Virtue Ethics without Right Action: Anscombe, Foot, and Contemporary Virtue Ethics

Abstract

Working out a criterion of morally right action is central to developing virtue ethics. Most advocates of virtue ethics believe that achieving such a criterion is crucial to vindicating virtue ethics as a normative theory. Yet the centrality of this task marks a departure from the views of at least some of the philosophers credited with the revival of virtue ethics in the twentieth century, especially from the views of G.E.M. Anscombe and Philippa Foot. Anscombe especially has sharp criticisms of the way philosophers handle the concept of morally right action along with related concepts like moral obligation. Yet the work of contemporary virtue ethicists such as Rosalind Hursthouse, Michael Slote, and Christine Swanton features little discussion of Anscombe’s criticisms or the reasons that the other virtue revivalists avoided providing a criterion of moral rightness. The dominant assumption appears to be that the earlier virtue revivalists neglect establishing a criterion of morally right action because their concern is to give priority to the evaluation of an agent over his acts as a corrective to the exclusive attention given to act-evaluation in the moral philosophy of the time. For Anscombe and Foot, at least, the concern to give priority to agent-evaluation is not among their motives for advocating a return to virtues. Instead, they believe that moral philosophers from the modern period forward have given the terms ‘‘right’’ and ‘‘ought’’ an artificial and incoherent sense.