Normative Ethical Theories
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Normative Ethical Theories
Deontological and Virtue Ethics
Now, I say, man and, in general, every rational being exists as an end in himself and not merely as a means to be arbitrarily used by this or that will. In all his actions, whether they are directed to himself or to other rational beings, he must always be regarded at the same time as an end.
Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals
The virtues are those excellences which enable a human being to attain the furthest potentialities of his nature.
Gilbert Meilaender, The Theory and Practice of Virtue
1—Introduction
The vast majority of Christian thinkers throughout the history of the church have embraced either deontological or virtue ethics or some combination of the two. The Ten Commandments and, more generally, the Old Testament law seems most naturally to be an example of deontological ethics. The book of Proverbs and the Sermon on the Mount seem to be expressions of a virtue approach to ethics. Moreover, these two normative ethical theories appear to capture what most people take to be a commonsense approach to the nature of ethics.
Roughly, deontological ethics focuses on right and wrong moral actions and moral laws and holds that some moral acts and rules are intrinsically right or wrong irrespective of the consequences produced by doing those acts or following those rules. According to deontological ethics, morality is its own point, at least in part, and moral duty should be done for its own sake. By contrast, virtue ethics focuses on the nature and formation of a good person, and the sort of dispositions and character traits that constitute the good person. According to virtue ethics, the good person is the one who is functioning properly, that is, as a human ought to function and thus is one who is skilled at life.
In this chapter, deontological and virtue ethics will be examined and evaluated in that order. The chapter will close with a brief examination of different ways the two theories can be united into a comprehensive vision of the moral life.
2—Deontological Ethics
In order to grasp the deontological theory of morality, three aspects of the theory should be understood: the deontological theory of value, the nature of a moral rule, and the arguments for and against the theory.
2.1 Deontological Theory of Value
The term deontology comes from the Greek word deon, which means “binding duty.” Accordingly, the essence of deontological approaches to ethics lies in the notion that duty should be done for duty’s sake. Moral rightness or duty is, in part, independent of the nonmoral good realized in the consequences of moral acts. On this view, a moral act is right when it conforms to the relevant, correct principle of moral duty. A correct principle of moral duty is one that is intrinsically right or derived from a principle that is intrinsically right. Consider the moral law “Do not murder.” A deontologist may take this to be an intrinsically correct moral rule or he may take it to be derived from the more basic rule “Respect persons as things with intrinsic value.” On this latter approach, “Do not murder” is justified as an important way of respecting the more basic rule, and in this sense it is derived from that basic rule. Either way, true moral rules are intrinsically right from a moral standpoint. Thus acts are right or wrong, not solely due to the consequences produced by following those acts, but in virtue of the type of act under which the individual acts fall. A specific act of breaking a promise is wrong because the type of act—a promise-breaking act—violates an intrinsically correct moral rule, “One ought to keep one’s promises.”
A deontological theory of value may be clarified by comparing it to utilitarianism, beginning with the general utilitarian theory of value. Note first that there is a distinction between intrinsic and instrumental value. Something has intrinsic value just in case it is valuable as an end in itself—for example, friendship. Something has instrumental value just in case it is valuable as a means to an end—for example, money. Some things can exemplify both kinds of value. Thus friendship is intrinsically good and also a means to pleasure. Second, there is a distinction between moral and nonmoral value. Moral value, sometimes called rightness, is the value possessed by moral acts and rules. Nonmoral value, sometimes called goodness, is the value possessed by things besides moral acts and rules—for example, pleasure, beauty, health, friendship.
Now according to utilitarianism, rightness is merely an instrumental value, that is, rightness is simply a means for obtaining goodness, namely, the maximization of utility, which, as we saw in chapter twenty-three, has been defined differently by various advocates of utilitarianism. On this view, morality is not its own point; rather, it is a means to an end. Many utilitarians believe in objective, intrinsic nonmoral value (e.g., friendship, pleasure). However, they do not believe that moral value is intrinsic. By contrast, advocates of deontological ethics believe that moral value stands to value in general as part to whole, not as means to end. For them, there are, indeed, things that have nonmoral value, but moral acts and rules also have intrinsic value. Rightness is intrinsically valuable and not solely a means to goodness. Morality is, at least in part, its own point. To behave morally solely as a means to something else is not to behave morally at all.
In addition to competing general theories of value, deontological and utilitarian ethical theories may be compared fruitfully in four other areas: persons, social relations, the past, and the features of an act relevant to moral appraisal. To begin with, deontological and utilitarian ethical theories have different views of the value of persons. On a deontological theory, persons have intrinsic value simply as such and ought not to be treated solely as a means to an end. According to utilitarianism, persons do not have intrinsic value; rather, they have value as units that contain utility. On this view, persons do not have intrinsic value simply as persons. Rather, they are in some sense “bundles of nonmoral good,” and as such they have value insofar as they exemplify pleasure, health, and so forth. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to pursue the issue, but some critics of utilitarianism have argued that because it does not depict persons as ends in themselves, it lacks the resources to support a robust doctrine of human rights.
Regarding social relationships, utilitarianism implies that there is one fundamental moral relationship between people, namely, the relationship of benefactor to beneficiary. On this view, people relate to each other morally as recipients or creators of utility. On a deontological view, there is a wide range of special social relationships that create their own special, intrinsic moral duties: parent-child, promisor-promisee, employer-employee, and so forth.
Regarding the past, deontological ethics holds that past events place moral obligations on people, and thus moral reasoning should include looking into the past for those morally relevant human transactions. For example, it is because Jerry promised Jim a week ago that he would help him with his homework today, that Jerry has a moral obligation to provide that help. By contrast, utilitarian moral reasoning is applicable to present and future states of affairs. In assessing a moral duty, the utilitarian looks for the moral act that maximizes utility in the present or future, and the past is consulted simply as part of the context to be taken into consideration in attempting to predict present or future utility.
Finally, deontological and utilitarian ethical theories differ regarding their analysis of the features of a moral act relevant for assessing the moral worth of that act. To get at this difference, consider two people, Jack and Jill, who spend an afternoon with their grandmother. Jack, motivated by love for his grandmother, intends to show kindness to her by spending the afternoon visiting with her. As a result, Jack’s grandmother is cheered by the company. Jill, motivated by greed, intends to secure a place in her grandmother’s will by spending an afternoon visiting with her and Jill is successful in hiding her intention from her grandmother. As a result, Jill’s grandmother is cheered by the company.
In these moral actions, we may distinguish four things: a motive, an intent, a means, and a consequence. A motive is why one acts. Jack’s motive was a feeling of love; Jill’s was greed. An intent is what act one actually performs. The intent answers the question, “What sort of act was it?” Jack’s intent was to show kindness toward his grandmother and he performed an act of kindness. Jill’s intent was to secure a place in the will, and her act was one of attempting to secure that place. The means is the way an agent purposely carries out his or her intention. Jack and Jill each perform the same means, namely, each spends the afternoon visiting with the grandmother. Finally, the consequence is the state of affairs produced by the act. In each case, the grandmother was cheered up.
For the utilitarian, the consequences of the act are the sole intrinsic factor that determines its moral worth. Means are evaluated according to their effectiveness in securing the maximization of utility. Intentions and motives are assessed morally in the same way. Intentions and motives receive moral praise and blame not because some are intrinsically right or wrong, but on the basis of whether or not those acts of moral praise or blame will themselves maximize utility.
For the deontologist, the end does not justify the means, and it is appropriate to assess the intrinsic moral worth of means as well as ends. The same thing may be said for motives and intentions, but for the deontologist, the latter are more important than the former. Why? An intention is the key factor in deciding what sort of act a particular action is, and thus the intention is what places the act in the relevant class of acts that is defined by a certain act type. Motives are also important, but they are more relevant to the assessment of the character of the moral actor than of the moral nature of the act itself. Finally, while a deontologist may see consequences as part of the relevant factors for assessing an action, they are less important than the intrinsic features of the act itself.
2.2 Deontological Ethics and the Nature of Moral Rules
In the history of philosophy, there have been act and rule deontologists. According to act deontology, a moral agent should intuitively grasp the right thing to do in each specific moral situation without relying on moral rules. Act deontology has never gained widespread acceptance because it is too subjective and it fails to capture the nature of moral rules and their role in the moral life. Rule deontology is the view that types of acts are right or wrong depending on their conformity or nonconformity to one or more correct moral rules. The most important advocate of rule deontology is the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Even though contemporary advocates of deontological ethics have expanded on or abandoned certain aspects of Kant’s moral philosophy, he is still regarded as the most important advocate of the position. At the core of Kant’s deontological ethics is his notion of a categorical imperative, which, according to many interpreters of Kant, has at least three different formulations:
CI1: Act only according to that maxim (i.e., principle) by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
CI2: Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only.
CI3: Act only so that the will through its maxim could regard itself at the same time as universally law-giving such that in performing the act, the agent follows the law autonomously.
CI1 is sometimes called the universalizability formulation of the categorical imperative, and it exhibits two important features. First, a moral rule is universalizable in the sense that it is equally binding on all people at all times in relevantly similar situations. Among other things, this principle expresses the principle of consistency: one ought to be consistent about one’s moral judgments. If some act X is judged right for some person P, then X is right for anyone relevantly similar to P. Second, moral rules are categorical imperatives, not hypothetical indicatives. For utilitarians, moral rules are hypothetical indicatives; that is, they are “if-then” conditional statements such that the consequent that follows the “then” describes a means for attaining the antecedent that follows the “if.” For example, “If you want to maximize happiness, then keep your promises.” Here, the moral rule “Keep your promises!” is a description of an effective means for maximizing happiness, and the moral rule is to be followed on the condition that one is trying to maximize happiness. By contrast, CI1 implies that moral rules are categorical imperatives such as “Do not steal!” or “Keep your promises!” Moral rules present themselves to us as categorical statements that apply across the board and not as statements conditioned on the acceptance of some hypothetical goal. Further, moral rules present themselves as imperatives, not as simple means-ends indicatives.
CI2 expresses the fact that human persons are members of the kingdom of ends, that is, that human persons have intrinsic value. Thus human persons should never be treated merely as a means to some other end. People sometimes treat others as means to an end and this is entirely appropriate. A student may treat a professor as a means to an education. But CI2 implies that human persons should never be treated solely as a means to an end. Arguably, the most plausible way to justify this principle is in light of the biblical doctrine that human persons are created in the image of God.
CI3 expresses what is sometimes called the principle of autonomy: duty should be done for duty’s sake. For an act to count as a morally correct one, it is not enough for it to be done in accordance with duty; it should be done for the sake of duty. In this way, a human being as moral agent acts as a rational being by treating his own will as a legislator of moral action in this sense: the moral action is done autonomously for no reason other than simple respect for moral duty. Such an act is called an autonomous act. In contrast, Kant described what he called a heteronomous act, that is, one done to satisfy some inclination, desire, or impulse. Heteronomous acts treat moral rules as means to some end—the satisfaction of desire—and thus they fail to count as genuinely moral acts done out of mere respect for the moral law and moral duty. In heteronomous acts, rationality enters the picture as an instrument for desire since reason simply engages in means-to-ends deliberation in the service of satisfaction. In autonomous action, however, reason serves to produce a will good in itself, one that acts solely for the sake of moral duty.
2.3 Assessment of Deontological Ethics
It is safe to say that deontological ethics captures the commonsense and considered moral intuitions of most people when they reflect about the nature of moral actions and rules. Indeed, it was deontological ethical intuitions that served as the basis for the counterexamples raised against ethical egoism and utilitarianism in chapter twenty-three. It is also safe to say that deontological ethics captures at least part of the core of biblical ethics, especially the Old Testament law, including the Ten Commandments. Critics claim that it is a troublesome feature of deontological ethics that it must rely so heavily on moral intuition. In response, deontologists point out that all philosophical views, including all ethical theories, sooner or later must appeal to intuitions, and the fact that deontological intuitions harmonize so well with the insights of most human beings counts heavily in their favor. This fact places a burden of proof on alternative theories such as utilitarianism, and that burden has not been met.
Besides the issue of the role of moral intuitions in justifying an ethical theory, there are at least four objections that have been raised against deontological ethical theories. First, some argue that while CI1 may be a necessary condition for a moral rule, it is not sufficient because a maxim could satisfy CI1 yet still not qualify as a moral rule. In this way, CI1 is, at best, a formally empty principle without sufficient material content to serve as an action guide that is required of an adequate moral rule. As an illustration of this argument, consider the following maxim M: everyone should always tie one’s left shoe before one’s right shoe. Clearly M can be universalized without contradiction, and thus M could be consistently willed as a universal law. But, equally clearly, M does not rise to the level of a moral maxim even though it satisfies CI1. In response, some deontologists, especially Christian ones, appeal to natural moral law and Scripture as sources of material content for the moral law. Roughly, natural moral law consists in true moral principles grounded in the way things are and, in principle, knowable by all people without the aid of Scripture. Many Christian theists see natural moral law as part of God’s general revelation, truths God has revealed in the creation itself. Both natural moral law and the commands of Scripture provide material content that supplements CI1, say some deontologists.
A second objection amounts to the claim that deontological approaches to ethics fail to provide adequate consideration for the consequences of moral acts and, it is argued, those consequences, if not the sole determining moral factor, are extremely important in evaluating alternative actions available to an agent. For example, consider a physician who has several medical interventions he could employ in attempting to benefit his patient. Surely the doctor should select the medical means that would maximize benefit for his patient and all those affected by the moral act. Since deontological ethics fails to weigh adequately the consequences of moral acts, it fails as an ethical theory.
In response, deontologists point out that deontological theories vary in the considerations they give to consequences of moral acts, but it is clearly false that they disregard them altogether. Consider the medical case in the last paragraph. A physician may subscribe to the deontological principle “One ought to benefit and not harm one’s patient.” Given this principle, different medical interventions may honor this principle to varying degrees. All things being equal, the doctor should perform that intervention which most exemplifies the moral rule. In this case, the moral rule is intrinsically correct and not justified on the basis of consequences, but consequences enter the picture as factual considerations which help the doctor decide the best way to respect a moral rule justified independently of those consequences. By contrast, if the moral rule is interpreted in a utilitarian way, then not only are the consequences of the various medical interventions evaluated morally solely in terms of the utility they produce, but the moral rule itself is justified relative to alternative rules on the grounds that if most people follow that rule it will maximize utility compared to most people following an alternative rule. In a particular situation, it may well be that a deontological and utilitarian approach will justify the same medical action, but they will do so for different reasons and, in any case, the deontologist does in fact have room for consequences in his overall depiction of morality.
A third objection to deontological theories is that they fail to deal adequately with moral conflicts in which more than one moral rule is at stake and one cannot honor all the relevant rules. The utilitarian has no such problem because in such cases, utilitarianism implies that one ought to perform that action or follow that rule that maximizes utility compared to alternative actions or rules. But deontological theories provide no guidance in such cases and this counts against deontological theories.
Deontologists claim that however much this objection counts against Kant’s particular version of deontological ethics, it is not a sufficient defeater of deontological theories in general since those theories have, in fact, provided a response to conflict situations.
To understand the deontological response to this objection, it is necessary to review some important ideas discussed in chapter twenty-two: three views of an absolute moral rule and three deontological systems. First, consider the following three analyses of a moral absolute P:
(1) is the most fundamental sense of a moral absolute. It is sometimes called moral objectivism, and it amounts to a rejection of subjectivism, roughly, the idea that believing a moral proposition is what makes it true relative to those who believe it. (2) is also a crucial notion of a moral absolute. Most deontological ethicists would accept (1) and (2), or since (1) is incorporated into (2), they would simply accept the objectivity and universalizability of moral rules. (2) entails that moral rules do not have exceptions. An exception to a moral rule is a case where the rule should apply but, for some reason, it is judged inapplicable and has no relevance to the moral case under consideration.
(3) is controversial, and it expresses a more stringent understanding of an absolute: an absolute is such that it is a true, exceptionless moral principle that has the highest degree of incumbency, that is, it cannot be overridden by a more weighty principle. In this view, only those absolutes with the maximum weight qualify as moral statements. An absolute is like an ace. It can trump (override) all rivals but cannot itself be trumped. Put differently, (3) implies that all moral absolutes are equally weighty.
It would seem that this understanding of an absolute is too strong. Surely, if a moral statement did have the highest degree of incumbency, it would be an absolute. But we seem to have absolute (objectively true, exceptionless) duties that can be overridden by more important duties. The notion of weightier and less weighty absolutes is not unintelligible, and in fact, it plays an important role in the moral life (see chap. 22). To see this, consider what philosophers call a prima facie duty. A prima facie duty is an objectively true, exceptionless moral duty that can be overridden by a weightier duty in a specific instance. When this occurs, the prima facie duty does not disappear, but continues to apply to the specific instance in question and make its presence felt. An exemption to a moral absolute occurs when that absolute is overridden by a weightier duty. The difference between an exemption and an exception is this. With an exemption, the overridden principle continues to apply. In the latter case, the excepted principle no longer applies at all. Arguably, exemptions do happen to moral duties but exceptions do not.
Given the distinction between exemptions and exceptions, many absolutists believe that while objectively true moral rules are universalizable and thus do not admit of exceptions within the relevant range of situations to which those rules apply (there are no cases in which, for example, the moral rule “Do not lie” should apply but where it simply vanishes and may be completely disregarded), moral rules do admit of exemptions. In those cases, the rule still applies. It may be overridden by a weightier rule, but the exempted principle still makes its presence felt and must be honored by being overridden only to the degree necessary to honor the weightier principle.
Besides these three different understandings of an absolute moral rule, there are three different deontological systems regarding how to treat moral conflict situations. First, there is unqualified absolutism, the view that all moral duties are equally weighty, that the third sense of an absolute above is correct, and thus that there are no prima facie duties. All supposed inescapable moral dilemmas are only apparently unavoidable, and there will always be a way to escape the dilemma. The second and third views are called conflicting absolutism and graded absolutism. Both positions accept the existence of prima facie duties and the notion that there are weightier and less weighty duties. Thus advocates of these points of view reject the third understanding of an absolute. Further, both positions believe that genuine moral conflicts occur. However, they differ as to how we should view the action performed in such conflict situations. According to graded absolutism (also called the greater of two goods view), when one does the greater good, one performs a morally correct act even if one went against a lesser moral rule. For example, if one lies to save a life, then what one did was a good thing. According to conflicting absolutism (also called the lesser of two evils view), if one lies to save a life, then one still does something wrong, because a moral rule was violated, even though one did the lesser of two evils. Given these different understandings of an absolute moral rule and these three deontological systems, advocates of deontological ethics believe they have, indeed, provided guidance for handling moral conflict cases, and thus this objection has been rebutted.
Finally, some have criticized deontological theories on the grounds that they are preoccupied with moral actions and rules, they fail to give due consideration to the nature of virtue and the good person, and they do not give any advice as to how to develop character. In fact, on at least one reading of Kant, if one does a morally correct act because he desired to do so, that actually counts against the moral worth of the act, and this is highly implausible. According to Kantian deontology, a moral act is one done solely out of respect for moral duty. If an act is done for the sake of satisfying desire, it is a heteronomous act and, to that extent, falls short of moral worth. Consider two people, Frank and Joe, who are considering whether to commit adultery. Frank very much wants to commit adultery and struggles a great deal with his decision, but in the end, he refrains, not because he wants to, but because it is his moral duty. By contrast, Joe, having developed a pure heart through years of virtuous living, deeply desires to honor his wife and has a great moral distaste for adultery. With no struggle at all, Joe refrains. On one interpretation of Kant, Joe’s act is worth less than Frank’s from a moral point of view because it is done out of desire and thus is heteronomous, while Frank’s act of refraining is strictly an autonomous act. But surely this is backward. Joe’s act is at least of equal value to Frank’s and, arguably more morally worthy, so deontological ethical theory fails on this score.
It is open to a deontologist to respond by drawing a distinction between two kinds of desires: morally relevant desire is a desire to do one’s duty that results from a cultivation of a desire for moral holiness. In contrast, heteronomous self-interest is a form of desire that seeks “moral” action solely as a means to the satisfaction of a desire—for example, a desire to be liked—that is not directed toward holiness and moral rightness. Given this distinction, a deontologist could argue that an autonomous act can and in fact ought to be done according to a morally relevant desire, and a heteronomous act is one done for morally irrelevant self-interest. By way of application, the deontologist could claim that Joe’s act is superior to Frank’s because it was done according to a stronger morally relevant desire and, in this way, Joe actually showed more respect for morality as such than did Frank.
Even if this response is a good one, it still seems true that deontological ethics does not provide an adequate analysis of virtue, character, and the good person. This problem raises the question of the relative merits of deontological and virtue ethics. So to address this problem sufficiently, it is important to turn to an analysis of virtue ethics.
3—Virtue Ethics
Virtue theory, also called aretaic ethics (from the Greek word aretē, “virtue”), has a long and distinguished pedigree, going back to Aristotle and Plato, running through Thomas Aquinas, and including many contemporary advocates. Virtue ethicists sometimes claim that deontological ethics fails because it abstracts from the moral agent himself, it focuses entirely on doing the right things instead of on being a good person, and it provides little guidance for understanding how to develop ethical character and moral motivation. By contrast, central to virtue ethics is the question of what a good person is and how a good person is developed. Further, the claim is made that deontological ethics places too much emphasis on moral autonomy, whereas virtue theory includes an emphasis on community and relationships. The remainder of this section will survey an exposition and evaluation of virtue ethics.
3.1 Exposition of Virtue Ethics
Virtue ethics is teleological in nature. The sort of teleology (focus on goals or ends) involved in virtue ethics is not like that of utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is teleological in the sense that it focuses on what sort of action will maximize utility. Virtue ethics focuses on the overall purpose of life, namely, to live well and achieve excellence and skill as a human person. In this sense, virtue ethics is deeply connected to a vision of life as a whole and of the ideal human person. Given an understanding of the purpose of life and of ideal human flourishing and skillful living that is part of that purpose, an ethics of virtue is an attempt to clarify the nature of a good person and how one is developed in light of this overarching vision of life. Put differently, virtue ethics aims at defining and developing the good person and the good life, and virtues are those character traits that enable people to achieve eudaimonia or happiness, not understood as a state of pleasurable satisfaction, but rather as a state of well-being, of excellence and skill at life.
Classic virtue ethics includes a commitment to essentialism, roughly, the idea that human beings have an essence or nature. An essence is a set of properties—for humans, those that constitute what it is to be human—that define the kind of thing an entity is and are such that if the entity in question loses them, it ceases to exist. To illustrate, Socrates has humanness as his essence, and has the property of being white as an accidental feature. Socrates could lose his skin color and still exist, but if he lost his humanness, he would cease to be. Moreover, being human tells us what Socrates is by his very nature. According to classic virtue ethics, human nature provides the grounds for ideal human functioning; one who functions ideally and skillfully in life is one who functions properly in accordance with human nature. Human nature defines what is unique and proper for human flourishing, and a bad person is one who lives contrary to human nature. Thus, in Romans 1:26-27, Paul argues that homosexuality is wrong because it is “unnatural,” literally, “against nature,” that is, it is contrary to proper human functioning in accordance with the essence of being human.
An illustration may help to clarify this notion further. A bad or dysfunctional carburetor is one that is not functioning the way it ought to function, that is, according to the way it was designed to function by its very nature. Similarly, a dysfunctional sexual life is one that is not functioning the way it ought to function, that is, according to the way humans were designed to function by their very nature.
In contemporary virtue ethics, some, such as Alasdair MacIntyre, have rejected essentialism and sought to explicate virtue ethics in an antiessentialist context. Roughly, virtues are features judged to be skills relevant to the good life as that is understood relative to the narrative embodied in different traditions. A tradition is a community whose members are united by a core of shared beliefs and a commitment to them. Thus virtues are not grounded in an objective human nature; rather, they are linguistic constructions relative to the valuations and commitments of different traditions. Whether this contemporary understanding of virtue ethics is adequate is something to be considered later.
Given a vision of ideal human functioning and skill, virtue ethics places great importance on character and habit. Character is the sum total of an individual’s habits, and a habit is a disposition to think, feel, desire, and act in a certain way without having to will consciously to do so. A virtue is a habit of excellence, a beneficial tendency, a skilled disposition that enables a person to realize the crucial potentialities that constitute proper human flourishing according to ideal human nature. Put more simply, a virtue is a skill that suits one for excellence at life.
Virtues go beyond moral virtues. For example, there are rational virtues such as the desire to seek truth, to be rational, and so forth. Traditionally, virtue theory included a commitment to the four cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, courage, and temperance. Christianity added the so-called distinctively Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love.
Finally, there have been a number of different views as to how to develop virtue, but the spiritual disciplines have been central to a Christian understanding of character development for some time and they are reemerging as important aspects of sanctification. So understood, a spiritual discipline, such as fasting, solitude, or silence, is a repeated bodily activity, done in submission to the Holy Spirit, aimed at developing habits that train a person in a life of virtue. A spiritual discipline is very much like playing scales on a piano. One does not play scales to get good at playing scales. Rather, one plays scales to form the habits necessary for being a skillful piano player. Similarly, one does not perform spiritual disciplines to get good at them, but rather to get good at life. A spiritual discipline is a means to habit formation relevant to the development of character and virtue.
3.2 Evaluation of Virtue Ethics
Virtue ethics has secured a wide following throughout the history of ethics, and it is easy to see why. Its core notions of the purpose of life, the good person, character, and virtue capture much of what is central to the moral life. In fact, it is often easier to secure agreement among people about what a good person is and who fits that category than it is to reach consensus about the correct thing to do in a particular situation or about the correct set of moral rules.
Still, virtue ethics is not without its critics, and two objections are often raised against it. The first one, touched on above, is the claim that given naturalistic evolutionary theory, several notions at the core of virtue theory, while not logically impossible, are nevertheless implausible. Such things as an overarching purpose to life, genuine natures, normative proper and improper function, and a general teleological outlook are hard to harmonize with a view that depicts humans as creatures that have evolved through a blind process of chance and necessity.
Virtue ethicists may offer two responses to this. First, they can admit the force of the objection and build a theory of virtue ethics without the traditional metaphysical framework. Most often, this strategy is taken by those who adopt some form of postmodernism. On this view, virtues are those habits a tradition or linguistic community takes to be valuable and skillful relative to the shared narrative and belief commitments of that tradition or community. While this approach does preserve some sort of virtue ethics, it is not clear that this community-relative version is worthy of the title. On the classic view, there really is a difference between a good person and a bad one, a skillful, functional life of virtue and a dysfunctional life of vice. Thus the whole point of virtue theory is to help clarify and develop people who are really functioning the way they were intended to function. However, on the community-relative view, a virtue or vice turns out to be what a group chooses to count as such, perhaps by embedding certain terms of appraisal in the group’s distinctive form of life. But it seems neither necessary nor sufficient for something genuinely to be a virtue that it be regarded as such by a tradition or community. It is not necessary because something such as humility is actually a virtue even if no community regards it to be one. It is not sufficient because if the community is a gang, it may treat the ability to steal or hate members outside the gang as a virtue, but this would not make it so. In the final analysis, community-relative virtues or values reduce moral notions to those of mere custom. As a result, they trivialize the moral life and fail to provide the resources for something to rise to the level of a real virtue.
Second, an advocate of virtue ethics can argue that since, strictly speaking, it is logically possible to embrace classic virtue theory and the metaphysics that is part of it along with naturalistic evolutionary theory, then there is no good reason to be forced to choose one or the other. This response may be convincing to some, but given the metaphysics of both naturalistic evolution and classic virtue theory, the two do not seem to sit easily with each other. Naturalistic evolutionary theory makes the existence of purpose in life, essentialism, teleology, and the like fairly implausible, and since these are central to classic virtue theory, this move will not be persuasive to many. A more promising line of approach may be seen by considering the following syllogism:
P: If naturalistic evolutionary theory is true, than classic virtue ethics is false.
Q: Naturalistic evolutionary theory is true.
Therefore,
R: Classic virtue ethics is false.
It is open to a defender of classic virtue ethics to embrace the modus ponens form of the argument, accept Q (“Classic virtue ethics is true”) and conclude with R (“Naturalistic evolutionary theory is false”). In this way, classic virtue ethics provides a defeater for naturalistic evolutionary theory.
The second objection to virtue ethics may fairly be called the classic criticism of the theory. According to this objection, virtue ethics simply fails to give guidance in resolving moral dilemmas and in knowing what to do in various moral situations. This is especially true when virtue ethics is compared with rule-based ethical theories such as deontological ethics. Rule-based theories are far better suited for providing such guidance than is virtue ethics.
This objection may be somewhat overstated if it means that virtue theory provides no guidance for the moral life. Asking questions such as, what would Jesus do in this situation? or trying to imitate virtuous people does provide guidance for leading a morally superior life. Still, the objection does carry some force because virtue ethics does not seem to provide the sort of clarity that rule-based theories do when it comes to assessing difficult moral situations.
If one grants that this objection carries weight, does that mean one ought to abandon virtue ethics? One’s answer to this question will depend on one’s view about how virtue and deontological ethical theories should be integrated. Many theorists hold that virtues and moral rules should coexist in some way. They claim that virtues without rules are blind, but rules without virtues are motivationally impotent. There are three different positions on how virtue and deontological ethics should be integrated:
Each position has had its share of advocates, and there is no clear winner in this debate. However, it may be that the complementary view best expresses the ethics of the Bible since Scripture seems to give weight and intrinsic value both to moral commands and virtues of character.
Chapter Summary
The vast majority of Christian thinkers throughout the history of the church have embraced either deontological or virtue ethics or some combination of the two. Deontological ethics focuses on right and wrong moral actions and moral laws, and it holds that some moral acts and rules are intrinsically right or wrong irrespective of the consequences produced by doing those acts or following those rules. According to deontological ethics, morality is its own point, at least in part, and moral duty should be done for its own sake. By contrast, virtue ethics focuses on the nature and formation of a good person and on the sort of dispositions and character traits that constitute the good person. According to virtue ethics, the good person is one who is functioning properly, that is, as a human ought to function, and thus is one skilled at life.
Act and rule deontological theories were contrasted, and emphasis was placed on the latter. Rule deontology is the view that types of acts are right or wrong depending on their conformity or nonconformity to one or more correct moral rules. Central to rule deontology is the notion of a categorical imperative. Three different formulations of a categorical imperative were given, and five objections to deontological ethics were evaluated. Along the way, three different senses of an absolute moral rule were offered, and three different deontological systems were described.
Virtue ethics focuses on the overall purpose of life, namely, to live well and achieve excellence and skill as a human person. In this sense, virtue ethics is deeply connected to a vision of life as a whole and of the ideal human person. Given an understanding of the purpose of life and of ideal human flourishing and skillful living that is part of that purpose, an ethics of virtue is an attempt to clarify the nature of a good person and how one is developed in light of this overarching vision of life. Classic virtue ethics was described, and a brief characterization of a contemporary postmodern virtue theory was presented.
An evaluation of two main arguments against virtue ethics was provided: the problem of harmonizing it with naturalistic evolutionary theory and the claim that it fails to give adequate guidance in morally difficult situations. The chapter closed with a presentation of three different ways of integrating deontological and virtue ethics: pure virtue ethics, the correspondence thesis, and the complementary thesis.
Checklist of Basic Terms and Concepts
act deontology
aretaic ethics
autonomous act
categorical imperative
character
classic virtue ethics
complementary thesis
conflicting absolutism (or lesser of two evils view)
consequence
contemporary virtue ethics
deontological ethics
deontology
essentialism
eudaimonia or happiness
exception
exemption
general revelation
graded absolutism (or greater of two goods view)
habit
heteronomous act
heteronomous self-interest
highest degree of incumbency
hypothetical indicative
instrumental value
intent
intrinsic value
kingdom of ends
maxim
means
moral value or rightness
morally relevant desire
motive
natural moral law
nonmoral value or goodness
objectivism
prima facie duty
principle of autonomy
pure virtue ethics
rule deontology
spiritual discipline
standard deontic view or correspondence thesis
subjectivism
teleology
universalizable
unqualified absolutism
virtue
virtue ethics