Virtue ethics

4. Agency and motivation

Imagine that you are thanking a friend for visiting you in hospital. She replies, ‘Oh, it was nothing. It was obvious that morality required me to come.’ This case, taken from an influential article by Michael Stocker (1976), and related to the discussion in the previous section concerning the demandingness of morality and the pervasiveness of the moral point of view, serves to illustrate an ideal of agency which lies implicit in much modern ethical theory (see Moral motivation; Moral realism). The unattractiveness of this ideal can be avoided by utilitarians, who may argue that thinking in the way your friend did about morality is likely to be self-defeating in utilitarian terms. Even the utilitarians, however, can be charged with missing the point. What is wrong with your friend is not that moral thinking like hers fails to maximize utility. Nevertheless, the case constitutes a far more serious problem for Kantians, given Kant’s insistence on the explicit testing of courses of action using the categorical imperative, and his view that the moral worth of an action lies entirely in its being done out of a sense of duty.

Modern virtue ethicists such as Lawrence Blum (1980) have endeavoured to replace this conception of moral agency with a virtue-centred ideal allowing agents to be moved directly by emotional concern for others. This ideal can once again be seen as emerging from Anscombe’s attack on the notion of duty. A morality of duty is said to pay insufficient attention to the inner life: the dutiful agent is not doing, or feeling, enough (this criticism is an interesting counterpoint to the accusation that Kantianism is excessively demanding). The charge, then, is not only that modern moral theory fails to provide plausible justifying reasons for action, but that the motivational structure of what is clearly moral agency is quite different from what the theories lead us to expect. Moral agency consists at least partly in acting and feeling in ways prompted by bonds of partiality, requiring no further backing from impersonal ethical theory (see Friendship §4).