Virtue Ethics or Character Ethics

In his chronicle of life under the Nazis in the Jewish ghetto in Cracow, Thomas Keneally
describes a physician faced with great dilemma: either inject cyanide into four immobile
patients or abandon them to the Nazis, who were at that moment emptying the ghetto and
had already proved that they would actually kill all captives and patients. (Here is a
person who the highest moral character and virtue, motivated to act rightly and even
heroically, yet who at first had no idea what was the morally right action). Ultimately,
with uncertainty and reluctance, the physician elected active euthanasia without the
consent and knowledge of the four doomed patients.

Virtue Ethics:
- not primarily interested in particular actions
- not the questions: Is the action right? What are the circumstances?
- Not the question “What should I do” but “What should I become?”

Proponents of virtue ethics  maintain that the emphasis on virtue is meant to

complement and not supplant completely the stress on norms

Characteristics of virtue ethics

 the increasing attention paid to the tradition as the context of moral inquiry
 the importance of narrative in ethics
 the teleological basis of moral justification
 the focus on moral action as manifestation of the values and commitment
which is central to the character of the moral agent
 a moral psychology concerning the way virtues and vices develop
 a theory of human fulfillment which describes the goal towards which virtues
lead

Also significant about “back to virtue” ethics  the retrieval of Aristotle and St. Thomas
Aquinas

Aristotle’s classic tradition contained in Nicomachean Ethics: “there is a fundamental

contrast between man-as-he-happens to be and man-as-he-could-be if he realized his
essential nature > the task of ethics is to help the human person how to make the
transition from the former to the latter

“Ethics presupposes some account of potentiality and act, some account of

essence of man as a rational animal and above all some account of telos” (MacIntyre)

Classical Aristotelian tradition: any rational method for resolving moral disagreements
can be found only in a tradition of shared assumptions about the nature of man and his
true end.

Thomas Aquinas  stands within the Aristotelian classical tradition as perfecter

Jean Porter: endeavored to reconstruct the moral theory of Aquinas in light of
“problematics” of contemporary Christian ethics  opined that today’s Christian
ethicists have seized on the fragments of what was once a unified moral tradition based
on accounts of human goods and their relation to human choice

Aquinas provides a theory of human good grounded on a general theory of goodness that
rests upon a particular of nature: the human person is considered the active agent of his
own actions  the object is the “good”

According to St. Thomas, what is the specific ideal of humanity and what sort of actions
and habits would promote the attainment of the ideal  partly rests on the theory of
virtue

Virtue (according to Augustine and Aquinas) – a good quality of the mind by which we
live righteously, of which no one can make bad use, which God works in us, without us”

Virtue is the disposition to act or habit of acting in accordance with moral principles,
obligations or ideals  fail to capture the importance of motives (proper motives)

Both right action and right motive should be present in virtuous action:
“The agent must be in the right state when he does (the actions): First he must
know (that he is doing the virtuous actions); second, he must decide on them and decide
on them for themselves; and third, he must also do them from a firm and unchanging
state

Distinction – between natural and supernatural virtues; between intellectual and moral
virtues

Cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude

Critical evaluation of Virtue or Character ethics

1. Morality in relations between strangers – not all areas of the moral life can be
forced into language and the framework of virtue theory; character judgments will
often play less significant role than rights and procedures esp. when strangers
meet
2. Virtue is not enough: it is doubtful that character ethics can adequately explain
and justify assertions of rightness or wrongness of specific actions; unacceptable
to claim that if persons display a virtuous character their acts are therefore
morally acceptable (always)
Ex: hard to maintain that just and unjust actions consists only in what just and
unjust persons do