Critique of Pure Virtue: Animadversions on a Virtue-Based Ethic

Abstract

Goal-based ethical theories, duty-based ethical theories and rights-based ethical theories have all been well represented and well canvassed during the modern era. But it has also become evident, particulary since the extensive examination of Rawls’, Dworkin’s and Nozick’s views, that none of these accounts are without very fundamental difficulties — difficulties which are not just difficulties in detail but difficulties in the basic structure and the programmatic intent of such theories. Just as with the deadlock in ethical theory of some twenty years ago there were scattered voices telling us to go back to Kant, so in our present circumstances it is understandable that some should try to return to a virtue-based ethics.