Contemporary Virtue Ethics Research Articles

Han Feizi's Criticism of Confucianism and its Implications for Virtue Ethics

AbstractSeveral scholars have recently proposed that Confucianism should be regarded as a form of virtue ethics. This view offers new approaches to understanding not only Confucian thinkers, but also their critics within the Chinese tradition. For if Confucianism is a form of virtue ethics, we can then ask to what extent Chinese criticisms of it parallel criticisms launched against contemporary virtue ethics, and what lessons for virtue ethics in general might be gleaned from the challenges to Confucianism in particular. This paper undertakes such an exercise in examining Han Feizi, an early critic of Confucianism. The essay offers a careful interpretation of the debate between Han Feizi and the Confucians and suggests that thinking through Han Feizi's criticisms and the possible Confucian responses to them has a broader philosophical payoff, namely by highlighting a problem for current defenders of virtue ethics that has not been widely noticed, but deserves attention.

Material Value‐Ethics: Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann

AbstractAlthough Max Scheler (1874–1928) and Nicolai Hartmann (1882–1950) were contemporaries and wrote under the influence of the phenomenological movement, the large differences between their initiatives and achievements in philosophy resulted in scholars rarely reading them together. However, they shared one major concept in ethics, that of material value ethics. This ethics is (1) non‐formal, and involves a profound criticism of Kantian ethical formalism, and (2) is founded in a phenomenology of the values themselves, that its, the content, available in intuition, of such values as trust, utility, friendship, or even the Aristotelian virtues. The present article seeks to uncover a latent harmony and consistency in the two men's material value ethics, and considers the possibility of its recovery for contemporary virtue ethics.

A Theory of Narrative Empathy

We are living in a time when the activation of mirror neurons in the brains of onlookers can be recorded as they witness another’s actions and emotional reactions. 1 Contemporary neuroscience has brought us much closer to an understanding of the neural basis for human mind reading and emotion sharing abilities—the mechanisms underlying empathy. The activation of onlookers’ mirror neurons by a coach’s demonstration of technique or an internal visualization of proper form and by representations in television, film, visual art, and pornography has already been recorded. 2 Simply hearing a description of an absent other’s actions lights up mirror neuron areas during fMRI imaging of the human brain. 3 The possibility that novel reading stimulates mirror neurons’ activation can now, as never before, undergo neuroscientific investigation. Neuroscientists have already declared that people scoring high on empathy tests have especially busy mirror neuron systems in their brains. 4 Fiction writers are likely to be among these high empathy individuals. For the first time we might investigate whether human differences in mirror neuron activity can be altered by exposure to art, to teaching, to literature. This newly enabled capacity to study empathy at the cellular level encourages speculation about human empathy’s positive consequences. These speculations are not new, as any student of eighteenth-century moral sentimentalism will affirm, but they dovetail with efforts on the part of contemporary virtue ethicists, political philosophers, educators, theologians, librarians, and interested parties such as authors and publishers to connect the experience of empathy, including its literary

Contemporary virtue ethics

AbstractWithin contemporary ethics, virtue ethics now seems to be permanently positioned as a major normative theory. Despite its popularity, however, it is often not very clear – even to virtue ethicists – what is included in the term. This article clarifies the territory by setting out some recent developments in virtue ethics. The article also explores the impact of the virtue ethics revival on metaethics and looks at the direction of future debate.

Hume on Promises and the Peculiar Act of the Mind

Hume's account of the virtue of fidelity to promises contains two surprising claims: 1) Any analysis of fidelity that treats it as a natural (nonconventional) virtue is incorrect because it entails that in promising we perform a "peculiar act of the mind," an act of creating obligation by willing oneself to be obligated. No such act is possible. 2) Though the obligation of promises depends upon social convention, not on such a mental act, we nonetheless "feign" that whenever someone promises he performs such an act. This paper explains both in light of the philosophical questions about promising that lie behind Hume's investigation, his virtue theory, and the general difficulties he believes we face trying to understand virtues that are in fact artificial in terms of our common-sense, natural conception of virtue. It extracts a lesson for contemporary virtue ethics about the motive of duty.

Précis ofLack of Character

The contemporary virtue ethics movement has sundered the Utilitarianism/Kantianism gridlock that structured normative ethics for much of the twentieth century; the dyadic menu of orthodox positions has become triadic, and new paths of exploration are now visible to moral philosophers of all theoretical persuasions. This insurgency is substantially due to an appearance of psychological plausibility: Virtue ethicists proffer conceptions of character that are widely considered indispensable to ethical theory's foundations in moral psychology (see Anscombe 1958: 1,15; Williams 1985: 206; Flanagan 1991: 182; Hursthouse 1999: 19-20). The appearance, I argue in Lack of Character (23),2 is largely chimerical. In familiar variants, such as those associated with Aristotelianism, the characterological moral psychology typical of virtue ethics is empirically inadequate: Systematic observation does not reveal the patterns of human behavior such accounts lead one to expect. My argument is based on experimental social psychology, augmented, in the spirit of methodological pluralism, by observations drawn from literature, history, anthropology, and elsewhere, from Survival in Auschwitz to Lord Jim.

Loneliness and belonging: is stoic cosmopolitanism still defensible ?

In view of recent articles citing the Stoics as a defence or refutation of cosmopolitanism it is legitimate to ask whether the Stoics did in fact have an argument for cosmopolitanism which may be useful to contemporary political philosophers. I begin by discussing an interpretation of Stoic views on cosmopolitanism by Martha Nussbaum and A.A. Long and show that the arguments they attribute to the Stoics are not tenable in the light of present day philosophy. I then argue that the Stoics did offer a very different argument for cosmopolitanism which is both more interesting and more plausible in that it draws on a conception of human nature similar to Aristotle’s and contemporary virtue ethics. Lastly I consider an objection made to their particular brand of cosmopolitanism by Martha Nussbaum, namely that a Stoic cosmopolitan life is devoid of personal affiliation and therefore unbearably lonely. I argue that this objection is in fact unfounded.

Angelic Sin in Aquinas and Scotus and the Genesis of Some Central Objections to Contemporary Virtue Ethics

Angelic Sin in Aquinas and Scotus and the Genesis of Some Central Objections to Contemporary Virtue Ethics

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The article concerns contemporary virtue ethics which is, along with Kantian ethics and utilitarianism, considered to be one of the most important ethical theories. Generally, virtue ethics can be understood as an agent-centered ethics, focused on the question: what kind of person should I be?; rather than on the question: what should I do?; or it could be understood as a character ethics that criticizes the attempt to formulate universal rules and only accepts so-called rules of virtue, which are less abstract. Moral assessment is made in terms of the moral good rather than in terms of the moral right. Such ethics is opposed to Kantian ethics and utilitarianism, both interpreted as act-centered ethics or rule ethics.The analysis of different versions of virtue ethics is made in the light of the main question of this article: are the two different approaches, that of agent-centered ethics and that of act-centered ethics, mutually exclusive (as virtue ethicists claim) or rather complementary (as is claimed by the advocates of Kantian and utilitarian aretologies)? The conclusion reached in the article is that both approaches should be treated as complementary rather than competitive. Projects whose aim is to supplement deontology with aretology have been proposed by such deontologists as O. O’Neill, O. Hőffe, R. Wolf, R. Louden, who interpret Kantian ethics in terms of virtue ethics. Also, the concepts of so-called utilitarianism of virtues (R. Crisp), utilitarianism of motives (R. Adams), and character utilitarianism (P. Railton) have been formulated.The above conclusion leads to another question: should virtue ethics be treated as an autonomous ethical theory or is it possible only as a supplementation of other theories? In this paper I argue that virtue ethics should be reduced to aretology and treated as a necessary but not sufficient part of any ethical theory.

The Aretaic Turn in Constitutional Theory

The Aretaic Turn in Constitutional Theory argues that an institutional approach to theories of constitutional interpretation ought to be supplemented by explicit focus on the virtues and vices of constitutional adjudicators.Part I, The Most Dysfunctional Branch, advances the speculative hypothesis that politicization of the judiciary has led the political branches to exclude consideration of virtue from the nomination and confirmation of Supreme Court Justices and to select Justices on the basis of the strength of their commitment to particular positions on particular issues and the fervor of their ideological passions.Part II, Institutionalism and Constitutional Interpretation, engages Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule's recent essay, Interpretation and Institutions. Sunstein and Vermeule contend that theories of constitutional interpretation are most fundamentally flawed because of their failure to take an institutional turn, but their supporting arguments lead to a related but quite distinct conclusion. Only a theory of judicial character can supply the diagnosis for the ills that Sunstein and Vermeule identify: constitutional theory must take an aretaic turn.Part III, Making the Aretaic Turn in Constitutional Theory, sketches an alternative approach to judicial review and constitutional interpretation that is rooted in contemporary virtue ethics. In Part IV, Constitutional Virtues and Vices, this sketch is given flesh and bones in the form of a theory of constitutional virtue and vice. Excellence in constitutional adjudication requires the virtues of judicial courage, judicial temperament, judicial temperance, judicial intelligence, and judicial wisdom (or phronesis). Most importantly, a virtuous constitutional interpreter must have the virtue of justice, which includes as components impartiality, lawfulness, and legal vision.Part V, The Aretaic Reconstruction of the Institutional Critique, returns to institutionalism as an approach to the theory of constitutional interpretation and argues that institutionalists cannot coherently refrain from making the aretaic turn. The article ends with speculation about the possibility of a path to the restoration of judicial virtue.

Moral cacophony: When continence is a virtue

Contemporary virtue ethicists widely accept thethesis that a virtuous agent's feelings shouldbe in harmony with her judgments about what sheshould do and that she should find virtuousaction easy and pleasant. Conflict between anagent's feelings and her actions, by contrast,is thought to indicate mere continence – amoral deficiency. This ``harmony thesis'' isgenerally taken to be a fundamental element ofAristotelian virtue ethics.I argue that the harmony thesis, understoodthis way, is mistaken, because there areoccasions where a virtuous agent will findright action painful and difficult. What thismeans is that the generally accepteddistinction between continence and virtue isunsupportable. This conclusion affects severalwell-known accounts of virtuous action,including those of Philippa Foot and JohnMcDowell. A closer look at Aristotle, however, providesanother way of distinguishing betweencontinence and virtue, based in hiscategorization of goods as noble or base. Iargue that virtue is exhibited when anagent's feelings harmonize with his correctjudgments of value, while discrepancies betweenfeelings and correct judgments of valueindicate continence. This understanding ofcontinence and virtue enables us to accommodatethe problem cases I raise.

Ethics and the Perfect Moral Law

This paper examines contemporary virtue ethics and the claim that Christian ethics is a virtue ethic. Three central theses are identified as being central to virtue ethics: a priority thesis, a perfectionist thesis and a communitarian thesis. It is argued that defences of the priority thesis—it best addresses the moral crisis in our society, it does justice to historical consciousness and it remedies the incompleteness in deontic ethics—are unconvincing. It is argued that virtue and moral perfection are best understood in terms of psychologically appropriate dispositions to act in accordance with moral principles. It is further argued that the communitarian thesis raises relativist difficulties and fails to do justice to the universal elements of morality. Each of these arguments is developed philosophically and the implications for Christian ethics are explored. In light of the theory of virtue sketched in the paper it is concluded that the independence thesis, upon which virtue ethics rests, is untenable and that an examination of the structure of the universal moral principles underlying the Christian faith remains the proper subject matter for Christian ethics.