The Vices of Virtue Ethics

Last year, I read Moral Theory: An Introduction by Mark Timmons. While I came away appreciating divine command theory, and especially natural law theory, the impression I received of virtue ethics was not particularly positive. I might even go so far as to say that utilitarianism is more cogent—at least it's practical! Heck, even boring old Kantian ethics might have an edge over virtue ethics for being more objective.

Virtue ethics, by contrast, begins on shaky ground, as its "primary focus of moral inquiry is on questions of what sort of person to be: excellence of character rather than right conduct is of primary concern here."[1]

I don't like this framing; it's causally confused. Virtue ethics gives special attention to character instead of right conduct, yet character has no meaning without right conduct, for character is expressed and perceived through action. It's difficult to imagine what the former would even be without the latter.

To be fair, later in the chapter Timmons writes that "virtue ethics does provide an account of right action," delineating obligatory, wrong, and optional actions.[2]

Despite this, when the emphasis is on "cultivating virtues and avoiding vices," in which duties and obligations take a back seat, virtue ethics has that same wishy-washy, subjective ring to it that moral relativism so clearly possesses. You can practically hear radical individualists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau cheering from the ponds of New England in the background!

If there's one thing I do like about virtue ethics, it's the doctrine of the mean. According to Aristotle, virtue exists between two vices, one being deficient and the other being excessive. For example, courage (virtue) lies between cowardliness (deficient vice) and rashness (excessive vice).[3]

This seems pretty reasonable. Of course, it sort of has that same "I don't pick sides, I pick between them" attitude that we see in centrist politics. It's not exactly self-evident what it is about choosing the middle option that makes it correct.

I realize I'm sort of shooting from the hip with this post. Perhaps I'll come to appreciate virtue ethics more in the future. The next author I plan to read on ethics is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who at least seems adjacent to virtue ethics, as he "sees judgments of character and not action as fundamental to moral evaluation."[4]

As well, in an article comparing a Christian version of intelligent design psychology with a naturalistic version of evolutionary psychology, J.P. Moreland writes that "humans will be strongly inclined toward deontological and virtue ethics,"[5] on the assumption that the former version of psychology is true. I do appreciate intelligent design, so I guess that's a point in virtue ethics' favour!

But if I had to pick an ethical theory that offered either universal or context-specific morality, the former is the clear winner, as it's more consistent and reliable. When the zeitgeist of the West is a mixture of moral relativism, truth relativism, and liberalism, where our only principles seem to be "happiness," "authenticity," "consent," and "freedom," it is perhaps in our best interest to endorse a more rigid ethical theory to keep at bay the distortions that these principles so easily produce.

Notes

1. Mark Timmons, Moral Theory: An Introduction, p. 211.

2. Ibid., pp. 220, 223.

3. Ibid., p. 218.

4. Douglas Huff, "Dietrich Bonhoeffer," Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

5. J.P. Moreland, "Intelligent Design and Evolutionary Psychology as Research Programs:  A Comparison of Their Most Pluasible Specifications," included in Robert B. Stewart (editor), Intelligent Design: William A. Dembski & Michael Ruse in Dialogue, p. 119.