Virtue ethics

3. The good of the agent and the demandingness of morality

A pure form of virtue ethics will suggest that virtuous properties – ‘thick’ properties as opposed to thin properties such as ‘rightness’ and ‘goodness’ – of actions constitute our only reasons for performing them. Aristotle came close to this position, but it is perhaps more plausible to interpret him as claiming that the rationality of virtue lies in its promotion of the agent’s eudaimonia. Aristotle’s view is nevertheless radical. Since my eudaimonia consists only in the exercise of the virtues, I have no reason to live a non-virtuous life.

More common than pure forms of virtue ethics are pluralistic views according to which there are other reason-constituting properties, some perhaps of the kind advocated by utilitarians and Kantians. The open-mindedness of virtue ethics contrasts sharply at this point with what Bernard Williams (1985) has identified as the peculiar narrowness of focus in modern ethics (see Williams, B.A.O.). Considerations other than the moral are relevant to the question of how one should live. Modern virtue ethicists can thus adopt a position on the demandingness of morality between the extremes of Aristotle and their modern opponents. For they need claim neither that self-interest is constituted entirely by being moral nor that morality completely overrides self-interest.

Much of virtue theory has been concerned to develop Williams’ criticism of utilitarianism and Kantianism that through their impersonality and impartiality, utilitarianism and Kantianism violate the integrity of moral agents (see INTEGRITY). Philippa Foot has developed these critical arguments in a direction favourable to virtue ethics. According to both the principle of utility and the Kantian categorical imperative, moral reasons, being universal, are independent of the desires of agents. Foot (1978), impressed by the rationality of fulfilling one’s own desires, has argued that moral reasons do depend on the desires of the agent, so that a person who acts consistently ungenerously may be described as ungenerous, but not necessarily as having any reason to act generously, unless they have a desire which would thereby be fulfilled. Foot is here expressing a doubt similar to Anscombe’s about the possibility of ungrounded ‘ought’ judgments.