Virtue ethics: principles and applications

VIRTUE ETHICS' refers to the theory or a system of philosophical belief that focuses on entire personality or disposition of a person instead of actions alone. Virtue ethics arose in response to the prevalent theories of deontology and utilitarianism that often failed to provide satisfactory answers for a variety of questions connected with ethics in certain situations especially where emotions and human connections were involved. Virtue ethics were developed by ancient thinkers Plato and Aristotle and for this reason, it is not something new. It has its roots in ancient times however the reason it is considered a modern moral philosophy is precisely because its rebirth is a fairly new phenomenon. It was in 1950s that interest in virtue ethics was renewed by Anscombe's famous paper titled: Modern Moral philosophy. This theory was developed to distinguish a set of beliefs that focused on moral character of a person instead of its individual actions.

In other words, virtue ethicist maintains that it is the entire disposition of the person that makes him virtuous or not, instead of his individual actions in isolated cases. They argue that virtue is ingrained in one's personality and is a person of sum of his beliefs, values and actions instead of simply his actions and reactions. A good way to explain this would be to take an example. If we are in a situation where someone needs our help and we extend it, the deontologist would think that help should be offered because it is a moral dirty, utilitarian would argue that this kind of action would maximize happiness of everyone involved, while a virtue ethicist would feel benevolent and thus extend help. In other words, virtue ethics is a logical way of thinking. We help others because that's the kind thing to do. We may not be overly concerned about or moral duties or maximization of happiness, but this is something that comes naturally to us. We see someone in distress and extend help because we know that we expect the same from others in such a situation. Virtue ethics is also on the sense of empathy.

Prior to 1960s, the field of normative ethics was largely dominated by deontology, which was based on the values and beliefs of eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant, and utilitarianism, which was based on the views of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophers Jeremy Bentham and J.S. Mill. In most of the books published up until thirty years ago, virtue was discussed in terms of deontology or utilitarianism. Gradually a change was witnessed as people began searching for something beyond deontology and utilitarianism as it was found that these two theories did not encompass many important issues or had no answers for some modern problems. This gave rise to virtue ethics, which was not exactly seen as the third approach at first but attained a distinguished status of its own as it began to grow in stature and importance.

The question here arises, why did we have to return to ancient philosophy of virtue ethics? But interestingly while a great deal of credit is given to Aristotle and Plato, the modern moral philosophers such as Anscombe, Foot, Murdoch, Slote had mentioned in very precise terms the problems they found in Aristotelian ethics. They must have absorbed the writings of ancient philosophers since a lot is said about the moral philosophies of these great thinkers in books of modern philosophers, still the father of modern moral philosopher was not blind to the problems of following ancient terms and values. In his famous paper on the subject, Anscombe wrote:

Anyone who has read Aristotle Ethics and has also read modern moral philosophy must have been struck by the great contrasts between them. The concepts which are prominent among the moderns seem to be lacking, or at any rate buried or far in the background, in Aristotle. Most noticeably, the term 'moral' itself, which we have by direct inheritance from Aristotle, just doesn't seem to fit, in its modern sense, into an account of Aristotelian ethics. (p. 26)