Virtue Ethics: Character and Habits

Virtue Ethics

• Virtue ethics is character-based ethics
• Focuses on character development
• Proponents believe there is a gap between knowing and doing what is right.
• The gap between knowing and doing what is right, stems from lack of capacity

Virtue Ethics Perspective

• Focus should be more on the moral agent.
• What matters morally, is what one becomes over time.
• Acquisition of a good character is the moral aim.
• A right action is what a virtuous person would consistently do in similar situations.
• Virtue ethicists reject following rules or trying to produce certain consequences.
• A virtuous person possesses and lives out virtues.
• Virtues are character traits needed for humans to flourish and be happy.

Acquiring Virtues

• No one is born virtuous
• Virtue is acquired.
• Being virtuous requires acquiring the right habits.
• Just as athletes acquire habits to flourish, humans must act virtuously to avoid becoming morally vulnerable.
• Virtue ethics says that having the right dispositions, motivations, and emotions while being good and doing right is important
• Virtue ethics focuses on emotions, character, and moral habits, in addition to actions

Types of Virtues

• Aristotle identified two types of virtues
• Intellectual virtues taught through instruction
• Examples: wisdom, understanding, prudence
• Moral virtues acquired as a result of habit
• Examples: prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance
• There are two traditional divisions of virtue: moral and non-moral

Moral Virtues

• Virtues are like the arts
• Must first learn virtues before being able to do them
• Example: Becoming a builder or doctor through learning and practice
• Virtues are not passions or faculties, but habitual dispositions
• Virtue is a character trait developed through habit, becoming a second nature
• One becomes a certain kind of person based on learning, practicing, or abstaining from certain acts.

Moral Virtue as a Mean

• It is a habitual disposition marked by choice, lying in a mean relative to us, and determined by reason
• Moral virtue exists as a mean between deficiency and excess
• Lack or excess can destroy
• Example: Lack or excess of exercise/food/drink damages health.
• Applying anything in quantity proportionate to the body restores, increases, and preserves it
• Lack of courage leads to cowardice, excess leads to foolhardiness.
• Foolhardiness is the excess of courage
• Cowardice is the lack of courage
• The mean of courage preserves a person

Achieving Moral Virtue

• To become just, one must do the right thing.
• A person doesn't perform virtuous acts by accident or chance but in a certain state.
• One must have knowledge of the action they are undertaking.
• One should deliberately choose to do it and be willing to own it.
• Actions should come from a steady, unwavering state, proceeding from a firm and unchanging character.
• Doing just or virtuous acts creates a just or virtuous person.
• By behaving justly and making it a habit, it results in moral virtue.
• Nature provides the capacity to acquire virtue, perfected through habit
• Knowledge of virtue and vice alone does not make one virtuous or vicious.
• One becomes virtuous by practicing what one knows and accepts as good.
• Becoming virtuous or vicious occurs through dealing with others.
• Virtue acquired through practicing virtuous acts.

Vices

• Vices are the opposite of virtues.
• Vice is a character trait that prevents humans from flourishing or being happy.

Virtue ethics focuses on character development and the acquisition of virtues. It emphasizes becoming a moral agent over time through the development of good character. Virtues are character traits needed for humans to flourish, acquired through habit and practice.