The Virtues and Vices of Virtue Jurisprudence

Abstract

Abstract The revival of interest in virtue theory (in particular Aristotelian virtue theory) among moral philosophers towards the end of the last century had an impact on legal theory, in a revival of ‘virtue jurisprudence’. Virtue jurisprudents argue that ideas of virtue and vice ought to play a central role in our understanding of the proper aims and principles of systems of law. At their most ambitious, they might claim that ‘the aim of the law is to make citizens virtuous’ (Solum 2003: 181), or ‘to promote the greater good of humanity .. . by promoting virtue’ (Huigens 1995: 1425). Such claims cause tremors in contemporary liberal hearts, redolent as they are of nineteenth-century ‘legal moralism’ and of the more ambitious (and more frightening) species of communitarianism; they also reflect what I see as one of the vices of some virtue jurisprudence— a familiar philosophical pleonexia that leads one to portray as the key to understanding a particular matter a concept or idea which, in fact, has only a more modest, but still useful, role to play.