaimonia is a total human flourishing. Like a bee buzzing in the hive actively producing honey, like a star burning fully brightly in the heavens, like a deer leaping through the forest, like a spider building a web and laying eggs, happiness is an activity – the complete and utter humming and buzzing at the top of his game. The happy person is first and foremost active. We must forever banish from our imaginations the picture of a stupefied, ecstatic hedonist, lost in pleasure. The happy person is clear-eyed, laser-focused on the goal, and moving with astonishing rapidity and efficiency towards that goal.
Happiness is the natural human end. It is, if you like, encoded in our DNA. It is the basis of human culture and civilization, from the far distant southern tribes of Australia and Africa to the cold and persistent northern tribes of Alaska and Iceland.
One or many?
Happiness is not a unitary possession. As Wendell Barry says of health, I say of happiness: the smallest unit is the community. There is no such thing as the happy loner. Yet happiness when it comes to dwell among a community as a whole comes to dwell within each man as an individual. There is, in the happy city, no distinction between your good and my good; only a distinction between you and me – but it is our good. Hence the traditional dichotomy underlying the problems that so plague Kantian and consequentialist thinkers like Peter Singer is disolved. The pursuit of wisdom is not “selfish” nor “altruistic.” It is, simply, desirable. It is recommended. It is the thing to do.
My view and objections
My view can be dispatched in a few words. After laying out my contemoprary expression of what is more or less a traditional picture of human life in context of nature, I proceed to the interesting bits: objections.
For various reasons – some historical, some sociological – many are simply unaware of the many charms and overwhelming plausibility of the truth of the view to which I ascribe. Mere confrontation with the view should challenge all and persuade some.
For other reasons – some philosophically robust and quite difficult, others merely prejudicial – some academics deny the truth of my view and are opposed to it. For such, a detailed presentation of their objections and discussion of the merits of the view
In more detail
What is Virtue?
In this section I discuss a few prominent accounts of virtue before supplying my own.
What is practical reason?
In this section, I discuss a few prominent controversies about practical reason and rationality and supply my own answer.
What is happiness?
In this section, I discuss a few controversies surrounding the notion of happiness and supply a plausible answer.
What is our telos?
Building on the previous section, in this section I clear away misconceptions about ‘natural teleology’, building a novel account that draws on philosophy, biology, cosmology, and psychology.
Objections
There are no virtues, because there are no stable character traits (Gilbert Harman).
Objection:
The most recent objection (vii) to virtue ethics claims that work in “situationist” social psychology shows that there are no such things as character traits and thereby no such things as virtues for virtue ethics to be about (Doris 1998; Harman 1999). But virtue ethicists claim in response that the social psychologists’ studies are irrelevant to the multi-track disposition (see above) that a virtue is supposed to be (Sreenivasan 2002). Mindful of just how multi-track it is, they agree that it would be reckless in the extreme to ascribe a demanding virtue such as charity to people of whom they know no more than that they have exhibited conventional decency; this would indeed be “a fundamental attribution error.” There have been other responses as well (summarized helpfully in Prinz 2009), notably that of Adams, echoing Merritt (Merritt 2000; Adams 2006). Adams steers a middle road between “no character traits at all” and the exacting standard of the Aristotelian conception of virtue which, because of its emphasis on phronesis, requires a high level of character integration. On his conception, character traits may be “frail and fragmentary” but still virtues, and not uncommon. But giving up the idea that practical wisdom is the heart of all the virtues, as Adams has to do, is a substantial sacrifice, as Kamtekar (2010) argues. Even though the “situationist challenge” has left traditional virtue ethicists unmoved, it has generated a healthy engagement with empirical psychological literature amongst them (Russell 2009 Part III; Annas 2011), which has also been fuelled by the growing literature on Foot’s Natural Goodness and, quite independently, an upsurge of interest in character education (see below).[@sepvirtue]
Answer: Aristotle’s psychology:
“Next we must consider what virtue is. Since things that are found in the soul are of three kinds- passions, faculties, states of character, virtue must be one of these. By passions I mean appetite, anger, fear, confidence, envy, joy, friendly feeling, hatred, longing, emulation, pity, and in general the feelings that are accompanied by pleasure or pain; by faculties the things in virtue of which we are said to be capable of feeling these, e.g. of becoming angry or being pained or feeling pity; by states of character the things in virtue of which we stand well or badly with reference to the passions, e.g. with reference to anger we stand badly if we feel it violently or too weakly, and well if we feel it moderately; and similarly with reference to the other passions. Now neither the virtues nor the vices are passions, because we are not called good or bad on the ground of our passions, but are so called on the ground of our virtues and our vices, and because we are neither praised nor blamed for our passions (for the man who feels fear or anger is not praised, nor is the man who simply feels anger blamed, but the man who feels it in a certain way), but for our virtues and our vices we are praised or blamed. Again, we feel anger and fear without choice, but the virtues are modes of choice or involve choice. Further, in respect of the passions we are said to be moved, but in respect of the virtues and the vices we are said not to be moved but to be disposed in a particular way. For these reasons also they are not faculties; for we are neither called good nor bad, nor praised nor blamed, for the simple capacity of feeling the passions; again, we have the faculties by nature, but we are not made good or bad by nature; we have spoken of this before. If, then, the virtues are neither passions nor faculties, all that remains is that they should be states of character.”[@aristotle NE II.5]
Virtue is not a passion nor a faculty but a state of character.
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The pursuit of virtue is selfish or egoistic (Hursthouse, citing?); “-(vi) The egoism objection has a number of sources. One is a simple confusion. Once it is understood that the fully virtuous agent characteristically does what she should without inner conflict, it is triumphantly asserted that “she is only doing what she wants to do and is hence being selfish.” So when the generous person gives gladly, as the generous are wont to do, it turns out she is not generous and unselfish after all, or at least not as generous as the one who greedily wants to hang on to everything she has but forces herself to give because she thinks she should! A related version ascribes bizarre reasons to the virtuous agent, unjustifiably assuming that she acts as she does because she believes that acting thus on this occasion will help her to achieve eudaimonia. But “the virtuous agent” is just “the agent with the virtues” and it is part of our ordinary understanding of the virtue terms that each carries with it its own typical range of reasons for acting. The virtuous agent acts as she does because she believes that someone’s suffering will be averted, or someone benefited, or the truth established, or a debt repaid, or … thereby.”
- Virtues are not codifiable and so not action-guiding (Hursthouse, citing? McDowell responds; Sanford responds)
- Human nature is a “mess” and so the virtues cannot be perfections of our nature (Bernard Williams and others; Hursthouse responds)
- There is no such thing as a biological “nature” anyway (a powerful – if vague Darwinian objection from metaphysics); Hursthouse responds, Brown offers?;
- Stephen Brown’s Darwinian objection that “happiness” of our species is gene propogation, which seems to transform ethics into a descriptive discipline;
- Ruth Millikan’s objection that an organism’s proper function cannot be read off its capacities but must be known via empirical history;
- the objection from Rehg, Lenman, and others that neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics is not “naturalistic”, and more.
- We have four characteristic ends, (hursthouse).
- Teleology does not exist naturally, only socially or psychologically. The rest of teleology is “projected” by us onto an unthinking, purposeless, nature.
- We cannot know what is virtuous until we know what our end is.
- The notion of a “human telos” is facistic.
- The notion of virtue is inherently racist, sexist, classist, and elitist.
- Virtue accounts are culturally relative (MacIntyre responds; Solomon responds, Nussbaum responds;)
Tree of Virtues, the Way of Life handout