Philosopher views

VIRTUE ETHICS ARE NECESSARY

1. CHARACTER TRAITS EXIST PRIOR TO OBLIGATION

Roger Crisp, Fellow at St Anne’s College, Oxford, and Michael Slote, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland, VIRTUE ETHICS, 1997, p. 4

We saw earlier that virtue ethics differs from other forms of moral philosophy through its insistence that aretaic notions like virtue, admirability, and excellence are more basic than--or even replace--deontic notions like moral obligation and rightness. Clearly, what Anscombe says about the emptiness of attributions of moral obligation favours virtue ethics, so understood, over other approaches that have been taken in the recent history of ethics. What also argues in favour of virtue ethics, however, is the fact that, unlike moral philosophers 'since Sidgwick', Plato and Aristotle appear to consider certain actions out of bounds independently of considerations of consequences. Given the 'corruption' of the opposite view, this should encourage us (once we have done our homework in philosophical psychology) to pursue an ethics more like Plato's or Aristotle's and in particular, then, an ethics with a distinctly virtue‑ethical commitment to making virtuous character or character traits central to ethical concern.

G.E.M. Anscombe, Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge VIRTUE ETHICS, 1997, p. 31

To have a law conception of ethics is to hold that what is needed for conformity with the virtues failure in which is the mark of being bad qua man (and not merely, say, qua craftsman or logician)‑that what is needed for this, is required by divine law. Naturally it is not possible to have such a conception unless you believe in God as a law‑giver; like Jews, Stoics, and Christians. But if such a conception is dominant for many centuries, and then is given up, it is a natural result that the concepts of 'obligation', of being bound or required as by a law, should remain though they had lost their root; and if the word 'ought' has become invested in certain contexts with the sense of 'obligation', it too will remain to be spoken with a special emphasis and a special feeling in these contexts. It is as if the notion 'criminal' were to remain when criminal law and criminal courts had been abolished and forgotten. A Hume discovering this situation might conclude that there was a special sentiment, expressed by 'criminal', which alone gave the word its sense. So Hume discovered the situation in which the notion 'obligation' survived, and the word 'ought' was invested with that peculiar force having which it is said to be used in a ‘moral' sense, but in which the belief in divine law had long since been abandoned: for it was substantially given up among Protestants at the time of the Reformation. The situation, if I am right, was the interesting one of the survival of a concept outside the framework of thought that made it a really intelligible one.
3. VIRTUES WORK WITHOUT METAPHYSICAL BIOLOGY

Alasdair MacIntyre, Duke University VIRTUE ETHICS, 1997, p. 134

The time has come to ask the question of how far this partial account a core conception of the virtues‑and I need to emphasize that all have offered so far is the first stage of such an account‑is faithful to; tradition which I delineated. How far, for example, and in what ways is it Aristotelian? It is‑happily‑not Aristotelian in two ways in w good deal of the rest of the tradition also dissents from Aristotle. First, although this account of the virtues is teleological, it does not require identification of any teleology in nature, and hence it does not require any allegiance to Aristotle's metaphysical biology. And secondly, just because of the multiplicity of human practices and the consequent multiplicity of goods in the pursuit of which the virtues may be exercised‑goods which will often be contingently incompatible and which will therefore make rival claims upon our allegiance‑conflict will not spring solely from flaws in individual character. But it was just on these two matters that Aristotle’s general account of the virtues seemed most vulnerable; hence if it turns out to be the case that this socially teleological account can support Aristotle’s general account of the virtues as well as does his own biologically teleological account, these differences from Aristotle himself may well be regarded as strengthening rather than weakening the case for a generally Aristotelian standpoint.

VIRTUE ETHICS WORK BEST

1. NEED A TELOS TO AVOID ARBITRARY DECISION

John McDowell, Professor at University of Pittsburgh, VIRTUE ETHICS, 1997, p. 140

Ought we always at a certain point just to give up in the interests of the practice itself? The medieval exponents of the virtue of patience claimed that there are certain types of situation in which the virtue of patience requires that I do not ever give up on some person or task, situations in which, as they would have put it, I am required to embody in my attitude to that person or task something of the patient attitude of God towards his creation. But this could only be so if patience served some overriding good, some telos which warranted putting other goods in a subordinate place. Thus it turns out that the content of the virtue of patience depends upon how we order various goods in a hierarchy and a fortiori on whether we are able rationally so to order these particular goods. I have suggested so far that unless there is a telos which transcends the limited goods of practices by constituting the good of a whole human life, the good of a human life conceived as a unity, it will both be the case that a certain subversive arbitrariness will invade the moral life and that we shall be unable to specify the context of certain virtues adequately. These two considerations are reinforced by a third: that there is at least one virtue recognized by the tradition which cannot be specified at all except with reference to the wholeness of a human life‑the virtue of integrity or constancy. 'Purity of heart', said Kierkegaard, 'is to will one thing.' This notion of singleness of purpose in a whole life can have no application unless that of a whole life does.

John McDowell, Professor at University of Pittsburgh, VIRTUE ETHICS, 1997, p. 161

It seems plausible that Plato's ethical Forms are, in part at least, a response to uncodifiability: if one cannot formulate what someone has come to know when he cottons onto a practice, say one of concept-application, it is natural to say that he has seen something. Now in the passage quoted in §4, Cavell mentions two ways of avoiding vertigo: 'the grasping of universals' as well as what we have been concerned with so far, 'the grasping of books of rules'. But though Plato's Forms are a myth, they are not a consolation, a mere avoidance of vertigo; vision of them is portrayed as too difficult an attainment for that to be so. The remoteness of the Form of the Good is a metaphorical version of the thesis that value is not in the world, utterly distinct from the dreary literal version which has obsessed recent moral philosophy. The point of the metaphor is the colos­sal difficulty of attaining a capacity to cope clear‑sightedly with the ethical reality which is part of our world. Unlike other philosophical responses to uncodifiability, this one may actually work towards moral improvement; negatively, by inducing humility, and positively, by an inspiring effect akin to that of a religious conversion.
3. VIRTUE ETHICS EMBODIES KNOWLEDGE OF THE VIRTUOUS

John McDowell, Professor at University of Pittsburgh, VIRTUE ETHICS, 1997, p. 142

A kind person can be relied on to behave kindly when that is what the situation requires. Moreover, his reliably kind behaviour is not the outcome of a blind, non-rational habit or instinct, like the courageous behaviour-so called only be courtesy-of a lioness defending her cubs. Rather, that the situation requires a certain sort of behaviour is (one way of formulating) his reason for behaving in that way, on each of the relevant occasions. So it must be something of which, on each of the relevant occasions, he is aware. A kind person has a reliable sensitivity to a certain sort of requirement which situations impose on behaviour. The deliverances of a reliable sensitivity are cases of knowledge; and there are idioms according to which the sensitivity itself can appropriately be described as knowledge: a kind person knows what it is like to be confronted with a requirement of kindness. The sensitivity is, we might say, a sort of perceptual capacity.