Aristotle in 2020: How Virtue Ethics Still Provides Actionable Guidance 2,300 Years Later

Introduction

Virtue Ethics is one of the four primary schools of thought in ethics. On its surface, the core intuition is simple: we know an action is right if a virtuous person would perform it.[1] However, the theory’s detractors claim this is circular logic and, therefore, offers no concrete guidance on what virtuous action is or how to effectuate it. But if one digs a little deeper into the theory it becomes clear that this criticism misses the mark. In fact, the building blocks of Virtue Ethics – virtues themselves – require no decision procedure to guide one’s actions. Each virtue contains its own roadmap. And if that roadmap is not sufficiently clear to navigate a particular situation, Virtue Ethics contains a hidden failsafe. In both cases, the theory offers ample and practical guidance for decision-making.

The Basics of Virtue Ethics

There are many sub-schools of Virtue Ethics but the principal theory was shaped by Aristotle (building on the work of Plato and Socrates).[2] As such, it is commonly referred to as Aristotelian ethics. Aristotle focused on the deceptively complex concept of eudaemonia, a sort of fusion of “happiness” and “flourishing,” and his measure of a successful life.[3] Achieving eudaemonia requires a lifetime pursuit of one’s goals in accordance with virtue and excellence. It’s a lifetime pursuit precisely because one doesn’t know how their “projects” (e.g. rearing kids, building a career, etc.) will turn out until the twilight of their years. Life contains many twists and turns, peaks and troughs; but, according to Aristotle, it’s the net result that’s important, not one’s degree of happiness at any discrete moment. A successful life can be filled with hardship but still work out according to one’s designs and desires in the end.

The foundation of eudaemonia stems from a twin set of virtues: intellectual and moral. Intellectual virtues include knowledge, good judgement and practical wisdom. Aristotle believed these can be taught.[4] By contrast, moral virtues define one’s character and therefore cannot be taught - nor is one born with them. Instead, they must be acquired. They include courage, generosity, fair-mindedness, and self-respect.[5] To acquire these virtues, one must face different character-testing experiences and apply reason to successfully navigate through them. By continuously facing situations that demand courage, for example, one comes to understand what courage actually means and how to act by its precepts.

Aristotle also stressed that a virtuous person is not someone who simply acts in a virtuous way. Rather, they must understand what the right thing is, actually do it, and do it for the right reason.[6] In other words, a virtuous person will do something precisely because it’s the right thing to do, and will feel no temptation to do otherwise. While this may be a hopelessly high bar, the key concept for our purposes is understanding, which we will return to in a later section.

The Key Critique

The main objection to Virtue Ethics is that it lacks a decision procedure. Absent a set of “codifiable principles,” the theory is considered too abstract and self-referential to provide any meaningful “action guidance.”[7] This is in contrast to Deontology, which is explicitly rule-based, and Consequentialism, which provides a clear objective to optimize for (most commonly happiness and liberty). However, notwithstanding their own problems in providing practical decision procedures, the claim that Virtue Ethics lacks one misses the mark. More pointedly, it conflates rules and objectives with actionable guidance. In fact, virtues in and of themselves offer their own inherent guidance.

The Roadmap Thesis

Individual virtues have precise meanings. Our understanding of these meanings, when applied in different contexts, can guide our actions clearly and unambiguously. As an example, let’s take courage, the virtue mentioned above. According to Aristotle, before we can act courageously we must first acquire courage. This demands that we reflect on the nature of courage[8] – what it is and isn’t, and other related concepts like fortitude and conviction. This reflection will also reveal what courage isn’t, including vices like cowardice and timidity. Once we have a holistic understanding of the virtue of courage, we can discern what acting courageously would require of us in any given situation. We will have a roadmap for action.

Consider the case of a schoolyard bully. Let’s call him Jake. Every day, Jake takes Billy’s lunch money under threat of pain or humiliation. If Billy refuses, Jake may tell their classmates an embarrassing secret about Billy. Or he may shove him into a locker. Of course, Billy wants the bullying to stop. But he knows this requires of him the courage to act. This means that Billy must quell his cowardice. But at the same time, he must avoid acting too rashly lest he suffer more serious consequences from the school’s administration.

Billy must balance these two extremes – the virtues and vices that courage sits in the middle of – for his action to achieve the desired result.[9] This limits and focuses his options. In doing so, it provides Billy a roadmap of potential actions and their tradeoffs. He must avoid an escalation of violence. But he must also avoid sending a weak or misleading signal to Jake that encourages further bullying. In this case, Billy doesn’t require a prescribed set of rules that say “If a bully does X, then you should respond with Y.” He simply needs to understand what courage is and what it requires of him in this particular situation – or the options it affords him. Courage, on its own, is sufficiently instructive. In fact, a prescribed set of rules, should they exist, may not actually address his specific circumstances, leaving him to define his own course of action anyway.

While focusing on the nature of courage should in fact provide a roadmap for action, this approach is not without its challenges. For one, it can be difficult to strike a balance between an excess and deficiency of a particular virtue. Aristotle calls this balance the Golden Mean.[10] An excess of courage may lead to imprudent decision-making just as a deficiency may result in disastrous inaction. Another challenge is that understanding the nature of a virtue, and by extension its Golden Mean, requires sufficient phronesis, or practical wisdom.[11] This can only come with time and experience, a route laden with risks and blunders. In Billy’s case, he may be too young to appreciate what courage means, enduring months of continued bullying before it becomes a useful concept to him. Phronesis is often hard-earned.

A third challenge is the seemingly limited slate of virtues relative to life’s idiosyncrasies. At least in the Aristotelian model, it’s not difficult to see that his virtues of intellect and character might prove insufficiently broad in scope and application. Of course, one could simply add more virtues as circumstances demand. But, what constitutes a virtue and who decides if one qualifies as such? Moreover, wouldn’t a multiplicity of virtues prove just as challenging as a lack of them? While these challenges do not invalidate the roadmap thesis, Virtue Ethics provides an additional strategy to complement and strengthen this approach.

Virtue Ethics’ Hidden Failsafe

Environmental Virtue Ethics is a distinct subfield that examines how virtues might inform our treatment of the environment. Its practitioners have reinterpreted classical virtues and added new ones such as “earthiness” and “attunement to nature” to guide their ecological strategies.[12] But when virtues don’t provide clear enough guidance, they instead focus on actions that will result in the greatest ecological flourishing, harkening back to one of the key components of Aristotle’s eudaemonia. Doing so turns the criticism of Virtue Ethics on its head, for this is a Consequentialist approach to virtue. Instead of maximizing happiness or liberty, one’s actions can be guided by whatever maximizes flourishing.

However, this is not strictly a Consequentialist approach. One could reverse-engineer the actions that produce the greatest flourishing to decipher or construct the relevant virtues, and then use those to guide their actions in accordance with the roadmap thesis above. In fact, a hybrid approach would only strengthen one’s understanding of the situation-relevant virtues, helping crystallize the landscape of possible actions in the case at hand. In Billy’s case, his flourishing may be contingent on employing a mixture of courage, good judgement, and empathy. By understanding which virtues will result in his flourishing, and reflecting on the nature of the virtues themselves, his range of potential actions will come into focus.

Conclusion

Virtue Ethics does not require a lattice of rules or maximizable units of this or that for it to be useful as a decision procedure. Virtues are imbued with sufficient meaning to imply their own utility. In many cases, they require something of us by their very nature. To be courageous demands specific behaviors, or the avoidance of others. In both cases, the embodiment of courage is possible only in the context of doing something. To be virtuous, then, is to require no decision procedure. Virtues provide their own roadmap. And if that fails, one can simply act in a way that maximizes eudaemonia. This may not have been what Aristotle had in mind, but it provides all the moral guidance one needs to navigate the modern world.

[1] Marianne Talbot, (2011), https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/virtue-ethics-virtue-values-and-character.

[2] Richard Kraut, “Aristotle's Ethics,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Stanford University, June 15, 2018), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-ethics/.

[3] Ibid

[4] Marianne Talbot, (2011), https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/virtue-ethics-virtue-values-and-character.

[5] Ibid

[6] Ibid

[7] Rosalind Hursthouse and Glen Pettigrove, “Virtue Ethics,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Stanford University, December 8, 2016), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/.

[8] Marianne Talbot, (2011), https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/virtue-ethics-virtue-values-and-character.

[9] Russ Shafer-Landau, Aristotle, “66/The Nature of Virtue,” in Ethical Theory: an Anthology, 2nd ed. (Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), pp. 615-629.

[10] Ibid

[11] Rosalind Hursthouse and Glen Pettigrove, “Virtue Ethics,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Stanford University, December 8, 2016), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/.

[12] Philip Cafaro and Ronald D. Sandler, Environmental Virtue Ethics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005).