For most of the last 400 years, moral philosophers have tended to focus primarily on actions, not agents—on what sort of things we should do rather than what sort of people we should be. The main task of the philosopher has been to discover and explain the principles on which this moral obligation is based and to formulate rules that guide us to behave in accordance with these principles.
Very different proposals have been made on the nature of the underlying principles themselves, from the duty-based ethics of Kant to the consequentialist utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill. Nevertheless, at root there has been a shared assumption that the core issue is the justification of actions rather than the character of agents, which has been seen as secondary or merely instrumental. But virtue has not always played handmaiden to duty or some other good beyond itself.
Until the Renaissance and the first stirrings of the scientific revolution, the overwhelmingly important influences in philosophy and science were the great thinkers of classical Greece—Plato and, above all, his pupil Aristotle. For them, the main concern was the nature and cultivation of good character; the principal question was not “What is the right thing to do (in such and such circumstances)?” but “What is the best way to live?” Given this very different set of priorities, the nature of virtue, or moral excellence, was of central interest. Aristotle’s philosophy was eclipsed for several centuries from the time of Galileo and Newton, when attention shifted to the rules and principles of moral conduct. From the middle of the 20th century, however, some thinkers began to express their dissatisfaction with the prevailing trend in moral philosophy and to revive interest in the study of character and virtues. This recent movement in moral theorizing, inspired principally by Aristotle’s ethical philosophy, has advanced under the banner of “virtue ethics.”
There is, on the face of it, such a gulf between the task as conceived by Aristotle and the approach adopted by most recent philosophers that some have suggested that the terminology should be adapted to reflect the distinction. It has been proposed that the term “morality” should be restricted to systems such as that of Kant, where the focus is on principles of duty and rules of conduct; while “ethics”—which is derived from the Greek word for “character”—is reserved for more Aristotelian approaches, in which priority is given to the dispositions of the agent and to practical (not just moral) wisdom. There has been disagreement over the usefulness of the distinction, which others regard as setting up a false (because misleadingly sharp) opposition between Aristotle and the philosophers with whom he is contrasted.
The Greeks on virtue According to Aristotle, as to other Greek thinkers, being a good person and knowing right from wrong is not primarily a matter of understanding and applying certain moral rules and principles. Rather, it is a question of being or becoming the kind of person who, by acquiring wisdom through proper practice and training, will habitually behave in appropriate ways in the appropriate circumstances. In short, having the right kind of character and dispositions, natural and acquired, issues in the right kind of behavior. The dispositions in question are virtues. These are expressions or manifestations of eudaimonia, which the Greeks took to be the highest good for man and the ultimate purpose of human activity. Usually translated as “happiness,” eudaimonia is actually broader and more dynamic than this, best captured by the idea of “flourishing” or “enjoying a good (successful, fortunate) life.” The Greeks often talk about four cardinal virtues—courage, justice, temperance (self-mastery) and intelligence (practical wisdom)—but a pivotal doctrine for both Plato and Aristotle is the so-called “unity of the virtues.” Founded in part on the observation that a good person must recognize how to respond sensitively to the sometimes conflicting demands of different virtues, they conclude that the virtues are like different facets of a single jewel, so that it is not in fact possible to possess one virtue without having them all. In Aristotle, the possession and cultivation of all the various virtues means that the good man has an overarching virtue, usually called “magnanimity” (from the Latin meaning “great-souled”). The Aristotelian megalopsychos (“great-souled man”) is the archetype of goodness and virtue: the man of distinguished station in life and worthy of great things; anxious to confer benefits but reluctant to receive them; showing a proper pride and lacking excessive humility.
“The Good of man is the active exercise of his soul’s faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue … Moreover this activity must occupy a complete lifetime; for one swallow does not make spring, nor does one fine day.”
Aristotle, c.350 BC
The golden mean is central to Aristotle’s conception of virtue. The doctrine is sometimes mistakenly seen as a call for moderation, in the sense of striking a middle path in all things, but this is far from his meaning. As the quotation makes clear, the mean is to be defined strictly by reference to reason. To take an example: the virtue that lies as a mean between cowardice and rashness is courage. Being courageous is not only a matter of avoiding cowardly actions such as running away from the enemy; it is also necessary to avoid foolhardy, devil-may-care bravado, such as mounting a futile attack that will be damaging to oneself and one’s comrades. Courage depends on reason governing one’s baser, nonrational instincts: the crucial point is that action should be appropriate to the circumstances, as determined by practical wisdom responding sensitively to the particular facts of the situation.
“Virtue, then, is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in the mean which is defined by reference to reason. It is a mean between two vices, one of excess and one of deficiency; and again, it is a mean because the vices respectively fall short or exceed what is right in both passions and actions, while virtue both finds and chooses that which is intermediate.”
Aristotle, c.350 BC
The hierarchy implied in the unity of the virtues led Plato to the strong conclusion that the different virtues are in fact one and the same and that they are subsumed under a single virtue—knowledge. The idea that virtue is (identical with) knowledge led Plato to deny the possibility of akrasia, or weakness of will: for him, it was impossible to “know the better yet do the worse”; to behave intemperately, for instance, was not a matter of weakness but of ignorance. The idea that we cannot knowingly do wrong, clearly at odds with experience, was resisted by Aristotle, who was always anxious where possible to avoid diverging from common beliefs (endoxa). For Plato and Aristotle, behaving virtuously was inextricably linked to the exercise of reason, or rational choice; and Aristotle elaborated this idea into the influential doctrine of the (golden) mean.
the condensed idea
What you are, not what you do
| Timeline | |
|---|---|
| c.440BC | One man’s meat … |
| c.350BC | Virtue ethics |
| AD1739 | Hume’s guillotine |
| 1974 | The experience machine |
| 1976 | Is it bad to be unlucky? |