VIRTUE ETHICS AND DEMOCRATIC VALUES

Abstract

V irtue ethics has recently been rousing itself from a long slumber.* Although twentiethcentury hthical theoryhas been primarily concerned with right and wrong action, we have lately seen a revival of interest in (the) virtue(s) as supplementing or even grounding our understanding of right action, and Aristotle and (to a lesser extent) Plato have had the greatest influence on these developments. Over the last few years, virtue ethicists have largely focused on the individual moral life rather than on issues of social justice, and to the extent virtue ethics is content merely to supplement other views, there may be nothing at all problematic about such an omission or de-emphasis. But most philosophers who call themselves virtue ethicists believe that (the) virtue(s) should play a foundational role in a free-standing total approach to ethics that can take its place, e. g., alongside (utilitarian) consequentialism and Kantian ethics; and they will want (one or another form of) virtue ethics to develop its own distinctive account of social morality and of social justice in particular. Yet anyone who has such a hope will, presumably, recognize the considerable obstacles that lie in its path. Virtue ethics has a proven record of siding with anti-democratic social/political ideals, and when one considers that neither Aristotle nor Plato favored democratic forms of government, one may well wonder whether ancient models can provide any sort of plausible contemporary basis for political philosophy or for ethics as a whole. Even if individualistic virtue ethics is not incompatible with current-day democratic values, the Aristotelian virtue ethicist may have to draw upon other traditions in order to give any sort of account of such values; and in that case she will face an intellectually unpleasant choice. If she declines to develop any sort of political philosophy, virtue ethics simply gives up on any attempt to develop a full-scale ethical alternative to currently dominant views, like utilitarianism/consequentialism and Kantianism, that are clearly capable of generating accounts of both individual and social values. (It is interesting that Rawls’s contractarianismmakes no claim to account for the full range of individual morality.)’ However, if virtue ethics has to borrow from Kantian ethics or consequentialism in order to generate a plausible political philosophy, then it acknowledges their strength and superiority in one major sphere