Virtue vs. virtue ethics
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Virtue vs. virtue ethics Christoph Halbig
© The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The present article sets out to defend the thesis that among the more or less familiar enemies or challenges an adequate theory of virtue has to cope with is another, less obvious one – virtue ethics itself. The project of establishing virtue ethics as a third paradigm of normative ethics at eye level with consequentialism and deontological approaches to ethics threatens to distort not just our ethical thinking but the theory of virtue itself. A theory of virtue that is able to meet the demands of a full-blown virtue ethics necessarily has to face three fundamental dilemmas and thus seems to fail as an adequate theory of virtue. And vice versa: An ontologically and normatively viable theory of virtue will be unsuited to provide a promising starting point for virtue ethics as the “third kid on the block” among the options of self-standing paradigms of normative ethics. Keywords Virtue · Virtue ethics · Unity of the virtues · Anscombe · MacIntyre
1 Introduction Talk of the renaissance of virtue has become commonplace in contemporary ethics. “After Virtue”, the title of Alasdair MacIntyre’s book from 1981, might still provide an apt characterization of the crisis of western civilization after the failure of what MacIntyre calls the “Enlightenment project”; in academic debates however, virtue is very much present not just within the confines of a so called virtue ethics but also in normative ethics, moral psychology and even meta-ethics and the theory of rationality (see Halbig and Timmermann (eds.) 2021). On the other hand, at closer
C. Halbig () UZH Institute of Philosophy, University of Zurich, Zollikerstrasse 117, 8008 Zurich, Switzerland E-Mail: [email protected]
C. Halbig
inspection the slogan “renaissance of virtue” proves misleading in at least three respects: First of all, it is not clear what the renaissance is supposed to be a renaissance of: Whereas early proponents of virtue like Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot (Anscombe 2005 [1958]; Foot 1978) relied on the idea of an Aristotelian tradition supposedly dominating both ancient and medieval ethics as their natural point of reference, the pluralistic and often antagonistic character of competing theories of virtue within ancient ethics (Platonic, Aristotelian and Stoic to name only the most prominent) and the existence of important strands of a theory and ethics of virtue outside the Western tradition (within Buddhism and Confucianism, for instance) has become increasingly obvious.1 Second, it seems questionable whether virtue has ever been in need of a rebirth: Even during the first half of the 20th century, the classical candidate for a period of almost total neglect of virtue, virtue was arguably very much present in ethical theory – from G.E. Moore’s definition of virtue as “an habitual disposition to perform certain actions, which generally produce the best possible results” (Moore 1903, p. 172) in his Principia Ethica to William Frankena’s attempt at a reco
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