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Is Virtue Ethics Self-Effacing?

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Abstract

Thomas Hurka, Simon Keller, and Julia Annas have recently argued that virtue ethics is self-effacing. I contend that these arguments are rooted in a mistaken understanding of the role that ideal agency and agent flourishing (should) play in virtue ethics. I then show how a virtue ethical theory can avoid the charge of self-effacement and why it is important that it do so.

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Notes

  1. Stocker (1976, 66). A similar thought informs Gary Watson’s suggestion that an agent’s motivational system should be in harmony with her valuational system (Watson 2004, 25-26).

  2. See, for example, Slote (1992, 149–50) and Hursthouse (1999, 94).

  3. Swanton (1997) voices a similar concern; however, as we shall see, she does not join Hurka and Keller in concluding that this problem is insurmountable for the virtue ethicist.

  4. In fact each of them thinks virtue ethics is worse off with respect to self-effacement than is consequentialism.

  5. Annas does not spell out the differences between these two senses of self-effacement this explicitly. But I think this characterization captures the heart of the contrast between the sense of self-effacement upon which her argument depends (SE2) and that on which Keller’s and Hurka’s arguments depend (SE1). SE1 and SE2 differ not only from one another, but also from Parfit’s sense of self-effacement (SE3). A theory would be self-effacing in his sense (SE3) if it “told everyone to cause himself to believe some other theory” (Parfit 1984, 24). SE1 and SE2 identify two of the possible reasons a theory might tell everyone not to believe it, but there may be other reasons for a theory to be SE3.

  6. Aristotle (2000) 1099a31ff. See also Hursthouse (1999, 171ff.).

  7. Annas herself pursues such a strategy (2008, 209).

  8. Notice that this response involves more than merely making the possession of virtue a necessary constituent of flourishing. For one might possess virtue to some requisite degree and still, on occasion, act in a way that is neither from virtue nor even in accordance with virtue. This would leave open the possibility that thinking about promoting her flourishing might lead an agent to give preference to certain non-moral elements of her flourishing and perform an action that the theory would not endorse. The identity claim closes off this possibility, either by eliminating non-moral elements from the account of flourishing or by stipulating that they are always subordinate to the moral elements of an agent’s flourishing. Notice, as well, that if one pursues this strategy, the idea of flourishing can no longer provide an independent justification for the virtues, as it does for Hursthouse. Nor—contra Annas (2008, 213)—can flourishing, on such an account, be “the point of being virtuous”.

  9. For interesting discussions of some of these distinctions, see Williams (1981), Taylor (1995a, b), Broome (2004), Hieronymi (2005), and Gert (2007).

  10. Compare Stocker (1970b, 137; 1979, 221ff.; and 1981, 760ff.); and Herman (1996, 25).

  11. This is what Stocker (1976, 75–76) refers to as an index rather than a determinant of goodness.

  12. For a nice discussion of this point, see Sandler (2007, 87–91).

  13. Thus, Keller’s objection to a de re criterion and Slote’s argument based on the principle that “it is better to act from feeling than from duty” fail to establish that virtue ethics is self-effacing (Keller 2007, 229; Slote 2001, 45).

  14. Such as, for example, Crisp (2006).

  15. Swanton (1997) develops this point in some detail. She notes that this is one of the reasons Annas is subject to the charge of self-effacement.

  16. A common complaint in medical contexts is that doctors adopt the impersonal triage approach when it is not appropriate. Both to avoid such complaints and to combat the temptation to adopt the impersonal stance, doctors often make efforts to address their patients by name. “Because,” as Iris Murdoch observes, “it’s somehow easier to think about somebody if you know their name” (Murdoch 1969, 18).

  17. Stocker (1997, 209). This is a commitment to which many virtue ethicists will already be amenable. See, for example, MacIntyre (1984), Nussbaum (1990), and Swanton (2003).

  18. They will be, in Scanlon’s sense, at least partially buck-passing. See Scanlon (1998, 96) and Parfit (2001, 20).

  19. Swanton (2003, 233–234). However, as shall become clear in the next section, the account of right action that I offer differs from hers.

  20. The question of why these constellations are familiar is amenable to a number of different answers. It might be because they connect up with human motivation in the way that Foot proposes in Virtues and Vices. Or it might be because certain “spheres of experience” figure “in more or less any human life” (Nussbaum 1988, 35).

  21. See Adams (1976), Watson (1990), Hurka (2001), Driver (2001), Bradley (2005), and Russell (2007).

  22. See Hurka (2006).

  23. See Herman (1996) and Hieronymi (2008) for nice discussions of this point.

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to audiences at the University of Glasgow, the University of Stirling, and the Australasian Association of Philosophy Meeting in Christchurch, New Zealand for feedback on earlier versions of this paper. I am particularly indebted to Michael Brady, Garrett Cullity, Rosalind Hursthouse, Jonathan McKeown-Green, Bill Ransome, and Christine Swanton for numerous discussions of the issues addressed herein.

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    Glen Pettigrove

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Pettigrove, G. Is Virtue Ethics Self-Effacing?. J Ethics 15, 191–207 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-010-9089-4

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