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Virtues and Vices (An Encyclopedia Article)
Virtues and Vices (An Encyclopedia Article)
Virtues and Vices (An Encyclopedia Article)
The concept of a virtue can make an important contribution to a philosophical account of ethics, but virtue theory
should not be seen as parallel to other ethical theories in trying to provide a guide to action.
Modern accounts of the virtues typically start from Aristotle, but they need to modify his view substantially, with
respect to the grounding of the virtues in human nature; the question of what virtues there are; their unity; and
their psychological identity as dispositions of the agent. In particular, one must acknowledge the historical
variability of what have been counted as virtues.
Aristotle saw vices as failings, but modern opinion must recognize more radical forms of viciousness or evil. It
may also need to accept that the good is more intimately connected with its enemies than traditional views have
allowed. Virtue theory helps in the discussion of such questions by offering greater resources of psychological
realism than other approaches.
Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Version 1.0, London and New York: Routledge (1998)
virtues, but nevertheless his view came almost to the same thing as Socrates, since he thought that one could not
have one virtue without having them all. One could not properly possess any one virtue unless one had the
intellectual virtue which is called in Aristotles language phronsis (often translated as practical wisdom, but
better rendered as judgment or good sense); but, Aristotle held, if one had this quality, then one had all the
virtues.
It is not hard to see the general idea underlying this position. Generosity is linked to justice - someone who gives
only what justice demands is not being generous. Similar points can be made about the interrelations of some other
virtues. However, it is important to the theory of the virtues that they provide psychological explanations as well
as normative descriptions, and from a realistic psychological point of view it is hard to deny (as many ancient
Greeks other than Socrates and Aristotle agreed) that someone can have some virtues while lacking others. In
particular, the so-called executive virtues of courage and self-control can be present without other virtues;
indeed, they themselves can surely be deployed in the interests of wicked projects. The refusal to acknowledge this
may simply represent an ethical reluctance to give moral accolades to bad people.
The fact that the virtues can, to some degree, be separated from one another itself helps to give point to virtue
theory. Some modern ethical theories do imply that there is basically only one moral disposition. Utilitarianism, at
least in its direct form, places everything on impartial benevolence (see Utilitarianism; Impartiality); and though
Kant himself did have a theory of the virtues, Kantianism insists on the primacy of a sense of duty (see Kant, I.
9-11; Kantian ethics). An advantage of virtue theory is that it allows for a more complex and realistic account of
ethical motivation.
Relatedly, it can acknowledge psychological connections between the ethical and other aspects of character,
accepting that peoples temperaments have something to do with how they conduct themselves ethically. For the
same reason, virtue theory is implicitly opposed to sharp boundaries between the moral and the nonmoral, and
is likely to acknowledge that there is a spectrum of desirable characteristics, and that no firm or helpful line can be
drawn round those that are specifically of moral significance. Aristotle did not even try to draw such a line: his
own terminology distinguishes only between excellences of character and intellectual excellences, and one of the
latter, phronsis, is itself necessary to the excellences of character. Hume, who, unlike Aristotle, was surrounded
by moralists who wanted to draw such a line, goes out of his way to mock the attempt to draw it, and his
deliberately offensive treatment of the subject is still very instructive.
Reality. Aristotle conceived of the virtues as objective dispositional characteristics of people which they possess in
at least as robust a sense as that in which a magnet possesses the power to attract metals, though people, unlike
magnets, have of course acquired the dispositions - in the way appropriate to such things - by habituation (see
Moral education). Modern scepticism, however, to some extent supported by social and cognitive psychology,
questions whether we can take such a nave view of what it is for someone to have a virtue. There are at least two
different sources of doubt. One is the extent to which peoples reactions depend on situation: it is claimed that they
will act in ways that express a given virtue only within a rather narrow range of recognized contexts, and if the
usual expectations are suspended or even, in some cases, slightly shifted, may not act in the approved style.
The other doubt concerns ascription. When we understand peoples behaviour in terms of virtues and vices, or
indeed other concepts of character, we are selecting in a highly interpretative way from their behaviour as we
experience it, and the way in which we do this (as, indeed, we understand many other things) is in terms of
stereotypes, scripts, or standard images, which may range from crude characters to sophisticated and more
individuated outlines constructed with the help of types drawn, often, from fiction. The available range of such
images forms part of the shifting history of the virtues. At different times there have been pattern books of virtue
and vice, and one of the first was the Characters written by Theophrastus, a pupil of Aristotle (see Theophrastus;
Examples in ethics).
Even assuming such ideas to be correct, it is not clear exactly to what extent they have a negative impact on virtue
theory. Everyone knows that virtues do not express themselves under all circumstances, and also that agents may
be very rigid in their ability to understand how a situation is to be seen in terms of virtues. Again, with regard to
ascription, it is very important that if it is true that we construct our interpretations of another persons character in
terms of a stock of images, it is equally true that the other person does so as well. The point is not so much that
there is a gap between the interpreter and the person interpreted, but rather that all of us, as interpreters of
Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Version 1.0, London and New York: Routledge (1998)
ourselves and of others, use shared materials that have a history. There are lessons in such ideas for ethics
generally and for virtue theory, but they need not be entirely sceptical. The points about the situational character of
the virtues and about their ascription serve to remind us that an agents virtues depend in many different ways on
their relations to society: not simply in being acquired from society and reinforced or weakened by social forces,
but also in the ways in which they are constructed from socially shared materials.
frustrate a particular person whom one hates or envies, but to take pleasure in the frustration of justice as such and
the disappointments inflicted on those of good will. At the limit, this can constitute an almost selfless aesthetic of
horribleness, one of the less obvious forms that may be taken by the satisfactions of Miltons Satan, with his
resolve that evil should be his good.
Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Version 1.0, London and New York: Routledge (1998)