Virtue Ethics

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February 24th, 2021
Virtue Ethics doesn't seem to describe how Scott Alexander experiences moral decisions. It seems irrelevant to how morality actually works in his case.
If Virtue Ethics is just about using one's "intuitive morality" instead of thinking rationally, then we don't get anywhere. All we can do is habitually do the good that everyone already knows is good. There's no room for improvement and no way to solve dilemmas.
Virtue Ethics, on the other hand, cannot even attempt to solve any moral dilemmas.
February 25th, 2021
I want to develop this thought and link it with Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics, but I'm running out of time today. For now I can only provide some inspiration.
And then there's 📙 After Virtue, which is a book about Virtue Ethics but whose most interesting perspectives to me have to do with the nature of Intelligibility in human action and how it relates to Narrative.
February 27th, 2021
Judging by this single quote that I had already highlighted from that book, I realize it's also very relevant to my project of understanding how Virtue Ethics relates to 📙 Experiences of Depression.
Idea
Compare with Virtue Ethics.
March 1st, 2021
As described in 📙 After Virtue, Virtue Ethics has a Vertical axis centered around Flourishing and the Common Good. Life may be a kind of playground, but it has structure and directionality.
March 3rd, 2021
The wise practicality of 📰 Body Pleasure seems to make it a candidate for a kind of root source of Virtue Ethics, a sketch for a basic curriculum in Flourishing. Why does this seem outrageous? Because Aristotle is dead, and we killed him.
Thread on the Top-Down & Bottom-Up Duality
so I think MacIntyrean Virtue Ethics would just say that ADHD as a variation can be generative, but for the sake of participation in higher-level structures the ADHD mind needs some kind of assistance, and providing such assistance is necessary for a flourishing society
📰 Book Review: After Virtue
In the entire book, MacIntyre doesn’t give a single example of Virtue Ethics being used to solve a moral dilemma, as indeed it cannot be.
Virtue Ethics, as far as I can tell, just gives you a knowing look and says “The very fact that you interpret morality in terms of moral dilemmas is a symptom of the disease of liberal Modernity.” This is useful for sounding deeply wise, but little else.
📰 Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe
Anscombe’s article “Modern Moral Philosophy” stimulated the development of Virtue Ethics as an alternative to Utilitarianism, Kantian Ethics, and Social Contract theories. Her primary charge in the article is that, as secular approaches to moral theory, they are without foundation. They use concepts such as ‘morally ought,’ ‘morally obligated,’ ‘morally right,’ and so forth that are legalistic and require a legislator as the source of moral authority. In the past God occupied that role, but systems that dispense with God as part of the theory are lacking the proper foundation for meaningful employment of those concepts.
📰 Intro To: “Modern Moral Philosophy”
Until we have some requisite concepts in place, our Virtue Ethics can’t get off the ground. Among these concepts are a description of human nature, human action, what a virtue is, and human flourishing.
📰 Last Thoughts on Virtue Ethics
Full Title: Last Thoughts on Virtue Ethics
📰 Virtue Ethics: Not Practically Useful, Either
Full Title: Virtue Ethics: Not Practically Useful, Either
My experience of morality is contrary to traditional Virtue Ethics in almost every way. It doesn’t feel like it depends on my social roles. It doesn’t strike me as divisible – that is, it feels like solid goodness and words like “continence” or “prudence” don’t do anything to me. It doesn’t strike me as the same feeling that occurs when I consider important but non-ethical questions like procrastination. It doesn’t strike me as performed in a community or according to a Narrative. It’s just not Virtue Ethics.
I bet reading works of fiction about poor people in the Third World would make you more likely to donate to charity, and contemplating Virtue Ethics and the just polis would make you more likely to make you get involved in local politics. Which of these you recommend is very closely linked to whether you think giving to charity to the Third World is more or less important than getting involved in local politics (hint: there is only one answer to this question which is not really stupid).
📙 Crippled Grace
And so we come to the crux of the matter. For Aristotle it is impossible for the disabled person to be truly happy. This prejudice cannot be brushed aside, since it indicates one of the problems of Virtue Ethics, which is the tendency for Virtue to be conceived of in ways that entrench the status quo.
📙 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics
Full Title: Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics
Although ethics, generally speaking, might benefit from phenomenological investigations, Virtue Ethics is a tradition that is particularly well suited to the depth descriptions of phenomenology.
Most basically, Virtue Ethics is concerned with our ability to become better than we are or to flourish. Virtue Ethics depends, therefore, upon our appreciation of the flow of interpretive objectification, where our embodied relationship to things is the focal concern.
A trademark feature of Virtue Ethics is its focus on flourishing as the basis of an excellent life. I bring this focus into dialogue with phenomenology by showing how the natural attitude limits our well-being because of the way it takes reality as something given, ordinary, and stable. As a remedy to this problem, I discuss avenues of engagement that help foster in us more open, enthusiastic, and responsible dispositions, which, in turn, allow us to relate to things, others, and ourselves in more fulfilling ways.
My more modest aim is to extend the suggestions of Dreyfus and Taylor and argue that there is both a methodological proximity and, to a lesser extent, a substantive ethical proximity between phenomenology and Virtue Ethics around the centrality of character to moral flourishing.
If there is an emphasis on the Lebenswelt that is the condition for particular forms of reasoning, including ethical reasoning, then we can again begin to see some methodological connections with elements of both Virtue Ethics and communitarian political thought, which affirm our historical embeddedness and the deep context-dependence of moral and political judgments and forms of agency.
📙 The Second-Person Perspective in Aquinas’s Ethics
The recognition that Aquinas’s Virtue Ethics is radically non-Aristotelian raises a sensitive cultural issue, given the accumulated investment in Aristotle throughout the long history of commentary on Aquinas.
The brief answer is that the Aristotelian interpretation of Aquinas’s Virtue Ethics has been in retreat for many years now, principally because of the work of analytic philosophers studying the infused virtues and by new generations of theologians such as Servais Pinckaers and Michael Sherwin, who have re-examined neglected aspects of Aquinas’s claims about the virtues and their integration with gifts, beatitudes, and fruits. So although this study is novel in certain ways, insofar as it proposes a new understanding of Aquinas’s Virtue Ethics inspired by recent research in social cognition, its non-Aristotelian interpretation of Aquinas’s account is consonant with pre-existing and converging trends in both analytic philosophy and Thomist theology.
For Aquinas, however, this other personal agent is the Holy Spirit, and his entire network of perfective attributes is ordered toward friendship with God. The obvious objection, therefore, is that his entire approach is of little or no value to an atheist, or to a theist who wishes to develop a Virtue Ethics without dependence on God, or indeed to a theist who wants a Virtue Ethics that relates to God in a non-Thomistic manner.
Indeed, like the epicycles added to save the appearances of the Aristotelian model of the solar system, I shall argue that the modifications required for the Aristotelian interpretation of Aquinas’s Virtue Ethics lack any obvious connections to one another or to the kinds of experiences that Aristotle taught us to relate to the notion of virtue.
Together with the influence of Aristotle on Virtue Ethics generally and his undoubted influence on Aquinas, it is then easy to see why the idea that Aquinas’s Virtue Ethics is a modified form of Aristotelianism still exercises a powerful hold on the scholarly imagination. In recent decades, however, new research has strongly criticized even a quasi-Aristotelian interpretation of Aquinas’s Virtue Ethics.
By contrast, in the case of Aquinas’s account of the infused virtues, gifts, beatitudes, and fruits, we lack a corresponding synthetic picture. No matter how many lists and connections are marshalled, these facts are ‘dry bones’ without a grasp of the living whole. What is needed to complement and animate these facts is a metaphoric understanding that embodies the facts about Aquinas’s Virtue Ethics and places them in a living context.