Virtue ethics

5. Universality and tradition

We have already seen how some virtue theorists link moral reasons to motivation. This is one route to a narrowing of the scope of moral reasons. Without any motivation to do so, there is no reason, say, to maximize utility or respect the moral law. Another route is followed by writers such as Alasdair MacIntyre who ground moral rationality in traditions.

MacIntyre’s critique of modern ethical theory, outlined in After Virtue (1981), is the most stringent in virtue theory. He claims that present moral discussion is literal nonsense: we unreflectively use a mix of concepts left over from moribund traditions; since these traditions are incommensurable, arguments using concepts from rival traditions are irresoluble and interminable. MacIntyre does not, however, follow through the implications of this critique into a Nietzschean moral scepticism, advocating instead a return to Aristotelian virtue ethics (see Nietzsche, F.). The question of how he accomplishes this is an example of a puzzle about virtue theory present since Anscombe’s original article: after the sustained critique of modern ethical theory by virtue theorists, is the remaining conceptual apparatus sufficiently strong to support an alternative prescriptive ethics?

The relationship between modern virtue ethicists and Aristotle is complex. Most virtue ethicists, including Foot and MacIntyre, combine an Aristotelian emphasis on the virtues with a modern scepticism about the possibility of an objective theory of the good for an individual. Likewise, MacIntyre’s stress on the importance of context is quite Aristotelian, but the relativism to which this leads him would be anathema to Aristotle (see Moral relativism). MacIntyre claims that goods are internal to practices, and not assessable from some external point of view, while Aristotle believed that teleological reflection on universal human nature enabled one to identify those practices which are good haplōs, ‘simply good’.

The relativism of modern virtue ethics has emerged also in political theory in the debate between communitarians, such as MacIntyre, and liberals (see Community and communitarianism; Liberalism). Along with a predilection for virtue-centred over rule-centred ethics go preferences for the local and particular to the universal, the specific to the general, the embedded to the abstracted, the communal to the individual, the inexplicit to the explicit, the traditional to the revised, the partial to the impartial. In MacIntyre’s work, the notion of goods internal to diachronic practices and grounded in traditions is tied to a criticism of a free-floating liberal self, choosing goods from some Archimedean standpoint. MacIntyre’s narrative conception of a self opens another door for the readmittance of the notion of character into moral philosophy.

The most serious problem for relativism has yet to be resolved in modern virtue ethics. What are we to say of practices and ways of life constituting internally coherent traditions, yet containing undeniably evil components?