Is Virtue Possible?

Abstract

Abstract Much attention has recently been paid to the nature and inter-relations of the moral virtues and to the psychology of their embodiment in particular individuals. Although it has typically been assumed that a virtuous individual knows what is right in different situations and acts accordingly, both Iris Murdoch in The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970) and John McDowell in ‘Virtue and Reason’ (The Monist 62, 1979, pp. 331–50) have laid particular stress on the (Aristotelian) idea of perception in their accounts of the epistemology of virtue. Murdoch and McDowell offer a marvellously subtle and complex treatment of virtue, and their ideas have rich reverberations for our understanding of Plato and Aristotle’s ethical thought. But their account of moral virtue is also importantly incomplete. And in what follows I shall argue, in particular, that their exclusive focus on internal defects that prevent people from seeing and doing what is right makes them over-estimate the general accessibility of moral virtue and ignore the historical dimension of our attempts to understand “moral reality.”