EECS 690

April 16

Virtue Ethics

• Compared with Virtue Ethics, Utilitarian or Deontological approaches, though dominant now, are very new kinds of ethical theories. Util. and Deon. theories are Modern theories (they arose in the Modern Period, about 1600-1800), what preceded them was over 2000 years of mostly virtue ethics.

The Difference

• Modern ethical theories ask “What actions are the right actions?” while virtue ethicists ask “What constitutes the right kind of person?”

• To become moral on a modern ethical theory, you must simply follow the theory. To be moral in a virtue system, you must cultivate the virtues in yourself by habituation and training (parents and elders are supposed to be in charge of this process when you’re young).

How to tell when something is a virtue.

• A virtue is a character trait that a person has that is reflected in their behavior. Good behavior represents the presence of good characteristics (virtues) while bad behavior indicates the presence of vices.

• Aristotle is often oversimplified in the saying "everything in moderation". What is true of Aristotle is that he discussed virtues as being means (averages) between two vices, a vice of deficiency and a vice of excess.

• Example: Courage. Surely it is no virtue to be unafraid of anything. That is the vice of excess courage, called rashness. On the other side, the person that is afraid of too much is a coward. Cowardice is a vice of deficiency of courage. So having the virtue of courage is to be afraid of things that one ought to be afraid of, and to not fear what one ought not to fear.

About virtues:

• Characterizations of virtue are fraught with normative terms. This appears to be an unavoidable aspect of the approach.

• Virtue ethics don’t depend very much on particular actions. A polite person (the mean between obsequiousness and rudeness) is sometimes not polite, but the less often he or she behaves in non-virtueous ways, the more virtuous that person is.

• There is a strong focus on training and habituation from the time a person is young.

Virtues of the virtues approach

• VE, more than any other system of ethics, takes into account interpersonal contexts.

• It is a refreshingly holistic way of looking at personal morality

• VE approaches make it very easy to see conflicts between various values.

• VE lessens the conflict between morality and prudence. (Prudence, in fact, is a major virtue itself, between the vices of selfishness and selflessness.)

Vices of the Virtues Approach

• VE may be overly culturally specific to be useful as a more general theory of ethics.

• It is harder to use VE to determine what to do in a particular difficult situation than a Modern theory.

• Conflicts between the virtues are not easily resolved.

• VE might make it more difficult to be counter-culturally moral.

Virtuous systems

• The authors suggest that a theory which focuses on habituation and training like VE does makes it suggest itself to proponents of connectionist systems.

• VE represents a combination between what the authors have called ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ approaches because it requires some specification of the goals of moral behavior (to exemplify the virtues) and also relies on training and habituation to ingrain the virtues.