Defense of the Ambiguity of Virtue Ethics

From guest blogger, Patrick. 

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.

Virtue Ethics and Capital Punishment

From guest blogger, William.

How would a virtue ethicist approach capital punishment? It is a question that is more complicated than it seems. The two other philosophical views that were discussed in class hold clear views on capital punishment. Strict deontologists would support capital punishment. The readings for this class show this. Shafer-Landau spends a lot of time discussing how Kant determined how punishment should be morally speaking. Kant and other deontologists believe that criminals should be treated the same way they treated their victims. Capital punishment to them is morally okay. Consequentialism as well believes that capital punishment is morally okay. Consequentialists would mainly look at the positive consequences of capital punishment, such as criminal deterrence and prevention of further crimes committed by the criminal upon their release from prison. To a consequentialist the death of one person is fine, because it generates greater overall happiness in the community.

Thought experiments help show how much virtue ethics struggles with morality and capital punishment. A man on death row for murder. The man in question lived a virtuous life before committing his crime. Is he still a virtuous man even though he committed a heinous crime? Virtue ethics struggles to come to a concrete decision in this case. This is because virtue ethics does not look at just at a person’s action, but the person’s life as well. Taking the man’s life into consideration, a virtue ethicist must consider the death penalty as punishment for this man’s crime to be unjust and immoral. This example also shows another issue with virtue ethics. It does not explicitly state what makes a virtue a virtue. Is capital punishment in this case justice or revenge? Virtue ethics does not answer this question, because virtue ethics only states being morally right comes from being virtuous. It does not answer conflicts about what actions are virtuous.

There is a group of people that I have neglected in this post so far: the executioners. That is because virtue ethics does not cover the moral dilemma faced by executioners. If executioners killed those who were actively hurting innocent people, there would be no moral quandary. But, executioners kill powerless people. A prisoner on death row is completely helpless. This creates two questions. Are the actions of an executioner virtuous? Does executing prisoners make an executioner a virtuous person? To a virtue ethicist the answer to both of these questions is no. The job of an executioner is to murder a helpless individual. A virtuous person would not kill a handcuffed person, regardless of who they are. This allows us to answer the second question. The actions of an executioner cannot make the executioner a more virtuous person, because the actions undertaken by the executioner are not virtuous.

I personally believe that virtue ethics is quite weak when it comes to these situations. The criticisms of virtue ethics can be seen quite clearly when applying it to something like the death penalty and capital punishment. While consequentialism and deontology have quick answers to this moral question, virtue ethics flounders. This is because virtue ethics mainly describes and does not prescribe. In the end a proper virtue ethicist would be against capital punishment, but their argument would be quite weak.

Virtue Ethics and the Definition of Virtue

From guest blogger, Tessa.

For this week’s blog post, I wanted to touch on Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics. When beginning to learn about this topic, everything sounded reasonable to me. For example, we should ask ourselves “what kind of person should I be?” instead of asking ourselves “what should I do?”. Our goal is to do what the ‘virtuous person’ would do. For example, an action is right if it is what would be done by someone of virtue. This sounds like realistic moral reasoning, although how do we define a virtuous person? The readings define a virtuous person as simply someone who sets a fine example and serves as a role model for the rest of us (also called a moral exemplar). Moreover, a virtuous act is between two vicious existences. One virtuous characteristic to have would be bravery, rather than being a coward or foolhardy.

While this seemed like a reasonable idea at first, I now have many more questions. What if people have a different definition of what ‘bravery’ is? What happens when different cultures value different virtues? Do we take cultures into consideration? What about conflicting virtues- someone may act with many virtues, but lack in one area- are they someone we should follow? These are just a few of the immediate concerns that came to mind during class. Believers say that you learn who is virtuous over time. It takes practice and learning from your mistakes to be able to find a real virtuous person.

Lastly, we briefly discussed people who may never have the chance of becoming virtuous. Some people may be doomed, because of their upbringing or their past/current role models. It really rubs me the wrong way that some people have absolutely no chance in becoming virtuous, so I may hone in on this for my paper.