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Virtue Ethics and Elitism
Abstract
Because of its reliance on a basically Aristotelian conception of virtue, contemporary virtue ethics is often criticised for being inherently elitist. I argue that this objection is mistaken. The core of my argument is that we need to take seriously that virtue, according to Aristotle, is something that we acquire gradually, via a developmental process. People are not just stuck with their characters once and for all, but can always aspire to become better (more virtuous). And that is plausibly the basic normative requirement of virtue ethics.
... 14 For a discussion on virtue ethics and the charge from elitism, see Svensson (2008). ...
This chapter explores The question of whether prison inmates suffering from attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) should be administered a psychopharmacological intervention (methylphenidate) for their condition. The theoretical starting point for the discussion is the communicative theory of punishment, which understands criminal punishment as a form of secular penance. Viewed through the lens of the communicative theory, the provision of pharmacological treatment to offenders with ADHD need not necessarily be conceived of as an alternative to punishment, but as an aid to achieving the penological ends of secular penance. The criminal justice system punishes offenders who commit offences prohibited under the criminal law, and the hope is that this will lead them to become repentant, to start reforming themselves, and to reconcile with those whom they wronged. However, the neurophysiological obstacles associated with severe ADHD present serious obstacles to achieving repentance and self-reform. As a remedy, the chapter proposes that to achieve those aims, criminal offenders diagnosed with ADHD should be offered the option to undergo pharmacological treatment. This proposal is defended from the objection that secular penance made possible by methylphenidate is less authentic.
This chapter deals with the relation between Marxism and essentialism. Modern ethics can be divided into three categories—deontology, utilitarianism, and essentialism—the last of which comprises virtue ethics and perfectionism. Deontology and utilitarianism are the dominant ethics in a capitalist society. Marxism utilizes deontology and utilitarianism to denounce a capitalist society but does not rely on these ethics as the main principles in forming a communist society. Nonwelfarist consequentialism is more progressive than utilitarian consequentialism because it abandons the hedonistic character of utilitarianism; it is thus the most suitable principle in a socialist society. In a communist society, essentialism becomes influential. Essentialism may sometimes include the following characteristics: relativism, moralism, elitism, and paternalism. The communist countries that have treated essentialism as national morality have stuck to these four characteristics. The communist society envisioned by Karl Marx refuses all of these qualities.
Conceived of as a contender to other theories in substantive ethics, virtue ethics is often associated with, in essence, the
following account or criterion of right action: VR: An action A is right for S in circumstances C if and only if a fully virtuous
agent would characteristically do A in C. There are serious objections to VR, which take the form of counter-examples. They
present us with different scenarios in which less than fully virtuous persons would be acting rightly in doing what no fully
virtuous agent would characteristically do in the circumstances. In this paper, various proposals for how to revise VR in
order to avoid these counter-examples are considered. I will argue that in so far as the revised accounts really do manage
to steer clear of the counter-examples to VR, something which it turns out is not quite true for all of them, they instead
fall prey to other damaging objections. I end by discussing the future of virtue ethics, given what has come to light in the
previous sections of the paper. In particular, I sketch the outlines of a virtue ethical account of rightness that is structurally
different from VR. This account also faces important problems. Still, I suggest that further scrutiny is required before we
are in a position to make a definitive decision about its fate.
KeywordsVirtue ethics-Right action-Fully virtuous agent-Decent agent-Developmental account of virtue and right
The predominant view of moral virtue can be traced back to Aristotle. He believed that moral virtue must involve intellectual excellence. To have moral virtue one must have practical wisdom - the ability to deliberate well and to see what is morally relevant in a given context. Julia Driver challenges this classical theory of virtue, arguing that it fails to take into account virtues which do seem to involve ignorance or epistemic defect. Some 'virtues of ignorance' are counterexamples to accounts of virtue which hold that moral virtue must involve practical wisdom. Modesty, for example, is generally considered to be a virtue even though the modest person may be making an inaccurate assessment of his or her accomplishments. Driver argues that we should abandon the highly intellectualist view of virtue and instead adopt a consequentialist perspective which holds that virtue is simply a character trait which systematically produces good consequences.
This book is a provocative contribution to contemporary ethical theory challenging foundational conceptions of character that date back to Aristotle. John Doris draws on behavioral science, especially social psychology, to argue that we misattribute the causes of behavior to personality traits and other fixed aspects of character rather than to the situational context. More often than not it is the situation not the nature of the personality that really counts. The author elaborates the philosophical consequences of this research for a whole array of ethical theories and shows that, once rid of the misleading conception of motivation, moral psychology can support more robust ethical theories and more humane ethical practices.
This paper examines the implications of certain social psychological experiments for moral theory--specifically, for virtue theory. Gilbert Harman and John Doris have recently argued that the empirical evidence offered by 'situationism' demonstrates that there is no such thing as a character trait. I dispute this conclusion. My discussion focuses on the proper interpretation of the experimental data--the data themselves I grant for the sake of argument. I develop three criticisms of the anti-trait position. Of these, the central criticism concerns three respects in which the experimental situations employed to test someone's character trait are inadequate to the task. First, they do not take account of the subject's own construal of the situation. Second, they include behaviour that is only marginally relevant to the trait in question. Third, they disregard the normative character of the responses in which virtue theory is interested. Given these inadequacies in situationism's operationalized conception of a 'character trait', I argue that situationism does not really address the proposition that people have 'character traits' properly understood. A fortiori, the social psychological evidence does not refute that proposition. I also adduce some limited experimental evidence in favour of character traits and distil two lessons we can nevertheless learn form situationism.
Ordinary moral thought often commits what social psychologists call 'the fundamental attribution error'. This is the error of ignoring situational factors and overconfidently assuming that distinctive behaviour or patterns of behaviour are due to an agent's distinctive character traits. In fact, there is no evidence that people have character traits (virtues, vices, etc.) in the relevant sense. Since attribution of character traits leads to much evil, we should try to educate ourselves and others to stop doing it.
Imagine a person making a call in a suburban shopping plaza. As the caller leaves the phone booth, along comes Alice, who drops a folder full of papers that scatter in the caller's path. Will the caller stop and help before the only copy of Alice's magnum opus is trampled by the bargain-hungry throngs? Perhaps it depends on the person: Jeff, an entrepreneur incessantly scheming about fattening his real estate holdings, probably won't, while Nina, a political activist who takes in stray cats, probably will. Nina is the compassionate type; Jeff isn't. In these circumstances we expect their true colors to show. But this may be a mistake, as an experiment conducted by Isen and Levin (1972) shows. There, the paper-dropper was an experimental confederate. For one group of callers, a dime was planted in the phone' s coin return slot; for the other, the slot was empty. Here are the results
Several philosophers have recently claimed to have discovered a new and rather significant problem with virtue ethics. According to them, virtue ethics generates certain expectations about the behavior of human beings which are subject to empirical testing. But when the relevant experimental work is done in social psychology, the results fall remarkably short of meeting those expectations. So, these philosophers think, despite its recent success, virtue ethics has far less to offer to contemporary ethical theory than might have been initially thought. I argue that there are plausible ways in which virtue ethicists can resist arguments based on empirical work in social psychology. In the first three sections of the paper, I reconstruct the line of reasoning being used against virtue ethics by looking at the recent work of Gilbert Harman and John Doris. The remainder of the paper is then devoted both to responding to their challenge as well as to briefly sketching a positive account of character trait possession.
In this paper I examine and reply to a deflationary challenge brought against virtue ethics. The challenge comes from critics who are impressed by recent psychological evidence suggesting that much of what we take to be virtuous conduct is in fact elicited by narrowly specific social settings, as opposed to being the manifestation of robust individual character. In answer to the challenge, I suggest a conception of virtue that openly acknowledges the likelihood of its deep, ongoing dependence upon particular social relationships and settings. I argue that holding this conception will indeed cause problems for some important strands of thought in virtue ethics, most notably in the tradition of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. But an approach to virtue ethics modeled on David Hume's treatment of virtue and character in A Treatise of Human Nature promises to escape these problems.
Adams s suggestion that there must be one really right way of presenting the history of moral philosophy seems implausible to me, so I reject with additional reasons his charges against the structure of Invention of Autonomy. Skorupski s way of stating the equal moral abilities thesis is not, I argue, very Kantian; a more Kantian version is not open to his objections. I am unconvinced by Schultz s claim that Sidgwick did not really hold that thesis. Deigh raises questions I cannot reply to here, but I do offer some texts that seem to show that Sidgwick is not guilty of the confusion about ought with which Deigh charges him.
In The Invention of Autonomy, Schneewind argues that a main development in early modern ethical thought is the transition from a conception of morality as obedience to a conception of morality as self-governance. I consider the presuppositions implicit in the latter conception and ask whether they can be maintained.