One of the major attacks on virtue ethics is its inability to guide
people in making decisions in difficult situations. Consequentialists and
Deontologists take hard line stances, based on happiness results or intentions
of actions, to determine which acts are moral. The system of acting virtuous
just because virtuous people do so seems vague in comparison to theories that
have metrics for determining how to act. But what about the situations that
those metrics can’t answer correctly? Are those situations flukes or just proof
of flaws in the metric? I believe it is the latter. Life is far too complicated
to be measured by a single standard to determine the morality of every
situation. Certain situations are bound to be poorly interpreted using such
metrics. It is the same notion that large governments can not effectively
manage complex economies. Trying to fit infinitely complex circumstances under
one size fits all plans causes the structure to break down.
Virtue Ethics is a vague theory on the morality, but I believe that is
its greatest appeal. Its ambiguousness is not a weakness of the theory, but a
strength. It allows the theory to flex and adapt to different situations that
one standard metric theories can not. If life is eternally complex, then perhaps
the theory of morality should be equally complex, even if that makes it vague
on the surface.
