Virtue ethics has been a thing for a long time. It’s about embodying certain characteristics that make someone a good person. Aristotle, who coined the whole system, advocated admiring the virtuous sage and copying their behaviour; the sage being someone who embodies characteristics that ought to be copied. It’s a bit of a circular process that certainly deserves some criticism, but it’s hard to shake the notion that there are certain characteristics that make a person more virtuous. Aristotle gave out a list, but I’m not going to focus on every single one because some of them are dumb.
The thing about virtues is that they require personal sacrifice. Courage is the best example, because courage without risk to the self is incoherent. It no longer functions as a concept. Honesty, for instance, is certainly not incoherent when there isn’t any risk, but lying about something benign would usually typify some kind of pathology. Honesty is only a virtue when the sage has something to lose by being honest (we’ll call “something to gain” the loss of an opportunity to gain to keep our sacrificial theme simple). Patience is only a virtue when it would feel real good to lose our shit on someone. Temperance is literally the sacrifice of indulgence, which, if you’ve ever indulged, is a lot of fun. While loyalty is not on Aristotle’s list, it is a common sense virtue that only has value during instances of temptation; its value coming from the sacrifice associated with it. Aristotle liked to think of virtues as the perfect balance of moral homeostasis, but it is very easy to frame them instead as the subjugation of the self for the sake of a higher purpose.
To be virtuous then, is to act for the benefit beyond oneself. What this means is that individualism is inherently an unethical philosophy, and systems built on individualism are by definition immoral. By focusing entirely on ourselves, we limit the risks we are willing to absorb for others. We may want to think of the tenets proselytized by individualism such as efficiency and productivity as virtues, but we would be sacrificing the core of virtue ethics. Personal sacrifice for the boss’s profit may seem virtuous to admirer’s of “good work ethic“, but where is the reciprocity necessary in an ethical system? Do bosses exist outside of that system? Probably wouldn’t be great if they did! What’s good for General Motors is not good for the group; I mean, unless General Motors became a collective… *cough*.
Again, there are problems with virtue ethics. For one, they’re very tribal. Loyalty to the group may detract from perfectly good or better alternatives, for instance. Friendliness literally points to a circle of friends, and no one can tell me that the same level of friendliness extends outside of that group. For those wondering about which of Aristotle’s virtues are dumb, they’re the ones only attainable by rich people like liberality, magnificence, and magnanimity (listed as great-souledness in that weird list I found on Google). Dude made a living selling philosophy lectures to those with the means to pay for fucking philosophy lectures; he had to play to his audience. However, this illustrates very well the problems of virtue ethics as a system. Virtues develop within the tribe for the benefit of that tribe, giving them a degree of subjectivity as well as a parochialism that I certainly reject.
I may not be a virtue ethicist, but despite my reservations, I can’t argue with the fundamental principle that ethics require a vision beyond oneself. If we recognize this truth, then we become much more resilient to socially destructive propaganda trying to pass itself off as virtues: independence, self-interest, etc. If a character trait seems designed to prevent unionization, it probably is!
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Good points. I am not a fan of vitue ethics. I agree that some are just dumb from the start. Virtue is an aesthetic; like all aesthetics, it’s subjective. Moreover, it’s archtypal,—perfection-seeking— so unattainable. The No True Scotsman logic fallicy is rife here. It also insists on normalising and is open to exploitation. Finally, virtues are not mutually exclusive, so they come into conflict with each other and there is no system to weight which to prioritise and when. I’m not really a fan of other normative ethical frameworks, but what can you do?
Another gripe I’ve always had with virtue ethics, since the floodgates are open now, is how someone is supposed to link behaviour to virtue. What does friendliness look like in real-world practical terms? Or even an easier one like courage? It’s too detached from its own results, and like, for someone who has their philosophical lineage descending from a guy hung up on what words like justice and piety mean, Aristotle really failed to take that into account.
Empathy doesn’t scale. It’s not possible to love or esteem everyone. Loving your own tribe is the best most can do.
The superior person distributes agape on the basis of merit. This means despising those who lack merit. The ordinary person ascribes merit to his own tribe to rationalize his tribalism. A swinish person has no concept of merit at all.
The universe defines merit as whatever aids survival. Anyone with a different notion of merit is deluded.
I’m not familiar with any ethical system that suggests treating those seen as “without merit” more poorly than the rest, except for maybe Social Darwinism which I sincerely hope you’re not advocating for here. Meritocracy is already a pernicious theory (you can read this for a general overview of why: https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/a-belief-in-meritocracy-is-not-only-false-its-bad-for-you), but generally its usage is reserved for justifying sorry conditions rather than suggesting the “unworthy” are to be despised.
I use the scare quotes because the definition of who has merit is usually determined by a particular group, and it’s not the universe. As per your definition, what aids survival in a complex and diverse world would be just as subjective as any virtue. My whole thesis points to virtue being personal sacrifice which doesn’t always aid survival, unless you’re referring to the survival of the group in which case I wouldn’t disagree, but within an individualistic framework, virtue would have no merit – hence my critique of individualism in this article. I would disagree with the tribal definition too, since a group of oil workers might see the environmental shift of the economy as a threat to their survival and lobby accordingly, but that would be myopic on their part and threaten the survival of other groups as well. I would disagree that their lobbying would be meritorious.
I agree that empathy doesn’t scale, but reason can inform an ethic and reason suggests a need for coherence among disparate groups lest the whole world burn. This isn’t as absurd as it sounds and happens all the time, even if the world stage doesn’t show it very often.