Problems With Virtue Ethics

The reality of virtue ethics isn’t as neat and simple as some might imagine. Although many common moral decisions may indeed come more easily to a person of the “right” moral character, the fact of the matter is that many moral dilemmas require a great deal of careful reasoning and thinking — simply having the right character cannot be enough to even make the right decision likely, much less assured. The fact that rule based and duty based ethical systems are complicated and difficult to employ does not make a person of good character more likely to make the right choices.

Another problem with virtue-based ethical systems is the question of what the “right” sort of character is which a person should have. Many, if not most, virtue theorists have treated the answer to this question as self-evident, but it is anything but. One person’s virtue may be another person’s vice and a vice in one set of circumstances may be a virtue in another.

Some advocates of virtue ethics suggest that we determine the right virtues by asking a virtuous person, but that is just an exercise in question begging. Others might suggest asking a happy person, but that assumes that happiness and virtue always coincide — by no means an obvious truth.

Perhaps a key to understanding virtue theories of ethics is to regard them as ways to approach moral psychology but not moral epistemology. What this means is that virtue theories should not be contrasted with theories about how to make moral choices, like the teleological theory of John Stuart Mill or the deontological theory of Immanuel Kant.Instead, virtue theories of ethics should be treated as ways to understand how we become moral creatures, how we develop the means by which we make moral decisions, and the process by which moral attitudes develop. More importantly, virtue theories may be able to teach us how morals themselves should be taught, particularly in the earliest years when the more complicated decision-making processes are not yet possible.