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Virtue Ethics: A Critical Reader
The central question in contemporary ethics is whether virtue can replace duty as the primary notion in ethical theory. This is book focuses directly on this subject.
320 pages, Paperback
First published May 31, 1997
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May 31, 2023Alright, the last review of one of my "non-rate"able books was boring as hell but THIS one might be a doozy. Now that I'm using goodreads as a notebook, any of the reference books that I read that are just like a collection of academic articles are gonna get a whole bunch of mini reviews for each individual article, so time to review (but not rate, I don't care that much) every single article in this one WOOHOO!!!!!!!
1 - Statman's introduction; boys these early ones are gonna be ROUGH considering I read this thing over like the course of more than a week. I don't really remember much about this other than that it was good I think. Very good overview of the original motivations for the shift to virtue theory in ethics, and the general developments that characterized the early days of contemporary work in the field. Not much else to say I guess? Kinda summarizes a lot of ideas that are fleshed out in more detail in the later articles, which I suppose makes sense given that it is an introduction.
2 - Trianosky's overview of virtue ethics; good, cool, not much else to say. You get a very nice little list of major claims that virtue ethicists tend to deny which helps to categorize certain thinkers and positions in terms of what they take to be the problems with duty ethics, and a fun little political compass-esque meta-theory of the structure of moral theories that divides them along a virtue/duty line regarding basic moral judgements and a teleological/deontological divide regarding how the ends of a theory are justified.
3 - Watson's primacy of character; honestly one of the two articles that I even ended up choosing to read this whole entire book because of, and I guess it was good? But idk I still feel a little disappointed honestly. Like its FINE, better than fine actually; seems like its the motivation between the 3 category understanding of ethical theories as being related to the good, the right, and virtue, uses a really useful concept of explanatory primacy, a distinction between the good regarding consequences and a constitutive view of the good, and has a really interesting discussion surrounding character utilitarianism and its relative closeness to an ethics of virtue. It's definitely an article that I'll be coming back to read over again who knows how many times... So why I feel so meh? Maybe its simply just boring.
4 - Swanton on satisficing rationality; cool, plausible, and clearly conveyed. I also just don't really care.
5 - Hursthouse on emotions; also cool, plausible, and clearly conveyed! I actually really like Hursthouse's writing style generally I think, however regarding this particular article I feel like what I care about most is like the thing that isn't really the main point of the article, that being Hursthouse's distinction between difficulty in exercising virtues based on circumstances vs difficulty due to fault in character. As for the main question, whether virtue ethics can handle emotions better than other ethical theories (she suggests it can't, not that its worse but just that is isn't clearly superior to other approaches)... Sure I guess. If it can't, then oh well. I have better reasons for thinking consequentialists and deontologists are nerds anyways.
6 - Stocker on emotional identification; "you should care more about your parents dying than you should care about atrocities that you have no relation to whatsoever", the article. At least it was short.
7 - Slote on saying fuck you to Kant; I won't lie at first I completely forgot everything about his article but I went back to review it and holy shit I'm glad I did. Slote went absolutely crazy in this one, his internal incoherence argument against common sense morality and Kantianism was sick as fuck (did we really even need to make an argument for why the former is stupid. Saying that your moral theory is just whatever your common sense tells you is like the worst manifestation of absolutely morally depraved intuitionists openly deciding to not even try and give reasons anymore for why their shitty judgements are actually super cool and not cringe), and while I frankly hate all the hullabaloo about symmetry to begin with the idea that virtue ethics achieves symmetry through the self and other as classes rather than individual agents was really neat.
8 - Alderman on why virtue ethics is the only good theory for objectivists; also a pretty badass paper I think, although more so because it's cool and relevant to my interests, and less so because I actually think it succeeds. The general idea is that virtuous character is logically prior to any other ethical concept, and the argument is basically that there can be arguments against the fundamental goodness of every other major ethical concept/category, but not against character; moreover, there are strong commonalities between historical conceptions of good character in different cultures and traditions that aren't present in the laws and principles of disparate traditions. As for the latter point, I'm not sure why that has to be the case - the golden rule comes to mind as an often quoted universal human rule of conduct - but I think this one is interesting for me mainly because it seems like an interesting starting point for motivating Zagzebski's exemplarist theory, and it makes me wonder if she read this (probably?) and if so how much it influenced her thought.
9 - Soloman on rejecting some arguments against virtue ethics; very cool, but not much to say honestly. Rejects the self-centeredness, action guidance, and contingency (god the last one is so lame fuck Kant fr) objections in a suitably satisfying fashion by basically showing why consequentialists and deontologists are cry babies that go WAAAAAHHHH!!!! about shit in virtue ethics that they literally don't have a problem with in their own theories. But mostly I see these as sorta like non-problems that I find it hard to care about sometimes, particularly the first and ESPECIALLY the third.
10 - Louden on why virtue ethics and lame and stupid actually; now we get to the two stinkers that wanna poop all over my virtue ethics parade. BOOOOOO!!!!! This first one is the second article of the two that I originally read this whole book in order to get to, and funnily enough the main action guidance critique of it that is supposed to be the major critique that stuck was the least interesting to me (probably because I had just read a bunch of articles shitting on it, I love unfairly pre-empting arguments to make them seem stupid when they're ones that I don't like teehee). For better critiques in this article that I feel like are worth taking more seriously than action guidance, see intolerable actions, the epistemic issues Louden discusses, and the utopianism critique.
11 - Montague on why the virtue ethicists had a point but I still don't feel like being one; honestly, I know I poopooed on this one for poopooing on virtue ethics, but the analysis of the structure between act, person, and trait appraisals was pretty instructive and I think important to keep in mind as a defender of virtue ethics. Definitely more favorable to this critique than Louden's scattershot of complaints, to say the least.
12 - Solomon of virtuous business people (ew); Solomon started out by dunking on people who think that business ethics is an oxymoron, and while I happen to be one of those people I'll let his insults slide given that I ultimately appreciate the general project the article undertakes. Part of my motivation to pursue virtue ethics as a theoretical approach is because it feels more readily applicable to genuine ethical issues and practical concerns, and Solomon I think does an effective job at showing exactly how the shift to a virtue ethical perspective can do just that in a business context.
13 - Hursthouse on virtue ethics and abortion; based article, based takes (sorta I feel like I should maybe heavily qualify this one on second thought), based philosopher. Some of the points brought up in this analysis regarding the morality of abortion were admittedly a little outdated, and saying that women's rights were lame felt a LITTLE overly inflammatory (on a more serious note - the real idea as I saw it was that "women's rights" are irrelevant because rights as a concept are irrelevant, i.e., women's rights are as valid as any other sort of rights, i.e., women's rights are perfectly valid and cool but I'm a virtue ethicist so I'm just not gonna use the word "right" in this paper even though I am ultimately defending what laypeople would understand as a woman's right to get an abortion), but the point wasn't even about the abortion bit at all, but more so about using it as a case study for demonstrating how virtue ethics can be effectively used in an applied ethics context; as far as that goal goes, this is certainly an amazing example of how I think applied ethical analysis should be done, disagreements aside.
14 - Simpson on why Aristotle WASN'T a great guy, actually; omg, you're telling me that a guy that defended slavery WASN'T a good person???? That's sooooOOOOOOOO cRaZy CoOkY wAcKy dude!!!!!!!! Now that I have hopefully drenched my deliberate ignorance about the distasteful aspects of Aristotelian philosophy in enough sopping wet sarcasm, I can say that this was basically a pretty mildly successful critique of the very illiberal aspects Aristotle's ethical theory that no one was trying to defend anyways, guised as a way to demonstrate that contemporary virtue ethics is definitely a COMPLETELY different thing from Aristotle's theory. This honestly just feels kinda obtuse to me at a certain point, I might as well argue that because someone could plausibly use the really suspect moral intuitionism in Prichard and Ross to motivate really bigoted ethical viewpoints (I don't have any examples of this happening or being done in the same way that Aristotle literally just openly advocated for bigoted shit generally, but they were British dudes born in the late 1800's, so frankly I don't think I need any), that we're not allowed to consider modern deontological pluralism or intuitionism as derivative of Prichard and Ross's philosophy. Worst article in the book.
15 - Santas on how to ACTUALLY prove that Aristotle's theory is fundamentally different than modern virtue ethics; Don't know enough about Aristotle's theory to confirm whether Santas is successful here, but I don't need to be able to do that to be able to confirm that it's better than the Simpson article at doing the same job. Actual detailed analysis of the structure of Aristotelian ethics with a thorough comparison to the structure of modern virtue ethics accounts, AND involves Aristotle's Politics in depth so that its relevance to his ethics isn't neglected. Literally owns Simpson so fucking hard, and I think gives pretty compelling reasons for rejecting Aristotle as a true virtue ethicist. That's fine, he was lame anyways.
16 - Louden on Kant's virtue ethics; honestly don't care much about this one either. It was a more interesting read than Swanton's, but I'm sorta apathetic to the conclusion. If the conclusion is right and Kant is a sorta virtue ethicist, then cool, the more the merrier! And if he isn't like it's more usually claimed, then good cuz he's lame anyways. The only thing in this that might be of interest to the 2.5 people that happen to both really interested in virtue ethics AND Kantianism is what seems like a sort of subtle shade tossing regarding the idea that virtue ethics proponents overexaggerate the extent to which the virtues were neglected in philosophy after Aristotelianism died, but I'm not really convinced that its a meaningful critique of the motivations for contemporary virtue ethics and as an argument it probably deserves its own article anyways.
Jesus christ thank god I'm finally done. As an overall evaluation I'd say that this book really slapped though! For someone in a time crunch that unfortunately doesn't have the time to simply read every major contribution to the revival of virtue ethics in the mid to late 1900's, but wants what seems to me like a decent picture of what the state of the programme was like nearing the turn of the century, I think this is a really good cole's notes view of the situation.
1 - Statman's introduction; boys these early ones are gonna be ROUGH considering I read this thing over like the course of more than a week. I don't really remember much about this other than that it was good I think. Very good overview of the original motivations for the shift to virtue theory in ethics, and the general developments that characterized the early days of contemporary work in the field. Not much else to say I guess? Kinda summarizes a lot of ideas that are fleshed out in more detail in the later articles, which I suppose makes sense given that it is an introduction.
2 - Trianosky's overview of virtue ethics; good, cool, not much else to say. You get a very nice little list of major claims that virtue ethicists tend to deny which helps to categorize certain thinkers and positions in terms of what they take to be the problems with duty ethics, and a fun little political compass-esque meta-theory of the structure of moral theories that divides them along a virtue/duty line regarding basic moral judgements and a teleological/deontological divide regarding how the ends of a theory are justified.
3 - Watson's primacy of character; honestly one of the two articles that I even ended up choosing to read this whole entire book because of, and I guess it was good? But idk I still feel a little disappointed honestly. Like its FINE, better than fine actually; seems like its the motivation between the 3 category understanding of ethical theories as being related to the good, the right, and virtue, uses a really useful concept of explanatory primacy, a distinction between the good regarding consequences and a constitutive view of the good, and has a really interesting discussion surrounding character utilitarianism and its relative closeness to an ethics of virtue. It's definitely an article that I'll be coming back to read over again who knows how many times... So why I feel so meh? Maybe its simply just boring.
4 - Swanton on satisficing rationality; cool, plausible, and clearly conveyed. I also just don't really care.
5 - Hursthouse on emotions; also cool, plausible, and clearly conveyed! I actually really like Hursthouse's writing style generally I think, however regarding this particular article I feel like what I care about most is like the thing that isn't really the main point of the article, that being Hursthouse's distinction between difficulty in exercising virtues based on circumstances vs difficulty due to fault in character. As for the main question, whether virtue ethics can handle emotions better than other ethical theories (she suggests it can't, not that its worse but just that is isn't clearly superior to other approaches)... Sure I guess. If it can't, then oh well. I have better reasons for thinking consequentialists and deontologists are nerds anyways.
6 - Stocker on emotional identification; "you should care more about your parents dying than you should care about atrocities that you have no relation to whatsoever", the article. At least it was short.
7 - Slote on saying fuck you to Kant; I won't lie at first I completely forgot everything about his article but I went back to review it and holy shit I'm glad I did. Slote went absolutely crazy in this one, his internal incoherence argument against common sense morality and Kantianism was sick as fuck (did we really even need to make an argument for why the former is stupid. Saying that your moral theory is just whatever your common sense tells you is like the worst manifestation of absolutely morally depraved intuitionists openly deciding to not even try and give reasons anymore for why their shitty judgements are actually super cool and not cringe), and while I frankly hate all the hullabaloo about symmetry to begin with the idea that virtue ethics achieves symmetry through the self and other as classes rather than individual agents was really neat.
8 - Alderman on why virtue ethics is the only good theory for objectivists; also a pretty badass paper I think, although more so because it's cool and relevant to my interests, and less so because I actually think it succeeds. The general idea is that virtuous character is logically prior to any other ethical concept, and the argument is basically that there can be arguments against the fundamental goodness of every other major ethical concept/category, but not against character; moreover, there are strong commonalities between historical conceptions of good character in different cultures and traditions that aren't present in the laws and principles of disparate traditions. As for the latter point, I'm not sure why that has to be the case - the golden rule comes to mind as an often quoted universal human rule of conduct - but I think this one is interesting for me mainly because it seems like an interesting starting point for motivating Zagzebski's exemplarist theory, and it makes me wonder if she read this (probably?) and if so how much it influenced her thought.
9 - Soloman on rejecting some arguments against virtue ethics; very cool, but not much to say honestly. Rejects the self-centeredness, action guidance, and contingency (god the last one is so lame fuck Kant fr) objections in a suitably satisfying fashion by basically showing why consequentialists and deontologists are cry babies that go WAAAAAHHHH!!!! about shit in virtue ethics that they literally don't have a problem with in their own theories. But mostly I see these as sorta like non-problems that I find it hard to care about sometimes, particularly the first and ESPECIALLY the third.
10 - Louden on why virtue ethics and lame and stupid actually; now we get to the two stinkers that wanna poop all over my virtue ethics parade. BOOOOOO!!!!! This first one is the second article of the two that I originally read this whole book in order to get to, and funnily enough the main action guidance critique of it that is supposed to be the major critique that stuck was the least interesting to me (probably because I had just read a bunch of articles shitting on it, I love unfairly pre-empting arguments to make them seem stupid when they're ones that I don't like teehee). For better critiques in this article that I feel like are worth taking more seriously than action guidance, see intolerable actions, the epistemic issues Louden discusses, and the utopianism critique.
11 - Montague on why the virtue ethicists had a point but I still don't feel like being one; honestly, I know I poopooed on this one for poopooing on virtue ethics, but the analysis of the structure between act, person, and trait appraisals was pretty instructive and I think important to keep in mind as a defender of virtue ethics. Definitely more favorable to this critique than Louden's scattershot of complaints, to say the least.
12 - Solomon of virtuous business people (ew); Solomon started out by dunking on people who think that business ethics is an oxymoron, and while I happen to be one of those people I'll let his insults slide given that I ultimately appreciate the general project the article undertakes. Part of my motivation to pursue virtue ethics as a theoretical approach is because it feels more readily applicable to genuine ethical issues and practical concerns, and Solomon I think does an effective job at showing exactly how the shift to a virtue ethical perspective can do just that in a business context.
13 - Hursthouse on virtue ethics and abortion; based article, based takes (sorta I feel like I should maybe heavily qualify this one on second thought), based philosopher. Some of the points brought up in this analysis regarding the morality of abortion were admittedly a little outdated, and saying that women's rights were lame felt a LITTLE overly inflammatory (on a more serious note - the real idea as I saw it was that "women's rights" are irrelevant because rights as a concept are irrelevant, i.e., women's rights are as valid as any other sort of rights, i.e., women's rights are perfectly valid and cool but I'm a virtue ethicist so I'm just not gonna use the word "right" in this paper even though I am ultimately defending what laypeople would understand as a woman's right to get an abortion), but the point wasn't even about the abortion bit at all, but more so about using it as a case study for demonstrating how virtue ethics can be effectively used in an applied ethics context; as far as that goal goes, this is certainly an amazing example of how I think applied ethical analysis should be done, disagreements aside.
14 - Simpson on why Aristotle WASN'T a great guy, actually; omg, you're telling me that a guy that defended slavery WASN'T a good person???? That's sooooOOOOOOOO cRaZy CoOkY wAcKy dude!!!!!!!! Now that I have hopefully drenched my deliberate ignorance about the distasteful aspects of Aristotelian philosophy in enough sopping wet sarcasm, I can say that this was basically a pretty mildly successful critique of the very illiberal aspects Aristotle's ethical theory that no one was trying to defend anyways, guised as a way to demonstrate that contemporary virtue ethics is definitely a COMPLETELY different thing from Aristotle's theory. This honestly just feels kinda obtuse to me at a certain point, I might as well argue that because someone could plausibly use the really suspect moral intuitionism in Prichard and Ross to motivate really bigoted ethical viewpoints (I don't have any examples of this happening or being done in the same way that Aristotle literally just openly advocated for bigoted shit generally, but they were British dudes born in the late 1800's, so frankly I don't think I need any), that we're not allowed to consider modern deontological pluralism or intuitionism as derivative of Prichard and Ross's philosophy. Worst article in the book.
15 - Santas on how to ACTUALLY prove that Aristotle's theory is fundamentally different than modern virtue ethics; Don't know enough about Aristotle's theory to confirm whether Santas is successful here, but I don't need to be able to do that to be able to confirm that it's better than the Simpson article at doing the same job. Actual detailed analysis of the structure of Aristotelian ethics with a thorough comparison to the structure of modern virtue ethics accounts, AND involves Aristotle's Politics in depth so that its relevance to his ethics isn't neglected. Literally owns Simpson so fucking hard, and I think gives pretty compelling reasons for rejecting Aristotle as a true virtue ethicist. That's fine, he was lame anyways.
16 - Louden on Kant's virtue ethics; honestly don't care much about this one either. It was a more interesting read than Swanton's, but I'm sorta apathetic to the conclusion. If the conclusion is right and Kant is a sorta virtue ethicist, then cool, the more the merrier! And if he isn't like it's more usually claimed, then good cuz he's lame anyways. The only thing in this that might be of interest to the 2.5 people that happen to both really interested in virtue ethics AND Kantianism is what seems like a sort of subtle shade tossing regarding the idea that virtue ethics proponents overexaggerate the extent to which the virtues were neglected in philosophy after Aristotelianism died, but I'm not really convinced that its a meaningful critique of the motivations for contemporary virtue ethics and as an argument it probably deserves its own article anyways.
Jesus christ thank god I'm finally done. As an overall evaluation I'd say that this book really slapped though! For someone in a time crunch that unfortunately doesn't have the time to simply read every major contribution to the revival of virtue ethics in the mid to late 1900's, but wants what seems to me like a decent picture of what the state of the programme was like nearing the turn of the century, I think this is a really good cole's notes view of the situation.
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