Virtue Ethics

What is the enduring challenge to virtue-ethics? What is Hursthouse’s response?

While deontologist and consequentialist theories focus on praxis (what to do), virtue ethics focuses on hexis (character). As such, the most enduring challenge to VE is the charge that it fails to be action-guiding. While it issues judgements about a person’s character, like “one should be kind” and “one should be just”, it offers no decision procedure for the agent and hence no guidance when facing specific moral dilemmas.

It does not follow that VE is unable to provide guidance on right action - we can derive right action from virtue. Hursthouse defines right action as the action that a completely virtuous person would characteristically do in such a situation.

Is Hursthouse’s response successful?

However, this response can appear trivial and/or circular. Sure, right action is action characteristic of a similarly situated virtuous person, one might say, but only because a completely virtuous person is a person who characteristically does right actions.

In response, the virtue ethicist merely has to reject that the completely virtuous person always acts rightly by definition, even if they do so in practice. Rather, the completely virtuous agent is defined as the kind, just, honest etc. person, completely independently of a prior conception of right action. When framed in this way, Hursthouse’s definition is not circular but action-guiding.

What is the challenge of self-improvement?

Johnson attacks Hursthouse’s definition of right action on the basis that there are many actions that appear right but would be entirely uncharacteristic of a completely virtuous person, particularly those of the moral novice striving for moral improvement and practicing self-control.

For example, an intemperate individual would do well to avoid situations where he may be tempted by his appetites, to seek counselling, or to put in place support-structures to make it easier to resist temptation. However, the completely virtuous agent would have no need to remedy or mitigate a lack of virtue because, definitionally, he is completely virtuous.

A similar objection, by Swanton, points out that a person who needs to apologize or make amends is doing something a perfectly virtuous agent would never need to do, since they would not have done wrong in the first place.

What is the practical objection to Hursthouse’s definition?

A common objection holds that the prescription ‘do what the virtuous agent would do in these circumstances,’ offers no practical guidance unless one is already virtuous – in which case guidance would be unnecessary. The less than virtuous, who are unfamiliar with the virtues and have a poor conception of what it is to be virtuous, would struggle to even identify a virtuous person, or imagine what a virtuous person would do in that situation.

What is the v-rules response?

The virtue ethicist responds by rejecting the idea that virtue ethics relies solely on abstract appeal to an ideal agent. Rather, it provides a substantial body of action-guiding prescriptions in the form of ‘v-rules.’ These include positive injunctions such as “do what is kind” and negative injunctions like “do not be dishonest.”

Is the v-rules response successful?

However, one could argue that the less than virtuous person may still struggle to apply v-rules just as much as they struggle to apply Hursthouse’s original definition of right action.

If an agent lacks an adequate understanding of virtue, they may equally lack an adequate grasp of virtuous concepts such as kindness, justice, honesty, and what these require in practice. For example, an agent might sincerely believe that making harsh remarks about someone’s appearance is not unkind on the grounds that “the kind thing to do is always to tell the truth.”

Further, even those with a generally adequate conception of the virtues may still find rules like ‘do what is honest’ or ‘do not be cruel’ to be far too vague to action-guiding. In a pluralistic society, what one person calls “courageous”, another might call “reckless.”

Why is this problem not one that only VE faces?

However, it must be noted that competing theories of right action face the same difficulty.

Deontological rules, such as ‘do not harm others’ or ‘help other people’, are equally vague and rely on terms which are at least as evaluative as those employed in the v-rules. Even a standard rule like “do not murder” requires agents to judge whether a particular killing counts as murder or justified self-defence.

Likewise, consequentialist theories rely on evaluative notions such as “happiness,” “welfare,” or “the good,” all of which demand substantive judgment. Virtue ethics is therefore no worse off than its rivals in guiding imperfect agents, and its refusal to offer a mechanical decision procedure should not be seen as a fatal flaw.

Final point on V-rules:

Finally, I believe that most people possess a reasonably robust, if imperfect, grasp of core moral concepts such as fairness, kindness, and justice, acquired through education, social practices, and ordinary interpersonal experience. While such understanding may be fallible and revisable, it is typically sufficient to guide everyday moral action.

What is the criticism of conflict between virtues?

A standard criticism of virtue ethics is the charge that, in certain situations, the different virtues give incompatible recommendations, leaving the agent without clear action guidance exactly when they need it most.

For example, honesty might demand revealing a painful truth whereas kindness recommends silence. There seems no way to resolve said conflict since the virtues are in a sense incommensurable. 

What is the classic response to the conflict issue?

The classic response is the unity of the virtues thesis, famously defended by Aristotle.  The virtues are not a collection of independent character traits that happen to pull in different directions - they are inextricably linked and unified by practical wisdom (phronesis), a single indivisible capacity to perceive what is genuinely good in any situation.

Because phronesis is the common root of all the virtues, a person who truly possesses one virtue possesses them all. There is therefore no independent "honesty faculty" and "kindness faculty" to pull in opposite directions; there is only the single, unified judgment of the phronimos about what the situation calls for.

Under this view, genuine conflict between virtues is an illusion. If honesty and kindness seem to conflict, it is because we have an incomplete understanding of what those virtues truly require in a specific context. A truly kind person, for example, would not conceal a devastating truth from someone in a way that undermines their agency. For the phronimos, the requirements of kindness will already be ‘honesty-sensitive’ and honesty will be ‘kindness-sensitive.’ Conflict is therefore a symptom of a learner’s incomplete habituation.

Is this a compelling solution to the conflict issue?

Since the resolution of conflict is somehow secured by definitional fiat, the unity of the virtues thesis doesn’t solve the problem of conflict so much as it stipulates it out of existence. It fails to provide a procedure for the imperfect agent to deal with, what they perceive as, dilemmas by simply promising that, for the perfectly wise, there is no problem.

What does Swanton argue with respect to conflict?

Christine Swanton rejects the idea that the virtues must be unified or harmonious, and develops a target-centred alternative. On her view, each virtue is a disposition to respond well to the normatively significant features in its own distinct field - for example, courage responds to threats and fear, generosity to others’ well-being, and justice to fairness - and the “target” of a virtue is what that virtue aims to hit in its field.

What should we do in situations of conflict, on Swanton’s view?

When virtues pull in different directions, we should recognise the competing demands rather than assume they must cohere.

The agent must carefully attend to the salient features of the particular context to decide which virtue’s target ought to be prioritised. Moral judgment involves a plurality of considerations that interact differently across cases. Sometimes a certain consideration is decisive, sometimes it is combined with other considerations, and sometimes it is set aside altogether.

This is why we need practical wisdom to perceive what matters morally in the particular circumstances. The existence of conflict is what makes the virtue of phronesis necessary in the first place. Without moral conflict, practical wisdom would have very little work to do.

What solves the charge of virtue as faults?

A common charge is that virtues can sometimes look like faults: we speak of people being “too generous” or “too honest.” However, genuine virtue is always guided by phronesis, which determines what is appropriate in the circumstances.

Hence, it would be impossible for someone with the virtue of generosity to be too generous, or someone with the virtue of honesty to be too honest. Someone who appears this way would not actually be in possession of the virtue, since this would entail practical wisdom.

Introduce tragic dilemmas:

What about those rare occasions where conflict is not merely apparent but genuine? Tragic dilemmas seem to pose the challenge to virtue ethics as these are situations where every available option involves serious wrongdoing or moral loss. Critics argue that if a virtuous agent lies, kills or betrays trust to avoid greater evil in a tragic dilemma, then they must be acting unjustly or dishonestly, and would therefore cease to be virtuous.

What is the VE response to tragic dilemmas?

However, a virtuous agent forced into a tragic dilemma does not act unjustly or dishonestly in the way a vicious agent does. Rather, they act with immense pain and deep regret over the circumstances that made their terrible action necessary. The agent may rightly feel regret, remorse, or the need to apologise or make restitution afterwards, acknowledging that although the choice was warranted, the action itself is not something to be proud of.

This reflects a crucial distinction between a morally right decision (the best choice available) and a morally right action (a deed the agent can be proud of). Tragic dilemmas expose the implausibility of other theories that promise clean moral answers in all cases. We feel that actions in tragic dilemmas ought to be accompanied by regret or some moral residue and that, for example, the agent pulling the lever in the trolley-problem ought not to walk away proud of his good action.

What is the indeterminate charge?

Virtue ethics relies too heavily on moral perception, shifting the conflict problem from the virtues themselves to the agent’s subjective judgment. If different virtuous agents perceive the requirements of kindness or justice differently, the theory remains insufficiently action-guiding. This remains a point of contention for those seeking a more objective decision procedure. 

Why should we not view ethics as comprehensively action-guiding?

However, Hursthouse rejects the notion that an ethical theory ought to be so action-guiding that it yields determinate and specific judgements of right action in all circumstances. If there were such a theory and it were true, it would function like a “technical manual” where anyone with technical mastery of it could reliably identify what is right and wrong.

Hursthouse exposes the implausibility of this picture through two thought experiments: first, the possibility of an ethical prodigy – a child who perfectly understands and applies the theory, whom we would be bound to obey as an authoritative source of moral guidance. Second, the possibility of an evil, morally corrupt agent who nonetheless possesses perfect moral knowledge. Both conclusions are absurd.

How does Annas further this point?

Furthermore, Annas points out that an agent who simply follows a moral theory’s determinate verdicts outsources moral judgement to that theory. While such an agent may be responsible for their actions, those actions fail to express their character in the way we expect moral actions to do.

This becomes especially vivid in cases of serious wrongdoing. If someone betrays a friend, or harms an innocent person, solely because a theory instructs them to do so, we may condemn the act but hesitate to describe the agent as disloyal or cruel in the relevant sense, since he is simply following the demands of the theory. Annas concludes that a theory which bypasses moral agency in this way is conceptually defective.

But was action-guidance not the motivation for having ethical theories in the first place? What’s Annas’ response?

However, was action-guidance not the motivation for having ethical theories in the first place? The conventional view holds that we turn to ethical theories because our pre-theoretical moral views are vague, conflicting, and frequently distorted by prejudice or convention. An ethical theory refines our judgements into clear, determinate verdicts. If it fails to build upon our natural indeterminacy, it seems unclear how the ethical theory leaves us better off than before.

In response, Annas reconceives the role of ethical theory through a developmental model, rejecting the idea that its purpose is to replace moral judgment with a comprehensive decision procedure.

What is the developmental model?

Moral learning, Annas argues, is like acquiring a practical skill. Just as one does not become an expert carpenter by studying a manual, but by practising the craft, moral expertise cannot be achieved by applying determinate prescriptions alone. As Aristotle writes in the Nicomachean Ethics, we become virtuous by doing virtuous acts, just as we become a flautist by playing the flute.

How does this happen?

Moral novices appropriately rely on the imitation of experts, simple rules, and conventional understandings of virtue. Then, through experience, reflection, and engagement with the moral world, they gradually develop a more unified and independent moral outlook.

The fully virtuous agent no longer relies on the general rules or deference that were necessary at earlier stages, but perceives what is required directly through practical wisdom. This is equivalent to how a master craftsperson does not just know that a certain technique works, but they know why it works. The phronimos is able to give an account of why their actions are right.

Why is the developmental picture an advantage of VE?

This developmental picture reveals a central advantage of virtue ethics over act-centred theories. When the moral novice acts rightly, he does so on the basis of a derivative understanding of virtue, seeing an action as right because it appears to be what a kind or just person (as conventionally understood) would do.

By contrast, the virtuous agent acts rightly in a non-derivative way, perceiving what is required directly through a developed understanding of morality and the possession of the virtues. Any adequate account of right action must explain both kinds of right action. Accounts that characterise right action independently of virtue can, at best, capture the novice’s standpoint, treating moral expertise as explanatorily redundant.

If morality is a skill, then the traditional manual approach of deontology or consequentialism is not just unnecessary but a developmental obstacle that prevents the agent from achieving genuine moral maturity. It keeps agents reliant on external moral authority forever, preventing individuals from developing phronesis of their own.

Aristotle’s argument against action-guidance?

Aristotle argues in the Nicomachean Ethics that ethics can only be given in outline because it concerns matters that are variable and context-dependent, where what is right depends on particulars and practical judgement, unlike the precision of mathematics or geometry.

Criticism of the developmental model:

The developmental model places heavy weight on early habituation, effectively making access to moral excellence dependent on upbringing and social environment. This threatens to moralise luck, implying that those deprived of the “right” moral education are structurally excluded from the good life through no fault of their own.

Who redefines right?

As Anscombe argued in Modern Moral Philosophy, the modern concept of “rightness” is a survival of a law-conception of ethics that no longer makes sense without a divine lawgiver.

As such, we should stop asking if an act is “right”, which is a thin concept, and start asking whether it is just, brave or temperate. They are more basic, thicker concepts because they both describe the action and evaluate it at the same time. If I tell you “What John did was wrong” you have no idea what happened but if I tell you “What John did was ungenerous” you know what type of act he did and why it was bad. As such, doing the right thing is just a vague summary of acting justly, bravely, and temperately.

What is there to say about the affective component?

On the classical Aristotelian view, full virtue requires more than performing the right action; it requires doing so for the right reason and without any contrary inclination, as a matter of character. The virtuous person’s rational and appetitive parts will be in harmony, such that acting in accordance with virtue is enjoyable. If a person finds acting justly painful or a struggle, they have not yet achieved the state of justice.

What are two issues with this affective view?

However, Aristotle’s virtuous person can appear oddly inhuman or robotic. The struggler seems more morally impressive because they feel the pull of temptation and overcome it. They understand what is being sacrificed in choosing the good, and still choose it, whereas the Sophron doesn’t even see the allure of the alternative. This seems less like wisdom and more like a lack of imagination.

Further, this account can seem elitist. We don’t choose our temperament, our genes, or our early childhood habituation. Hence, if virtue is natural to you because of these factors, then your affective and rational harmony is a gift rather than an achievement. We are effectively praising privilege. The struggler – the person who was perhaps raised in vice but is trying to work towards goodness – is the only one actually doing moral work.

What does Kant argue?

Kant argues that actions possess the most moral worth when they are performed from duty against contrary inclination. A person who is naturally sympathetic and helps others effortlessly deserves less praise than a person who is cold in temperament but nonetheless helps solely because it is right. The struggler rationally chooses the good, whereas the naturally virtuous person simply expresses what they already are.

Reponse to Kant/natural virtue:

However, the philosophical consensus is that a human being cannot be "born virtuous" because virtue is fundamentally a corrective excellence that presupposes the existence of opposing inclinations.

As Philippa Foot argues, we only identify traits like courage, temperance, or industriousness as virtues because humans are naturally prone to fear, overindulgence, and laziness. If these vicious inclinations were not part of our biological nature, the virtues would be as redundant – like a corrective lens for someone with perfect vision.

What appears as effortless virtue is therefore not a matter of luck or privilege, but evidence that resistance has been rationally mastered and incorporated into character. Virtue confirms the presence of struggle in the agent’s past rather than its absence.

Final defences of the lack of struggle:

Further, Aristotle would respond that this objection misunderstands the nature of excellence. All skills, including moral ones, begin with luck: the pianist is lucky to have hands and a piano, but this does not undermine our admiration for their music. On the contrary, effortlessness is the sign of mastery, not a defect.

Annas develops this skill analogy. The struggler should be understood as a moral novice. When you first learn to play the piano, you struggle - you have to think about every finger movement. Further, this struggle is necessary and praiseworthy for a beginner. However, the goal of practice is to eventually reach the expert stage where the music flows naturally. We don't say regard the expert as inferior because they no longer struggle.

Therefore, the apparent paradox arises from confusing what is appropriate to the moral learner with what is characteristic of moral experts.

Can VE accommodate moral absolutes?

Virtue ethics is often accused of rejecting all moral absolutes. However, this charge is overstated. Aristotle himself claims that some actions – such as murder, theft, and adultery - are such that they are wrong in themselves.

What virtue ethics rejects is not absolutism per se, but codification: the idea that morality can be captured by a system of rules that provides comprehensive action-guidance. Even if some absolute prohibitions exist, they do little to guide everyday moral life and cannot substitute for moral judgment. The virtuous individual would work out that murder is wrong, without it having to be handed to her in a rulebook.

How do we know what the virtues are?

Virtue ethics treats virtue as fundamental: it does not explain virtue in terms of other moral concepts, but explains other moral concepts in terms of virtue. As such, it seems unclear how can we can work out which character traits are the virtues?

If the virtue ethicist produces a list, we can question whether it is the right list. If they produce some abstract test, we can worry about the fact that, with sufficient ingenuity, or different further premises, these can be got to yield different results.

Why does it not matter if we can prove the virtues?

The demand for a formal test to justify each virtue presupposes a foundationalist epistemology that VE rightly rejects. Following McDowell and the later Wittgenstein, I believe that morality is not a ‘geometry' of rules, but a 'form of life' into which rational agents are initiated.

We do not need to prove that courage or charity are virtues from some neutral, external standpoint any more than we need to prove the rules of logic before we can start thinking. The value of such traits is already perceptually salient to anyone who has reached moral maturity. Accordingly, the list of virtues is not a fixed set of axioms but the product of reflective equilibrium: inherited from tradition yet subject to refinement through practical wisdom and reflection on human life.

What is Slote’s view?

Personally, I find Slote's non-eudaimonist agent-based approach most compelling. Rather than deriving virtue from a theory of human nature or flourishing, Slote grounds morality in empathy: right action expresses genuine empathetic concern for others, and wrong action reflects a deficiency of it.

Why would a non-virtuous agent act virtuously?

On Hursthouse’s account, a non-virtuous agent can act rightly by doing what a virtuous agent would characteristically do, even though the action neither expresses virtue nor subsequently contributes to the agent’s flourishing. Therefore, why would a non-virtuous agent act virtuously?

Appeals to future habituation explain why this might matter for moral learners, but they fail in cases where moral development is blocked or irrelevant, such as agents near death. In such cases, Hursthouse’s account appears unable to explain why acting rightly should matter to the agent at all.

Why is this not objective not only for VE?

However, this objection – which could equally be applied to deontology or consequentialism – assumes that a reason for action must be tied to a subjective psychological benefit or a future state of the agent. If this were so, then morality would be reduced to instrumental egoism.

Is hurthouse’s definition a criterion of rightness?

I would point out that Hursthouse’s definition is a criterion of rightness, but not the source of the reason. The reason the dying man should tell the truth is not "to become virtuous," but because the other person deserves the truth.

Even if I am not virtuous, I can still recognize the "reasons" that a virtuous person would recognize and appreciate. The non-virtuous person has a reason to act rightly because the grounds for that action (e.g., the needs of others, the requirements of justice) exist independently of their own developmental arc.

Who supports this view?

Hirji (2019) argued there is no evidence for the fact that Aristotle argues an action is right purely because the virtuous person does it.

Instead, she argues that virtuous actions are defined independently by the good external ends they aim to realise - generosity by its benefit to the recipient, courage by the safety it secures for the polis - whilst the virtuous agent's role is to identify and perform such actions with knowledge, for their own sake, and from a stable character.

Two more defences of why to act virtuously:

Phillipa Foot compares human virtues to the natural excellence of other living things. The reason a non-virtuous person should act rightly, even if they have a terminal illness, is that acting rightly is the characteristic excellence of a human being. Just as it is "better" for a tree to have deep roots even if it is about to be chopped down, it is "better" for a human to act justly because justice is a constituent of human goodness.

On a similar note, your actions constitute who you are. To act wrongly – to lie, to steal, or to be cruel – is to make oneself a liar, a thief, or a cruel person. The dying man has a reason to act rightly because to do otherwise is to spend his final six months as a vicious person.

What does this response rely on?

However, this response relies on the agent accepting the aretaic definition of self-interest. If the agent thinks their interest lies only in pleasure or the avoidance of pain, they won't see the harm in becoming a vicious person if it brings them temporary comfort. The reasons of virtue are only visible to those who have been correctly brought up to value character. To the moral blind, no reason can be given.

Why is VE egoistic/self-effacing?

A flourishing-based theory, like virtue ethics, says that a person has reason to act rightly because doing so will contribute to her own flourishing. If the individual believes the theory and is motivated by this claim, her primary impetus for acting rightly will be a desire for her own flourishing, which seems contrary to genuine ethical concern.

Genuine expression of virtue requires being motivated by concern for others or for the values embodied in the virtues themselves. If an agent acts justly or generously because they believe it will promote their own flourishing, they may perform the right action, but they are not acting virtuously.

Yet if agents are not motivated by their own flourishing, virtue ethics becomes what Parfit calls self-effacing: it claims that flourishing is the true source of our reasons while requiring agents to ignore or be blind to that fact in order to act virtuously.

What is the response to egoism?

However, this objection assumes that if virtue is justified by its contribution to the agent’s flourishing, then then virtuous action must be motivated by self-interest. Annas denies this inference. After all, virtues are dispositions embodying commitment to ethical values such as justice, generosity, and courage, and these values are essentially outward-looking. It seems strange to consider someone living in a brave, generous, and just way as self-indulgent.

Courage or justice are not dispositions that can be switched off when my own interests, as opposed to those of others, are not at stake.

Explain further how virtue links to flourishing:

Hence, it is a mistake to claim that the virtuous person’s motivation is egoistic simply because it is aimed at her flourishing, and not others. She aims at her own flourishing and not others just in the sense that she is living her life.

To reiterate, the claim that virtue benefits its possessor is not a claim about the agent’s motivation but about the structure of a good human life as a whole. Flourishing is not a secret reason hiding behind the act; rather, flourishing is the name we give to the activities characteristic of the virtues. Once this distinction is in place, the charge that virtue ethics collapses into egoism loses its force.

What is there to say about substantive vs formal flourishing?

A substantive account defines flourishing as some independently specified good – such as pleasure, success, or happiness – to which virtue is merely a means. Such a view is implausible, since the virtuous are not guaranteed worldly success and may even be disadvantaged by their virtue.

Instead, on a formal account, flourishing is characterised as living well, with its content specified by the virtues themselves. On this view, virtue is not instrumentally valuable but constitutive of flourishing. Aiming at flourishing is therefore not aiming at a self-interested payoff, but aiming to live a life structured by justice, courage, and generosity.

What about the observation that vicious people flourish?

This also explains why virtue ethics does not need an account of flourishing that is acceptable to both virtuous and vicious agents: disagreement about what flourishing consists in is precisely what separates them.

The virtuous and the non-virtuous disagree about what flourishing is; not in the sense that they dispute about means to a shared ends but disputing what the end itself consists of in. Many critics have failed to see this point, because they have assumed that virtue ethics must have a substantive account of flourishing, defined in a way that is independent of the virtues. However, since this assumption is not shared by virtue ethics, all these objections miss their target.

Virtue ethics begins from the point that we do attach value to being virtuous. Hence, the observation that vicious people appear to be flourishing by conventional standards proves nothing.

What is the response to self-effacingness?

Hurka argues that if agents must not be motivated by thoughts of flourishing, then virtue ethics instructs them to ignore its own foundational claims.

However, this worry dissolves once we appeal to the familiar VE distinction between moral novices and the fully virtuous. Beginners rightly deliberate in explicitly ethical terms, thinking about what a virtuous person would do and about the point of virtues in contributing to a good life.

By contrast, how does the virtuous person act in a way that is not self-effacing?

By contrast, the virtuous agent no longer needs to think explicitly about virtue or flourishing in deliberation: through habituation, reflection and experience, they have come to perceive what matters directly. The theory’s foundations are not hidden from the agent but simply no longer needed in everyday deliberation.

This is analogous to an expert craftsman, who does not consciously rehearse principles while working, but can nevertheless explain and justify their actions when asked. A professional footballer doesn’t think “I am playing to win the League” when making each specific pass – rather, it’s the wider context that gives the pass meaning.