Abstract
My question in this paper concerns what eudaimonist virtue ethics (EVE) might have to say about what makes right actions right. This is obviously an important question if we want to know what (if anything) distinguishes EVE from various forms of consequentialism and deontology in ethical theorizing. The answer most commonly given is that according to EVE, an action is right if and only if it is what a virtuous person would do in the circumstances. However, understood as a claim about what makes particular actions right, this is not especially plausible. What makes a virtuous person’s actions right must reasonably be a matter of the feature, or features, which she, via her practical wisdom, appreciates as ethically relevant in the circumstances, and not the fact that someone such as herself would perform those actions. I argue that EVE instead should be understood as a more radical alternative in ethical philosophy, an alternative that relies on the background assumption that no general account or criterion for what makes right actions right is available to us: right action is simply too complex to be captured in a ‘finite and manageable set of…moral principles’ (McKeever and Ridge, Principled ethics, Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 139). This does not rule out the possibility that there might be some generalizations about how we should act which hold true without exception. Perhaps there are some things which we must never do, as well as some features of the world which always carry normative weight (even though their exact weight may vary from one context to another). Still, these things are arguably few and far between, and what we must do to ensure that we reliably recognize what is right in particular situations is to acquire practical wisdom. Nothing short of that could do the job.
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Notes
There are different views among eudaimonists about how strong the connection between eudaimonia and virtuous activity is exactly. Aristotle, for example, seems to treat virtuous conduct as necessary but not sufficient for the best life (external goods are needed as well), whereas the Stoics arguably held that virtuous activity is both necessary and sufficient for eudaimonia. More recently, Rosalind Hursthouse has defended an interesting third position, according to which virtuous activity is, strictly speaking, neither necessary nor sufficient for the best life, but instead constitutes our best bet for achieving it (see Hursthouse 1999, Part III).
Compare Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics (NE), 1094a 18–25 (see Aristotle 2002).
I suppose this is not quite right according to Hursthouse’s account of the relation between virtuous activity and eudaimonia (mentioned briefly in fn. 1). In her account, doing what is right (together with knowledge of why it is right) is constitutive of the way of life that is more likely than any alternative to lead to eudaimonia, but it is not, strictly speaking, necessary for the best life.
Notice that both of the relevant conditions for virtuous activity concern our actions and affections. In what follows, however, I will restrict my attention to right action.
Another possibility, it seems, could be for the defender of EVE to remain uncommitted regarding the true account of what makes right actions right. She could say that her only concern with regard to that question is that the account must not be incompatible with her favoured conception of the human good.
Another way of understanding the suggestion could perhaps be as simply stating something that we should be able to use when trying to figure out what we should do in particular situations (we should ask ourselves “what would a virtuous person do, were he or she in my shoes?”). Understood in this way, however, it could conceivably be accepted by consequentialists and deontologists about right-making features as well. Thus, we would still be left with the question of whether EVE has anything distinctive to contribute with regard to such features. (I will return briefly to this point below.)
Searching for a set of principles of the relevant kind is not, presumably, the only job for moral theorists, but it is often treated as their most important task.
Some moral theories which seem to belong within the tradition of moral theorizing that I am sketching here do not quite live up to this ideal, however. An interesting example in this respect is arguably the pluralist moral theory associated with Ross (1930). Ross defends a list of seven pro tanto (or, as he calls them, prima facie) moral duties or principles. These duties or principles, it seems, are (1) not stated in purely descriptive or non-moral terms, and (2) such that the pro tanto qualifications cannot be eliminated. Still, Ross’ theory constitutes a kind of generalism in the sense that all right conduct can be explained by reference to the basic list of duties, even though it often (always?) takes judgment to determine which duty that wins the day in a particular situation. Rossian-style pluralism has been defended more recently in, e.g., McNaughton and Rawling (2000, 2006).
Of course, it is also open to defenders of the view that we should not always, and maybe not even very often, use basic moral principles in ordinary decision-making to say that there still are at least some cases in which we can profitably apply the basic principles directly to our circumstances.
As Aristotle put it, in ethics we are not seeking “the why” because (or at least not primarily because) we want to know about it, “but for the sake of becoming good” (NE, 1103b 27–28).
See, e.g., Hursthouse (1996, 1997, 1999); Oakley and Cocking (2001); Zagzebski (1996, 2004). (Zagzebski in fact distinguishes between, on the one hand, right action, and, on the other hand, moral duty. The former is couched in terms of what a virtuous person might do, whereas the latter is instead couched in terms of what a virtuous person would do.) Kawall (2002) defends the view that right action should not be understood in terms of what a virtuous person would do, but instead in terms of what a virtuous person would deem right in the circumstances.
Even though the metaethical claim is not among my main concerns in this paper, some of the things I will state below are nevertheless relevant with respect to it. In particular, I will argue that there is strong reason to think that the notion of the virtuous person must be understood, at least in part, in terms of right action. If this is correct, then it would be (at least in part) circular to account for the nature or essence of right action in terms of what a virtuous agent would do.
In a recent paper, Jason Kawall defends the view that virtue ethicists should indeed accept (roughly) the claim that an action is right if and only if it is what a virtuous agent would do, both on the metaethical level and on the level of normative theory (i.e., as a claim about that in virtue of which right actions are right); see Kawall (2009), Sect. III. As Kawall points out, however, one could conceivably combine, say, virtue theory on the metaethical level with one or another form of utilitarianism on the normative. (I thank an anonymous referee for The Journal of Ethics for drawing my attention to Kawall’s interesting paper).
See Hursthouse (1999, p. 37).
As I pointed out earlier (footnote 8), this seems true for pluralistic moral theories of the kind that we find in Ross (1930); and in McNaughton and Rawling (2000, 2006). For a consequentialist example, we might think of J. S. Mill’s view, according to which there are higher and lower pleasures which we need to take into account when determining what it is right to do.
A distinction of this kind is drawn in Kawall (2009), Sect. III. Kawall distinguishes between what he calls the instantiation sense and the normative sense of the question “why is this action right (wrong)?” The answer to the instantiation question tells us what makes the action such that it would be performed by a virtuous person in the circumstances (that it contributes to the relief of another person’s bad headache, e.g.), whereas the answer to the normative question instead tells us in virtue of what the action is right (namely that it would be performed by a virtuous person). In this picture, virtuous persons are thus not guided by what strictly speaking makes actions right, but instead by different considerations which appear as morally relevant to persons in possession of the virtues in particular situations.
It is true that Aristotle at one point indeed states that right or virtuous action is “determined by rational prescription and in the way in which the wise person would determine it” (NE, 1107a 1–2). This might seem to suggest that Aristotle thinks it is really the fact that a virtuous agent would do a certain action that makes the action right. However, another, and I think much more plausible, interpretation of Aristotle is that he thinks the virtuous person, due to his or her practical wisdom, is simply in the best possible position to appreciate what it is right to do in the circumstances.
I do not intend this to mean that the virtuous person must necessarily be able to refer to a set of ultimate principles or rules. It might be (indeed, on the view I will defend below, it is) the case that what makes right actions right is so context dependent that on a general level, the best that a virtuous person can do is to point out that what it is right to do depends on the circumstances, and then in addition perhaps provide some examples, explaining why it is right to do an action A in circumstances C, an action A* in circumstances C*, and so on.
This line of response was suggested to me by an anonymous referee for The Journal of Ethics.
For an account of the nature of modesty in which underestimation indeed plays a crucial role, see Driver (2001, chapter 2). (The central claim in Driver’s account is this: “A modest person underestimates self-worth”, p. 16; emphasis in original.) Now if modesty comes down to basically the same thing as humility, then I would probably have to engage with Driver’s arguments in favour of her account to defend some of my claims about humility in this paper. However, whether modesty is basically the same thing as humility and, if it is, how I might respond to Driver’s arguments, are questions which I will set aside for another occasion.
For a defence of the view that utilitarianism indeed recommends a life of virtue, see Crisp (1992). However, it should be noted that what Crisp is defending is not quite (or at least not necessarily) that we should think about what a virtuous person would do when deciding how we should act in particular situations. Rather, the view is that the best life, on utilitarian grounds, is a life in accordance with the virtues and that, presumably, means that we should also aim to think about how we should act in the way a virtuous person would do that, and the virtuous would not, I take it, deliberate in terms of what someone such as herself would do. (I will return to this last point just below.)
I should perhaps add that I do not wish to deny that it might have some motivational force to think for oneself that “it would be quite callous not to tell her”, “a courageous person would do A here, I should really do A too”, and so on. Thoughts of this kind, it seems to me, do not (at least not normally) help us to figure out what it is right (or wrong) to do; rather, they add motivational force to do (or to avoid) what we know already beforehand is right (wrong), by reminding us about the kind of person we will appear as in the eyes of ourselves and others if we act in a certain way.
One further objection to the suggestion that right action should be cashed out in terms of what a virtuous person would do, which seems relevant whether or not this is understood as a suggestion for what makes right actions right or instead (or perhaps also) as a suggestion for what we should think about when trying to figure out how to act, says that it fails to produce the right answer in cases where no virtuous person (precisely because she is virtuous) could ever be. Common examples of such cases in the literature include: (a) cases where one has done wrong towards another person and where what is called for is that one make amends for what one has done; (b) cases where one is unsure about what one should do and one therefore asks a wiser person for guidance; (c) cases where one decides to pursue some strategy for getting rid of some character flaw that one has. In response to examples of this kind, it is often suggested that what needs to be done is to revise the original account so that it states, e.g., that an action is right if and only if it is what a virtuous person would advise one to do in the circumstances. (Other ways of revising the original account include that an action is right if and only if it is what a virtuous person would want one to do, or perhaps what a virtuous person would deem right, in the circumstances.) I argue elsewhere that it is in fact possible to construct counterexamples to many of these proposed revisions as well (see Svensson 2010). However, I suppose it is still conceivable that someone would be able to develop an account which avoids counterexamples entirely. Notice, though, that even if we were to opt for an account of right action couched in terms of, e.g., what a virtuous person would advise or want one to do in the circumstances, instead of one couched in terms of what a virtuous person would do, this would not make the account any less implausible as an account of what makes actions right. Neither would it make the account any easier to use when trying to figure out what one should do in particular situations.
It is perhaps worth noticing that one response to this challenge that is not open to the proponents of EVE is to claim that what makes right actions right is that they promote one’s own individual flourishing (eudaimonia). This possibility is closed just because EVE involves the claim that acting rightly is itself constitutive of eudaimonia. Thus if we want to know why our right actions are right, we need to look elsewhere than to the notion of eudaimonia. (The idea that the rightness of our actions is determined by their conduciveness to our own flourishing is problematic for other, independent reasons as well. Perhaps the most obvious problem is that it seems quite counter-intuitive to claim such things as that what makes your act of giving me an aspirin right is that you are thereby promoting your own flourishing, rather than claiming that it has to do with the fact that you are thereby helping to relieve my headache.)
I am not suggesting here that there could never be reason for distress or regret about not fulfilling a promise that one has made if keeping the promise is not what one should, all things considered, do in the circumstances. Presumably, the fact that one has made a promise sometimes carries normative weight, even if it is, in the final judgment, outweighed by other factors. In such cases, some amount of distress or regret for not keeping the promise seems appropriate or fitting. However, I suppose there could also be cases where the fact that one has promised to do something has lost all its normative force and where distress or regret about not keeping the promise therefore is out of place.
I am sympathetic to the suggestion developed in Leibowitz (2009), according to which we should think of generalism and particularism as two different research programs in ethics which should be evaluated on the basis of the fruitfulness of their results.
My response to concerned textbook writers is therefore just this: widen the framework! Why not let the readers at least consider a position in ethical philosophy, according to which there is no account of what makes right actions right that could be stated in a “finite and manageable set of…moral principles”?
Providing an account of practical wisdom or intelligence that fits with the view that I am proposing in this paper will probably be an especially important task since one of the main worries many philosophers seem to have with particularism is precisely how, if particularism is correct, we can come to have knowledge of what is right. I am not in a position to make much progress in this respect here, however. (For a recent and, I think, quite interesting discussion of the nature of practical wisdom, see Hursthouse (2006).
I should say that the question whether virtue ethics is usable has been the topic of much discussion already in the literature. However, much of this discussion proceeds on the assumption that virtue ethics is indeed in the business of trying to produce a distinct account or criterion of what makes right actions right, comparable to accounts or criteria found in various forms of consequentialism and deontology, and I want to deny that.
Presumably, not only philosophy should be important in this respect, but also (and perhaps even primarily) developmental psychology.
I think this difference is in large part responsible for distinctions such as MacIntyre’s (1984) between a classical “Aristotelian” mode of ethical philosophy and a modern “Nietzschean” mode; Norton’s (1988) between classical “ethics of character” and modern “ethics of rules”; Pincoff’s 1986 between “ethics of virtue” and “quandary ethics”; and Taylor’s (1985) between “ethics of aspiration” and “ethics of duty”. It is worth noticing, however, that EVE is not the only ethical position with limited capacity to provide any very specific guidance about what we should do in concrete cases. The same seems true also of, e.g., pluralistic moral theories which consist of several basic pro tanto principles, the application of which to particular cases require the exercise of judgment (for examples of pluralistic moral theories, see the references in footnotes 8 and 15).
Insofar as the proponents of EVE acknowledge the existence of certain side-constraints and pro tanto reasons, they can of course also point out that having these things before one’s mind should be useful when thinking about what one should do (even though they will not pick out one specific course of action as right).
Even on the particularist construal of EVE that I am proposing in this paper, EVE does not deny that we must treat like cases alike, in the sense that if it is right to do an action A in a situation S but not to do A in S*, then there must be some relevant difference between S and S*.
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Acknowledgments
I wish to thank all those who contributed to the discussion of earlier versions of this essay at the University of Arizona, Oslo University, Uppsala University, and at the third annual RoME Congress in Boulder. I am particularly grateful to Julia Annas, Anne Baril, and Michael Bukoski. I also want to thank an anonymous reviewer for this journal for several helpful suggestions.
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Svensson, F. Eudaimonist Virtue Ethics and Right Action: A Reassessment. J Ethics 15, 321–339 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-011-9108-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-011-9108-0