After having taught an Ethics course at Alaska Pacific University for a number of years, and now at the University of Alaska Anchorage as well, I have found myself sufficiently dissatisfied with the commonly available textbooks and ethics readers to write my own. Whether it will end up as anything more than a personal reference and teaching tool is neither here nor there because my purpose in composing it is my conviction that it will serve the education of my students and I have already been employing it to that effect for two years now. Anyone with interest is welcome to request the whole compilation as a PDF, for which I have included the table of contents below.
Together with utilitarianism and deontology, virtue ethics presents the final category in the triumvirate of the most common classifications of ethical theories. Having fallen into the shadow cast by the novel Enlightenment theories of Kant, Bentham, and Mill for several centuries, virtue ethics has nevertheless experienced something of a revival in the latter part of the last century.1 This is a somewhat ironic turn of events given that virtue ethics is arguably the most traditional form of ethics and there is reason to believe that it is the most natural as well. Indeed, given the essentially imitative and emulative nature of human beings, it seems that virtue ethics comes closest of all theories in capturing the de facto method by which our implicit moral conditioning is established, at least until we start to reflect critically upon it.
Like utilitarianism, virtue ethics can be classified under the rubric of teleological approaches to ethics. Unlike utilitarianism, however, the end or telos toward which virtue ethics strives is integral to the character of the agent in question. The Greek words hedonia (ἡδονία), which refers to pleasure, and eudaimonia (εὐδαιμονία), which literally indicates something like “the state of being in good stead with one’s conscience,” expressively convey the distinction between the orientations of utilitarianism and virtue ethics, respectively. That the English term “happiness” remains equivocal as to which of these substantially different connotations it is intended to designate presents an initial challenge to any attempt to distinguish between these two basic teleological outlooks. Moreover, that J. S. Mill employed the term “happiness” to describe the summum bonum of the utilitarian doctrine while, at the same time, many translators have opted to render the term eudaimonia, as it appears in Aristotle’s seminal text, The Nicomachean Ethics, with the same English word has encouraged a false equivalency and led to untold confusion amongst students of philosophy. In fact, this equivocation is partly responsible for kindling my motivation to compose this ethics reader.
The divergence between virtue ethics and utilitarianism is more significant than the difference between “positive affect” and “human flourishing,” which represent alternate translations of hedonia and eudaimonia, respectively. Indeed, despite that both present teleological approaches to ethics, virtue ethics is something of an inversion of utilitarianism in an essential sense: to wit, virtue ethics emphasizes the cultivation of virtuous traits of character in the moral agent. This transformation of the agent is sought by means of acting in a manner that is consistent with the possession of such traits so that they become habits. “Practice makes perfect,” as the old saw expresses this principle. Utilitarianism, by contrast, renders the moral agent somewhat incidental to the question of ethics except for (a) its ability to promote net utility with its actions and (b) its instrumental function as a venue for the experience of pleasure. Virtue ethics assumes almost the inverse stance, in which the moral agent is front and center. In this way, the consequences that follow from a given action are subordinated in significance to the manner by which performing that action served both (a) to express a given virtue and also (b) to sculpt the character of the moral agent. The latter, as noted above, is accomplished by way of inclining her, through practice and force of habit, toward future actions of the same caliber and kind. In this way, virtue ethics does not attempt to abstract the outcome of a given deed from either the deed itself or the doer of the deed.
Virtue ethics possesses the further advantage over other theories of ethics that a certain responsiveness to context is inherent in the theory itself. To act in a manner consistent with virtue does not preëmptively prescribe a universal principle to follow, or a moral law for the agent to submit himself to. At the same time, this very lack of express moral guidance is largely responsible for virtue ethics having been supplanted by utilitarian and deontological theories of ethics in the last centuries. Whether it is possible to identify the answer to which of these approaches is the correct one is not a question that is likely to be settled in the final paragraph of this introduction to virtue ethics but, as Socrates observed at the very dawn of the Western philosophical tradition: conscious ignorance is the mother of wisdom.
I have not followed the “industry standard” of choosing a selection from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (350 BC) as the keynote text for this chapter on virtue ethics. It is not without reason that Aristotle has been recognized as the figurehead of the virtue ethics approach to ethical theory. Building on the work of his teacher Plato, Aristotle was the first thinker to attempt a systematic codification of virtue ethics and to this day, the result of his attempt remains one of the finest and clearest expositions of this approach. Still, I have chosen instead to begin by the spirit rather than the letter of virtue ethics and thus to allow a historical account of a real-life hero to serve as the keynote for this section. Specifically, I have begun the section with a press release detailing the dramatic story of the Soviet submarine officer Vasily Arkhipov’s astonishing display of courage—during a supremely tense situation in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis—that likely averted the beginning of WWIII. After this brief account is a short selection culled from the Book of Job in the Hebrew Bible which depicts the eponymous protagonist as a paragon of virtue in his life and worship. Job’s unwavering virtue strikes the reader with all the more force given the material adversity that is delivered upon him: “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” Following the excerpt from Job is a short selection from the Bhagavad-Gita, which constitutes one episode in the anonymous Indian epic the Mahabharata. This selection continues in the same vein as the story of Vasily Arkhipov in setting forth templates of martial virtue, not because this is the only genus of virtue, but because it is among those from which there exists the greatest corpus of historical works to draw from and because it is one of the most difficult things to do ethically, war being so intimately bound with violence and to many of the actions we regard as the most atrocious. The excerpt from the Gita is followed by one from the anonymous 10th century Anglo-Saxon epic, Beowulf. After this, I have included selections from some of the well-known Greek and Roman philosophers, beginning with a miscellany of excerpts from the Platonic dialogues, which depart from the martial theme and instead display Socrates as the archetypical philosopher or “wisdom-lover” and also begin to offer a more theoretical presentation of ethics as virtue. Aristotle continues this trend in Nicomachean Ethics, which offers an entirely theoretical account.
Before continuing with the presentation of readings, a brief digression is in order by way of clarification for my choices above. Evidently, the ordering outlined in the preceding paragraph flouts the historical sequence of composition that I indicated would serve as my rule for organizing the texts selections. Still, I have opted to present the excerpt from Bhagavad-Gita, which is dated to roughly the second century BC, and Beowulf, which did not appear until the tenth century AD, before returning to Plato, who lived in the fourth century BC. The reason for my decision is that the epic forms present a manifestly “earlier” or “younger” approach to virtue ethics than do the Platonic dialogues.2 This distinction is best understood in terms of “degree of explicitness,” or in the relative proportion in which virtues are portrayed versus explained. In Beowulf, the virtues are depicted; in the Nicomachean Ethics they are described. The Platonic dialogues—and to a large extent, the Gita—represent something of a transitional form. Plato, in other words, had one foot in each world and the dialogue form—as a combination of dramatic and dialectical elements—serves as the perfect expression of this. The Gita can be read in the same way, consisting as it does foremost as a dialogue between two characters. It is perhaps important to acknowledge the geographical as well as the historical leap that the decision to place Beowulf before Plato and Aristotle entails. Not only do roughly fourteen centuries separate the composition of these texts, but approximately fourteen hundred miles divide England from Greece as well. I could have easily maintained fidelity to the historical approach, and homogeneity of tradition as well, by selecting one of Homer’s epics, which both Plato and his most famous student are endlessly quoting in their own philosophical discourses. But I chose to select an Anglo-Saxon epic for the sake of suggesting that this general principle of evolution from pictorial to conceptual presentations of virtue ethics is not confined to a specific culture, people, or tradition. This process of transition in ancient India and ancient Greece predated that in Northern Europe by over a millennium. This discrepancy, however, does not diminish our ability to recognize the isomorphism of a common principle any more than does the fact that two individuals born in different years and in different places are likely to reach adolescence at different circumstances as well, and yet the fact of adolescence remains the same. Indeed it must remain the same as a condition for us to recognize the differences. The absolute difference in years and in place, therefore, does not obviate the commonality in principle of the phenomenon in question.
Following the excerpts from the Gita and from Beowulf, and the miscellany of excerpts from the Platonic dialogues, I have included a selection from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, which, as indicated, is often considered the locus classicus of virtue ethics. Next I have chosen a section from the Gospel of Matthew that presents Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount,” which offers one of the most radical and challenging presentations of virtue ethics in all of history. Jesus challenges the the traditional concept of right action—roughly understood as “help your friends, harm your enemies”—by his injunction to “love your enemies.” In an important way, Jesus’ teaching found fertile ground in a culture steeped in the philosophical influence of Plato, who had almost single-handedly transformed the traditional concept of virtue indicated above (i.e. “help your friends, harm your enemies”) to “harm no one.” Indeed, it is not merely a historical accident that the New Testament was composed entirely in Greek.
Following the excerpts from Matthew and John is a selection from Epictetus’ The Enchiridion (135 AD) which serves as a classic articulation of the fundamental precepts of Stoic virtue ethics. Next is a famous monologue from one of Shakespeare most beloved comedies, As You Like It, which depicts the human biography as consisting in seven archetypal “stages” that are played out upon the “stage” of life—“all the world’s a stage,” affirms Jaques. This metaphor, aside from its aesthetic power, serves to illuminate the diachronic element of virtue not only within history, but within a single lifetime. Virtue is expressed as the proper relationship between an agent and a scenario. This relationship will necessarily transform in response to changes in its terms. The excerpt from Shakespeare is followed by Benjamin Franklin’s famous list of 13 virtues, which, according to his autobiography, he drafted at the mere age of twenty. Next is an excerpt from Victor Hugo’s 1862 classic Les Misérables, which puts on display the power of charity, compassion, repentance, and redemption. Lastly, and perhaps to the reader’s surprise, following this selection from Hugo’s masterpiece is a well-known Grimm’s fairytale, “Little Red Riding Hood.” I have included this story for the sake of defending against the risk of treating ethics like any other specialized academic discipline and instead encouraging a more comprehensive grasp of ethics.
On a prior occasion sub umbra coronae, which is, “under the shadow of the Crown,” I have recorded these lectures which are also pertinent to the theme of this piece.
Thanks, in part, to Elizabeth Anscombe’s seminal 1958 essay “Modern Moral Philosophy” and Alasdair MacIntyre’s equally influential work, After Virtue, published in 1981.
For more on the theme of the evolution of consciousness, the interested reader is kindly referred to The Redemption of Thinking, which is a published version of the present authors doctoral thesis.