virtues, rules, and the foundations of ethics

V I R T U E S , R U L E S , A N D T H E F O U N D A T I O N S OF E T H I C S

DAVID CLOWNEY

The thesis of this paper is that a theory of the virtues is an irreducibly important part of moral theory, but that it cannot be the only part. The paper has two sections. In the first, I follow the thinking of a particular writer on the virtues, Philippa Foot, at points where she is dealing with the foundations and limits of virtues ethics. In the second part, I make a more systematic comparison between deontologieal and aretaic (i.e., virtues-based) theories of ethics, indicating what I take to be the relative strengths and weaknesses of each.

An ethics of the virtues typically answers the most basic questions of ethics by reference to a generic human need for certain traits of character, rather than by appeal to moral law (a la Kant) or to the maximization of benefits (a la Mill). Thus definitions of what a virtue is can usually be cast in the form "A virtue is a quality of character which humans need in order to .... " Versions of virtues ethics can be distinguished from one another by seeing how they would answer the question, why do human beings need the virtues?

Along with a definition of a virtue there frequently goes a non- deontological account of moral obligation. "People should be courageous" is read as an analogue of "Cacti should be watered infrequently;" in both cses the "should" is not unpacked in terms of commandments but of generic needs. There is a life characteristic of normal cacti. A cactus flourishes if it is a good or well-realized example of this life; and infrequent watering is one of the conditions a cactus requires in order to flourish. Likewise, human beings should (i.e., need to) be courageous, since this is one of the conditions for human flourishing. The "compelling force" of morality, according to the virtues account, comes ultimately from this need that humans as humans have for the virtues3

Elizabeth Anscombe, in her 1958 essay"Modern Moral Philosophy," defended the adequacy of this non-deontologieal account of obligation. She claimed that without belief in a divine law-giver, "the moral ought"

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was a loose canon on the social deck, ungouverned by cognitive content but full of psychological force, and that it ought if possible to be gotten rid of. She thought this could be done, without making ethics impossible, by talking about the virtues (Anscombe 1958).

Since Anscombe wrote, there has been a revival of the ethics of the virtues. Among the revivalists is Anscombe's friend and colleague Philippa Foot, who agrees that"a sound moral philosophy should start from a theory of the virtues and vices" (Foot 1978, p. xi).

I 1. Philippa Foot's Volunteer A r m y At the time that she published Virtues and Vices [Foot 1978], Professor Foot had arrived at an original and controversial position as to why we need the virtues, a position she expressed clearly in "Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives" and in "Are Moral Considerations Overiding?" In brief, the answer she gave at that time was "We don't need the virtues, unless we happen to love justice, kindness, and the good of others; then we will need them to achieve our ends."

By giving this answer Foot did not mean to deny generic human need for the virtues. She acknowledged that each of us needs a measure of such self-regarding virtues as courage, hope and temperance, in order to achieve any end at all. (She did not stress this point, perhaps because she justifiably thought that a purely self-regarding value system is not a morality.) She also thought the need for justice and benevolence was generic in the sense that we all need others to be just and benevolent toward us, and that human societies collectively need to have just and benevolent members. But it was primarily as a volunteer army, not as a compulsory draft, that she imagined the moral community (Foot 1978, p. 170). Because she thought that 'ought' implies reasons for action, she also thought that an individual who has no reasons to be moral would not be bound by moral obligation. Such an individual, she said, could "opt out" of morality, and thereby become exempt from its claims. Although "virtues are in general beneficial characteristics, and indeed ones that a human being needs to have, for his own sake and that of his fellows" [Foot 1978, p. 3], nevertheless the crucial "other-regarding" virtues of benevolence and justice are not needed by an individual whose ends don't include the welfare and rights of others.

Professor Foot was led to these conclusions by noticing first, that may people follow moral rules "because they are too timid or conventional to question the teaching they have received;" and secondly, that "no one has succeeded in showing that moral action as such is

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rat ional action" (Foot 198 I, p. 309). In other words, some people follow moral rules blindly, for no reason; and some people (in particular, an individual who did not care about justice, mercy and love) might have no reason to follow moral rules.

More recently, in comments on Will iam Frankena 's Carus Lectures, Mrs. Foot has indicated she is "sure that there is something wrong" with "Moral i ty as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives" (Foot 1981, p. 305). Just what she thinks is wrong is less clear. Is it the notions of the Volunteer Army and of "opting out" about which she has had second thoughts, and which she is in fact abandoning?

If so, I think she is right. She must be right, unless Dostoevski 's cold-blooded brigand Orlov had no real obligation not to murder old people and children, because kindness and justice were no part of his ends. Of course this is the kind of thing Foo t was previously willing to say, and she only par t ia l ly drew the sting of it by adding that such a person would still be wicked and unjust, whatever his ends might be. (The example of Orlov is Foot ' s own; she uses it, in another context , in the essay on Frankena that I have just cited.)

If Foot has abandoned her "volunteer a rmy" views, she will need to provide another answer to the question, why humans need the virtues; or else she will need to give some supplementary account of the nature of moral obligation. When she wrote "Moral i ty as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives" it was clear what answer she would give. She then said that we need the virtues to achieve our ends, provided those ends include the rights and well being of others. It is not so clear what she would say now. In the 1981 article, she expresses sympathy with Frankena 's conviction that "the moral ought" is applicable to agents who lack moral desires as well as to those who have them, and says that this "comes closer to voicing the uneasiness that I feel about linking 'ought ' to interests and desires." Her uneasiness is strongest, she says, when she thinks about the case in which a moral person imagines losing moral desires: such a person, she says, "has reason to guard against [this fate], and ... this does not seem to be merely because he now has moral ends" (1981, p. 309). Is Foot saying that moral considerations give reason for action to agents like Orlov who lack moral desires? She almost says so. "As I see it now there are reasons for action which do not fit the pattern of a Kantian hypothetical imperative, which has [a simple "I want"] desire as its starting point. ' I t is contemptible ' is one of them, and may be one of those part icularly relevant to moral conduct ." (Foo t 1981, p. 312)

However, her next sentences head in quite another direction, leaving

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it more unclear how her new views are shaping up:

But where this leaves us in relation to the rationality of moral conduct it is not yet easy to see. Orlov would not have acted rationally in submitting to morality, given that he saw things as he did. But if there turns out to be some kind of objectivity about the answer to the question as to what is (really) contemptible and admirable then there would be a way in which he was either right or wrong.

(Foot 1981, p. 312)

As a retraction this is puzzling; for it no longer sounds very different from the view it replaces. On her earlier views, could not Foot have said that Orlov's ends and acions were (really) contemptible, just as they were (really) unjust and wicked? And on her new views, she still seems hesitant to admit that Orlov ought (i.e. has reason) to submit to morality. So isn't morality still optional for him? What is new? perhaps only this: "for one for whom moral considerations are reasons to act" (Foot 1983, p. 385), 'That 's contemptible' or 'That 's admirable, ' may be reasons for action as well as 'It is just, and I love justice' might be, even though they are not connected to desire in the same way.

These hints are obviously signs of work in progress. By themselves they don' t provide much to go on. They do, however, point in a direction. What they point to is the incompleteness of virtues theory; or at least, its need for foundations in a theory of values, which would explain what is (really) contemptible and (really) admirable, and why.

2. Foot on Practical Wisdom and Moral Relativism Especially in more recent essays, Professor Foot implies that some things are good for us, whether we want them or not. For example, in the title essay of Virtues and Vices (pp. 5-8), she agrees with Aquinas and Aristotle that the wise person (in contrast to the merely clever) "knows the means to certain good ends,"[i.e., those that are related to human life in general]; "and secondly he knows how much particular ends are worth" (p. 5). But to know what ends are good, and to know which are important and which are not, it is not sufficient to know what most people value, nor even to know what the consequences of your pursuing various ends would be.

Since it makes good sense to say that most men waste a lot of their lives in ardent pursuit of what is trivial and unimportant it is not possible to explain the important and the trivial in terms of

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the amount of attention given to different subjects by the average man. (p. 6)

For instance, a wise person knows that "such things as social position, and wealth, and the good opinion of the world, are too dearly bought at the cost of health or friendship or family ties" (p. 7). Such a person values what is worth valuing, and therefore is judged wise.

Knowledge of what is worth valuing, if we grant that such knowledge exists, cannot be accounted for merely by saying that the wise know the consequences of their choices, and therefore know how to get what they want. They must also know what will ultimately make them happy (what would most satisfy them, if they had it); and they must value that. Having knowledge of this sort is partly a matter of having an uncorrupted will.

Do all of us need practical wisdom, as opposed to mere shrewdness? Do we need not to have an uncorrupted will? To say "yes", and explain why, will require more than the descriptive or "biological" notion of human nature and of normal human life with which some theorists (for example, James Wallace [Wallace 1978] have tried to rest content. What Foot at least implicitly requires is the notion of a human telos, a goal which is proper or natural to humans, even if most never pursue it. But she does not know how to decide what this goal is. So it is no wonder that she is puzzled by the ideas of great happiness, and of the trivial and important. Of course she is right that it is foolish to define these notions by popular vote. But having admitted that, she is back to looking for some other standard for determining what is worthwhile, a proper goal for human life, and so on; and where will she find it? In spite of the opinions of the sociobiologists, there is not really any other species with which we can compare ourselves to learn what goals and what sort of life are normal and proper to human beings. Foot takes comparisons with other species as far as she thinks they will go in an essay on euthanasia ((1977) 1978, pp. 38-41). She finds them illuminating to a degree, but inadequate. The concept of benefit is different, for example, in the case or animals and humans, since what is good for humans is affected by what humans think good for them (p. 40), and since normal human life is characterized by suffering in a way in which animal life is not. I might add that some things that are characteristic of human life, like warfare, are activities we might well consider normal in animal populations, so that an excellent specimen of the species would be well equipped and skilled in the conduct of these activities abnormal, and some of the character traits they call for are Vices. This is another reason why the human telos cannot be defined by

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observat ion in the way a biologist would define normal life for an animal species.

If obvious biological facts about us will not give us the answers Foo t is looking for, and setting aside the theistic option, for which Foo t has not to my knowledge shown any great enthusiasm, the remaining possibilities apperar to be very limited. Either there is something in the nature of ra t ional i ty which will tell us what we as rat ional beings ought to value and pursue (Foot is skeptical about this perennial philosophical favorite (1978, pp. 122, 23)); or value originates with individuals or with communities, no doubt within certain biological limits; or it is somehow simply there (the intuitionist option, which Foot categorically rejects).

Suppose, whether Foot can explain it or not, that there are more and less worthwhile ends for humans to pursue; that there is a human telos. Let us return to the question whether Orlov ought (needs) to submit to morality. I wonder if Foot needs to be as tentative about this as she seems to be. Why shouldn' t she say that we need to live lives which we ourselves find worthwhile, and that pursuit of what is (really) worthless, no matter how briefly satisfying it may be, will not ul t imately result in a worthwhile life even from one's own point of view? These are at least plausible claims, which I think would fit her way of thinking. If she were willing to make them, she could justif iably say that everyone needs to pursue worthwhile ends. Given that moral ends are themselves objectively worthwhile, and come in aid of what is worthwhile, that would mean that Orlov needs (ought) to submit to morality, whether he now cares about justice and love or not.

The same concerns with teleology, and the same perplexity about objective values, recur in Professor Foot 's essay on "Moral Relativism". This most helpful paper clears a lot of irrelevant discussion out of the way by identifying a version of moral relativism that is not only logically and practically coherent, but plausible.

Moral relativism, as Foot defines it, is the view that there is no truth of the matter as to which of two conflicting moral value-systems is correct. It is not the view that there are no truths of morali ty, nor that no-one could ever be mistaken in a moral judgment. It is rather the view that morali ty is like taste. Judgments of taste, she observes, are true or false. But we generally assume that their truth is not substantial, because they are made relative to a background of s tandards of taste, and among different sets of these s tandards there is no one right choice. For example, a fiat-headed person is good- looking relative to ancient Aztec standards; relative to modern Western standards the same person is not good looking. With respect to either of the sets of s tandards, there is an

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answer to the question, "Is a flat-headed person good-lookingT' It is not a matter of mere personal opinion, and someone could be wrong about the answer. Nevertheless there is no answer to the question, which of the two sets of standards is the right set to have; and so "taste-relativism" is true.

Is morality like taste? We are taught the two sets of standards differently. Moral judgments are taught as absolute (with exceptions built in); whereas the idea of standards that are relative to the preferences of an individual or group is intrinsically involved in the notion of taste. But perhaps morality could be taught in a different way. We will need to go deeper.

A few questions are settled, Foot thinks, by the concept of a morality itself. Since a morality is a code concerned with avoiding harm, doing good, and fairness, some codes will not count as moralities. The concept of a morality, she thinks, settles ahead of time that the Holocaust was immoral, even if Hitler considered himself exempt from morality, or thought he was acting morally. (This means that there are at least a few "substantial" moral truths.) But about many other moral issues, some hotly debated, the same cannot be said. The concept of morality itself does not settle them. Does the virtues approach do so?

The virtues approach further narrows the range within which moral relativism could be true. Because of the relationship of morality to what all human beings need, many moral truths do not change from group to group:

... there is a great deal that all men have in common. All need affection, the cooperation of others, a place in a community, and help in trouble. It isn't true to suppose that human beings can flourish without these things - - being isolated, despised or embattled, or without courage or hope. We are not, therefore, simply expressing values that we happen to have if we think of some moral systems as good moral systems and others as bad. Communities as well as individuals can live wisely or unwisely, and this is largely the result of their values and the codes of behaviour that they teach. Looking at these societies, and critically also at our own, we surely have some idea of how things work out and why they work out as they do. We do not have to suppose it is just as good to promote pride of place and the desire to get an advantage over other men as it is to have an ideal of affection and respect. These things have different harvests, and unmistakeably different connexions with human good.

(Foot 1978 (1982), p. 164)

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So what humans need in order to flourish is not a relative matter; and with respect to what is required to meet these needs, moral relativism is not true.

A relativist might claim that within these limits there is still room for unresolved moral conflicts of a radical kind between moral systems, with respect to which there would be no truth of the matter. 2 Would the claim be right? Foot challenges it in two ways. First, she says, it is usually made in too hasty a fashion. If philosophers would take the time to work their way through what it would actually be like to live in a certain way, it might become more evident how that way of life was beneficial or harmful to human beings, and less plausible to hold that there was no objective way of deciding between value systems. But secondly, she says, the comparison of value systems means asking some questions that philosophers don't, at the moment, know how to answer. She knows of no adequate explanations of what value is, or of what it is to value something. The concepts of happiness and of the trivial and important she finds equally obscure, as I've indicated. Her conclusion is that, due to lack of understanding of these concepts, most discussions of moral relativism are inconclusive and unhelpful. The relativist case is not proven; but neither is it refuted. In fact, she says, at the moment there may be no way of telling if relativism is true, and it would be more helpful to analyze the concepts of value, importance, and happiness than to discuss it. She implies, of course, that the existence of "real" value, "real" importance, and a "real" difference between great happiness and mere quantity of pleasure, would render relativism false.

Taken together, the conclusions to which Foot comes, and the questions with which she regularly concludes, form a picture of the strengths and limits of her virtues and vices approach. So far, those questions point outside the theory of the virtues to axiology: to the nature of (moral?) value generally, to the value pairs of importance and triviality, admirability and contemptibility, and to the connection with value that differentiates great happiness from the mere concatenation of pleasures. Once again, then, Foot 's theory of the virtues "opens out" into a theory of values. At the beginning of this article I also indicated a dependence of her views on deontology, and to that I now turn. It is most evident in connection with the virtue of justice.

3. Foot on Virtues and Moral Rules Mrs. Foot has no essay directly addressed to this topic; but most of her work addresses it obliquely. "Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives" and "Are Moral Considerations Overriding?" give one

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exposition of her position. She argues, in those papers, that morality is taught to us as a system of absolute "do 's" and "don'ts", but with exceptions built in. This differentiates it from etiquette, which in western society we learn as a system of absolute rules without exceptions, while also learning that any of the rules of etiquette can be overridden by more important considerations of morality, prudence or even of finance. Morality is very like prudence, says Foot, in that the dictates of prudence are taught to us as having exceptions, and then we are taught always to do the prudent thing. In the case of prudence, it is understood that the reason for being prudent is our own interest. We will suffer for it if we are imprudent. We understand this perfectly well, even if the condition of the rules of prudence, the hypothesis, if you will, is not always stated with the rules. And in the case of morality it is the same, she thinks. The ends of morality are assumed by all of its rules, so that if someone can avoid subscribing to those ends, the rules are not binding on that person. They have no "compelling force" apart from a person's interest in the goals they represent.

At the time she wrote these articles, while she did think of a morality as including a code of rules, Foot apparently did not think of moral obligation as obligation to law. Moral obligation, for her, was consistently and exclusively the obligation of need or function.

The greatest source of difficulty for this view, as I am by no means the first to point out, is the nature of justice. Justice provides two difficulties for an ethics of the virtues. First, the "virtue" of justice, unlike other virtues, is best understood as a disposition to follow moral rules; so, pace Anscombe, some account of moral rules is required if one is to talk about justice. Perhaps Foot would be able to accomodate this point formally, since she recognizes a code of moral rules. Second, it is hard to see how any of the old or new views about why humans need the virtues could, by themselves, give adequate content to the virtue of justice. To flourish, a society certainly needs some code about what is due to whom, acode to which most of its members subscribe or at least submit. That much is easy to show. It is not so clear that every such arrangement should be dignified by the name of justice. Unfortunately many societies survive, and some have flourished for centuries, under revoltingly unfair arrangements about what is due to whom.

In her recent essay on "Utilitarianism and the Virtues" (Foot 1985), Foot acknowledges the primacy of rules in defining the virtue of justice. Justice, she says there,

... is primarily concerned with the following of certain rules of

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fairness and honest dealing and with respecting prohibitions on interference with others rather than with attachment to any end.

(Foot 1985, p. 205)

This puts Foot in the good company of many other virtues theorists who have been unable to develop a complete moral theory without bringing in moral rules. G.H. Von Wright never tried to work with the virtues alone. His two volumes The Varieties o f Goodness and Norm andAction testify to his multi-faceted approach to ethics, which includes axiology, deontology, and a theory of the virtues. James Wallace, author of another 1978 book entitled Virtues and Vices, says that he began work on the virtues in the hope, inspired by Anscome's "Modern Moral Philosophy", that he could do without the notion of moral law. But he found that he could not, and decided that certain virtues (most noticeably justice) are forms of conscientiousness. That is, they are dispositions to follow moral rules for their own sake. Alasdair Maclntyre comes to a similar conclusion by a different route in After Virtue and in other essays.

In fact, any discussion of justice rapidly reveals the deontological aspect of ethics. A thorough virtue-ethics must explain and account for the nature of moral law, rights, and obligations, on pain of failing to account for something essential to morality.

So far as I know, the closest Foot has come recently to commenting on the nature and source for moral rules is at the end of her recent article on utilitarianism. There she argues against the favorite consequentialist notion that the goal of morality is to produce "the best possible state of affairs." She is not sure that there is any such thing, or that there is any "shared end" for morality:

Perhaps no such shared end appears in the foundations of ethics, where we may rather find individual ends and rational compromises between those who have them. Or perhaps at the most basic level lie facts about the way individual human beings can find the greatest goods which they are capable of possessing. The truth is, I think, that we simply do not have a satisfactory theory of morality, and need to look for it.

(Foot 1985, p. 209)

It is hard to respond to such a general expression of puzzlement. I think it is fair to say, though, that the location of Foot 's bewilderment is in the vicinity of objective values and of the compelling force of moral rules. It is these for which she has, at present, no account that satisfies her.

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In seeking to develop her position, Foot has been led from consideration of the needs and interests common to human nature, to consideration of the goals proper to human beings. She has correctly sensed that to speak about what is good for humans, it is necessary to take into account the directed nature of human action, and the need for right goals. The telos cannot be eliminated from virtue ethics while maintaining a rich enough system of concepts to do justice to the moral life. But with no way of getting clear on what the telos of human beings is, she is obliged to end with questions and suggestions for further conceptual analysis. She does not say why she thinks that knowledge about the trivial and the important (or in more traditional terms, about the human telos right parenthesis) is the sort of thing we might acquire by further conceptual analysis. Likewise, reflections on justice and moral rules have led her to aknowledge that justice is principally a disposition to follow moral rules. So, starting with virtues and vices, she has been led to value theory and deontology. I have taken time to trace this development through her writings, not only because of their intrinsic interest, but because I think it is worth seeing how so clear and careful a thinker has been compelled to these conclusions. That a similar progress can be traced through the pages of most other writers on the virtues is confirming evidence for the incompleteness of a theory of virtues and vices as a description of ethics.

I turn now to a more systematic examination of the complementary relation between two interdependant but irreducible elements of moral theory, namely a theory of the virtues and moral law. The element of moral value is of at least equal importance, and the same sorts of points hold true with regard to it; but I will leave it for another occasion.

II Virtues and Moral Law; Alternatives or Complements? The territory covered by moral law and by the virtues overlaps. What is morally required is for the good of human beings (it is required at least partly because it is for the good of human beings). Thus some moral phenomena can be explained alternatively in deontic terms or in terms of the virtues, and aretaic and deontic systems will often generate the same practical dicta.

The interchangeability of aretaic and deontic approaches to moral obligation may be illustrated in connection with the moral commonplace that humans ought to have and exercise self-control. A virtues-ethicist might say that self-control is one of those qualities of will which humans need in order for characteristically human life to

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flourish. Self-control, then, will count as a virtue, and humans ought (i.e., need) to be virtuous. A deontologist, on the other hand, might list forms of temperance as moral requirements simpliciter; or else seek to show that temperate behaviour is required by some more general moral principle. For example, a Kantian might contend that it violates the dignity of a rational creature so to indulge the pleasures of the flesh as to impede either the exercise of one's own rational faculties, or one's respect for others as rational agents. A Frankenite could argue that temperance is a prerequisite for fulfilment of duties of beneficence towards oneself and towards others. A divine command theorist might say that unrestrained indulgence of the passions distracts one from love toward God and others, and therefore God forbids it. On these three deontological approaches, then, humans ought to be temperate (i.e., the moral law requires temperance).

So virtues and moral law approaches can give similar results. Of course, even if this "extensional equivalence" were total it would not make the two accounts equivalent in other respects. Both accounts could be correct, and point to different aspects of morality. In fact they do seem to point to complementary aspects of morality. The reasons given for counting temperance a virtue overlap the reasons for which the deontologists condemn intemperate actions, but stress the connection of temperance with human fulfilment, and have an additional force as arguments for an habitual pattern of temperate action. (One intemperate action may, but need not significantly disrupt pursuit of a long-term goal, or significantly damage character; a pattern of intemperate behaviour will certainly do both.) Conversely, the deontological approach emphasises an aspect of obligation that goes beyond human needs to a dimension of ultimate accountability, implying that even one intemperate action is morally wrong.

However, what I have dubbed the extensional equivalence of the aretaic and deontic approaches does not obtain universally. Not only do the two approaches point to different aspects of morality; each gives some practical guidance not obtainable by the other. Thus, just as Anscombe is incorrect in thinking that moral law is simply the divine imperative to act in conformity with the virtues, so Frankena is also incorrect in claiming that virtues are simply dispositions to obey moral principles (Frankena 1973 pp. 65, 67).

Among the things aretaic theories do well, and deontological theories do poorly, are:

a) The virtues connect morality with human good in a non-arbitrary way.

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If the compelling force of moral obligation is that of generic human need, it is very obvious why being good is good for us. And so it should be. On a typical virtues account, being good (that is, acquiring and living in accord with the virtues) meets the needs of our nature; and therefore it must in general be good for us. Deontological approaches have a much harder time explaining how the moral law is non-arbitrary for humans (i.e., how it is connected with our interests and wellfare). Utilitarian theories have attempted to remedy this lack; but in doing so they have drawn attention again to particular actions and their particular beneficial or harmful consequences, rather than to character. Deontological approaches are usually not much use for discussion of the good of a whole human life.

b) A theory o f the virtues can explain why action in accord with certain character traits, or possession o f the character traits themselves, is obligatory or forbidden.

The connection of virtues with character is obvious: virtues, as typically presented by those who write about them, are not patterns of behaviour, but traits of the will (also involving the reason). They are acquired dispositions to behave in certain ways for certain reasons. Thus to have a virtue is not simply to do the right thing for the right reason on some particular occasion, but to have a character that will produce such principled behaviour on most occasions.

Deontological accounts, in contrast, focus on specific actions and their motives; and this omits what may be the most important part of ethics, namely, the character of the agent. I don' t mean that moral rules take no account of the will of an agent; on the contrary, they must do so, but not in the same way as does the requirement to exemplify a virtue. Because an action (as opposed to a mere bodily event) involves an intention on the part of an agent, both civil and moral laws take account of intentions in what they require, permit, or forbid and in what they excuse. To this extent moral law is about character and not simply about behaviour. But this is as far as a legal approach to morals can go in dealing with character. The whole point of law is to command or forbid a class of actions, without taking account of whether so-and-so, who did this particular (good or bad) thing, is in general a good or bad person. Perhaps there are moral requirements to have or to seek to have a certain character. But the notion of character itself cannot be explained simply as a disposition to follow rules or principles. In too many cases character is a matter of what one loves and hates, of discernment, and in some cases (e.g., in that of the "good Samaritan,") of a disposition to go beyond the rules.

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Not only is character not explicable simply as a disposi t ion to follow certain rules; it is also true that some of the "rules" depend for their explicat ion and justif ication on considerat ions of character. Some substantive moral issues are best discussed in terms of their connection with character, rather than by asking what moral precept or prohibi t ion they fall under. The ethics of addictive behaviours is in this category, as is that of the use of time. In these cases it is often not profi table to discuss the rightness or wrongness of one act, or for that matter of a rule or principle; what is relevant is the effect on character of a pat tern of behaviour, and the value of the character from which such a pat tern results.

G.H. Von Wright establishes the inadequacy of the "disposit ions to follow rules" account of virtues for one group of cases in his fine chapter on the virtues, in The Varieties of Goodness (Von Wright, 1963). There he refuses to call virtues dispositions or habits, because dispositions and habits, he says, are defined by the class of specific actions they produce, whereas virtues are not. Take courage as an example. There is no well-defined list of courageous acts; rather, any act can be courageous which exemplifies the t r iumph of deliberate choice over fear in the cause of one's or another 's welfare. In other words, it is the state of the agent, not the act considered apar t from that state, that determines whether an act was courageous. A deontologist could respond by saying that there is a moral rule to be courageous. What he could not say, without circularity, is that courage is the disposit ion to follow this rule. This is one reason why Frankena cannot be right when he says that virtues are dispositions to follow moral rules.

Von Wright 's point is valid for the limited range of traits he calls virtues, which are all forms of self-control, and include neither justice nor benevolence. But a similar point can be made about beneficence. Among the requirements of the principle of beneficence, as Frankena himself recognizes, are "Good Samar i tan" requirements. These are not requirements to do good on this or that occasion, but to be disposed to do good as the right occasion presents itself. Now one may be moral ly required to have Good Samari tan traits, and to exemplify them when appropriate. But good Samari tan behaviour itself cannot be rule- governed. There cannot be a moral rule to act as a Good Samar i tan on every occasion, since what the Good Samar i tan does is to go beyond what the rules require. There cannot be a rule that one must always do more than the rules require, since it would be logically impossible to follow such a rule.

c) An ethics o f the virtues connects morality with the meaning and goals o f life, in ways that deontological systems cannot. 62


Deontological ethics is ill-equipped to show the relation between moral and meaningful action, or to address the morality of a pattern or form of life as well as of particular actions. Law commands or forbids, but does not by itself provide purpose and direction, nor does it provide wisdom for its own application.

Virtues, on the other hand, have a special connection with the meaning and goals of life. On most accounts, virtues are "their own reward" (that is, it is fulfilling to have and exemplify them, no matter what results this brings). But practicing the virtues also tends toward the achievement of human potential and the living of a fulfilled life. Thus Aristotle's reflections, so odd to modern ears, on whether it's true that no one should be called happy until they're dead. Lately, the narrative approach to virtues ethics taken by Alasdair Maclntyre, Stanley Hauerwas, and others, connects the virtues with the meaning of human life more directly yet. For them, a meaningful life is one which has a narrative unity, and the virtues are traits needed to give a narrative unity to the life of an individual and a community as they pursue the conclusion of the story they are simultaneously telling and enacting. 3 More work needs to be done here, I think, in discriminating between the aesthetic value of narrative unity and whatever its moral correlate must be; for they cannot be the same. (The most aesthetically satisfying conclusion to my life might be a tragic one, or a ridiculously comic one. But surely that will not and should not incline me to seek a tragic - - or ridiculous --- end). Nevertheless I think it is correct to say that my life has meaning for me if I can honestly tell the story of my life as headed toward a conclusion 1 find worthwhile. (And perhaps my life would really be meaningful if the story I tell is true, and the conclusion really is worthwhile). Now the virtues are very closely related to these morally important themes of a meaningful life and the good of a whole life. On Maclntyre's definition of the virtues that is true by definition, since the virtues include a kind of narrative skill, the qualities we need in order to understand and pursue the best conclusions to our lives. But it is true according to more traditional treatments of the virtues as well. For example, the virtue of practical wisdom, which all the other traditional virtues presuppose, implies a knowledge of what ends are worth pursuing, as well as the will and the skill to pursue them (Foot 1978, p. 5). So practical wisdom is the ability that's required to live a meaningful life.

In these three ways, at least, virtues theories do what deontological theories cannot do. But deontological theories likewise contribute what a theory of the virtues is unable to supply. Specifically:

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a) Only a deontological approach can give an adequate account of justice, rights, and obligations. Justice, rights and obligations are primarily legal notions. For that reason, as we've seen, the proper way to describe the virtue of justice fits Frankena's model for definitions of a virtue. Justice is a disposition to follow certain moral laws.

To derive the specific content of justice and rights, and to account for the absolutely binding character of certain obligations, it is necessary to resort to notions of moral law; and in fact that is what writers on the virtues have regularly done. I have already mentioned the examples of Von Wright, Wallace, Maclntyre, and Foot.

Technically, one may notice that it is "rules about what is due" to which these writers are driven,.not something called "moral law." But when one asks about the nature, status and content of these rules, it is moral law to which one is generally directed (as opposed, let us say, to custom or civil law).

Is there an underlying incompleteness to virtues theories which drives these various theorists, when reflecting upon justice, toward the concept of moral law? I believe there is; and I have already begun to indicate what it is. Virtues theories build from an account of human nature, human welfare, the human telos, normal human life, or some related concept, to a list of those qualities of will which humans must have to fulfill their nature, achieve their telos, etc. Most such theories include community as essential to humanity (e.g., those of Aristotle, Wallace, and Maclntyre all do this). If they are righ, it is plausible to claim that justice, defined as "giving to each what is due." is a virtue; without it, no community could long avoid "the war of all against all;" and therefore we "ought"(i.e., need) to be just. But the content of the virtue of Justice so defined will be quite restricted. Communities, unfortunately, have survived quite nicely under arrangements in which what is "due" to different members varies (unjustly!) with class, sex, race, age, wealth, power, family connections, and the like. I don't see how the analysis of justice can be developed, on a virtues basis alone, to the level at which it could provide a platform for effective moral criticism of well- established, smoothly functioning, oppressive social arrangements about what is due to whom.

It is notoriously difficult to say what the source of moral law is, and what (beyond its superior status) distinguishes a moral requirement from one of taste, etiquette, prudence, custom, or social consensus. But writers on the virtues, when they come to reflect on justice, regularly begin talking about rules; and they regularly give these rules a status superior to that of the other codes I have mentioned. Which is a long

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way of saying that when it comes to justice, they depend on moral law. b) Virtues theories cannot satisfactorily explain why it is absolutely

imperative, not only that aperson act virtuously on most occasions, but do so on each occasion, even i f death results. Neither the absolute nature of obligation, nor the character of the sense of obligation itself can be adequately accounted for within virtues theories. About the best that can be said to establish the absolute nature of moral obligation from the point of view of the virtues is that humans need to be virtuous on each occasion, because to fail on one occasion is to run the risk of losing a virtue or acquiring a vice. This is a limp account of moral obligation. Analogously, aretaic theories cannot say why moral obligations bind me, even when it does not seem (not to me, perhaps not to anyone), to be for my good to submit to them. As to the sense of obligation, its content (along with the related phenomena of guilt, innocence, shame and pride) seems to be more in the realm of interpersonal accountability and personal relationships than in that of the attainment of good and avoidance of evil, however defined.

c) A closely related failing is that virtues theories cannot explain why some actions are absolutely forbidden, and the performance o f them is not only a failure to be good, but is a positive, guilt-incurring evil. Alasdair Maclntyre develops this point effectively in a paper read at the Hastings Center while he was writing After Virtue (Callahan 1981, 119ff; cf. Maclntyre 1981, 142). Maclntyre sees the virtues as qualities necessary to procure the goods internal to practices, lives, and moral traditions; the vices as their corresponding defects; and moral law as the positive prohibition of certain actions which would destroy society if they were permitted. So it is possible to fail morally in one of two basic ways. One can fail to be good enough (e.g., by being a coward); and one can do positive evil (i.e., commit an action which is forbidden by the moral law). It is perhaps possible to build moral law into a virtues theory by including it in the virtue of justice, as we have seen done. Maclntyre, however, prefers to speak of moral law not as a proper part of, but as a necessary counterpart to, a morality of the virtues. And perhaps this is the best course, since it is really law and not virtue which is the fundamental category when justice is under discussion, and since what is required of us is not only that we have the virtue of justice, but that we abstain from unjust action on each and every occasion.

d) Robert Louden, in a fine essay entitled "Some Vices of Virtue Ethics" (Louden 1984), notes that a theory of the virtues provides little help in the resolution o f moral quandaries, and little practical guidance for specific moral reasoning. His remarks are a nice counterfoil to

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Edmund Pincoffs' well-known "Quandary Ethics" (Pincoffs 1971). No doubt it is a mistake, as Pincoffs suggests, to build ethics around moral puzzle solving to the exclusion of character formation. But it is no less disastrous to have an ethics that can't guide us to right decisions in difficult concrete cases. Is Louden correct in his criticism of virtues ethics? Not entirely, I think; but the reason he is not is that no developed theory of the virtues has ever stood alone. Moral rules have always been introduced by way of specifying what justice entails. Moral values have been introduced by way of explaining what the wise and benevolent person will choose; and the ordering of values has been discussed in connection with questions about the unity of the virtues.

e) As a concluding point of evaluation, I wish to point to the foundations-questions with which any theory of the virtues must deal. In a given virtues-theory, what counts as a virtue, and what a virtue is, will be determined by the theorist's views about human nature, or human welfare, or the human telos, or normal or meaningful human life, or some combination of these and related concepts. A satisfactory virtues theory will need not only to discuss particular virtues, but also to explicate and defend a position with regard to these ethically foundational concepts of nature, welfare, purpose, and so on. This is not a failing of virtues ethics. But to carry out the project leads to other parts of ethical theory in the ways I have tried to show.

In spite of its short comings, virtues ethics makes invaluable contributions to moral theory which other accounts cannot provide. So does deontological ethics. In fact, each leads to the other. Moral law includes but is not identical with the obligation to act in accord with normal human nature, the human ergon or telos; and moral virtue includes, but is not limited to the disposition to act in accord with moral law.

For the reasons I have given, the law approach and the virtues approach to ethical theory should be recognized as two different, limited, partially overlapping, and mutually interdependent perspectives on ethics. I have not had much to say, in this second section, about values; but it should be obvious that a theory of values will provide a third perspective of the same sort. The resulting multi-perspectival perspective will generate some answers to questions about the foundations of ethics; for example, by showing how laws and values underlie a theory of the virtues, and how the need for the virtues partially explains moral obligation. It will certainly not answer all foundations questions. Nevertheless, whether one is concerned with questions of ethical theory, with the making and justifying of moral

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decisions, or with moral growth, such a multi-perspectival approach is needed.4

GLASSBORO STATE COLLEGE GLASSBORO, NJ 08028

USA

REFERENCES

Anscombe, G.E.M., 1958. "Modern Moral Philosophy." Philosophy 33: 1-19.

Becker, Lawrence, 1973. On Justifying Moral Judgments, NY: Humanities Press.

Benedict, Ruth, 1934. "Anthropology and the Abnormal." The Journal of General Psychology 10: 59-82.

Callahan, D. & Engelhardt, H.T., eds.,1981. The Roots of Ethics: Science, Religion and Values. New York: Plenum Press.

Foot, Philippa, 1978 Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy. Berkeley, University of California Press.

, 1978 (1982). "Moral Relativism." In Krausz and Meiland, eds., Relativism Cognitive and Moral. Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1982.

,1981. "William Frankena's Carus Lectures." Monist 64, 305-312. , 1983. "Moral Realism and Moral Dilemma." The ,lournal of

Philosophy 80.7, 379-398. ,1985. "Utilitarianism and the Virtues." Mind 94, 196-209.

Frankena, William, 1973 (1963), Ethics (2nd edition): Englewood Cliffs, N J: Prentice Hall.

Hauerwas, Stanley, 1981. A Community of Character. Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press.

Louden, Robert B., 1984. "On Some Vices of Virtue Ethics." American Philosophical Quarterly 21: 227-36.

Maclntyre, Alasdair, 1981. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press (2nd edition 1984).

- - , 1981 (2). "Can Medicine Dispense with a Theological Perspective on Human Nature?" In Callahan and Engelhardt, eds., 1981, q.v.

Pincoffs, Edmund L., 1971. "Quandary Ethics." Mind 80: 552-71. Wallace, James D., 1978. Virtues and Vices. Ithaca, NY: Cornell

University Press.

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NOTES

The nature of our need for the virtues is further explained in various ways by various virtues theorists. For example, G.H. Von Wright says we need the virtues in order to protect our welfare when otherwise passions would master reason to our harm; and he defines welfare as what someone would want, if that person knew the cost of getting it (Von Wright, 1963, pp. 103-108).

James Wallace thinks the virtues both protect and promote our welfare. But he defines welfare rather differently than does Von Wright. He adopts the Aristotelian notion of a characteristic human activity (for Aristotle, "life according to reason," for Wallace, "social life ordered by convention"), and says that the virtues are the character traits needed to sustain this sort of life (Wallace, 1978, p. 10).

Alasdair Maclntyre pays more attention than do Von Wright and Wallace to the idea of a human goal or purpose. He combines the notion of an activity or practice, and of goods internal to it, with an historicized teleology according to which our telos is our own creation. He formulates a three tiered definition of virtues as those character traits we need in order to achieve the goods internal to practices, to choose among the goods of various practices in pursuit of the good of a whole life, and to choose among competing notions of the good in the context of a continuing moral tradition (Maclntyre 1981, pp. 178,204, 207).

z An argument of just this form for moral relativism, with concrete examples, appears in Ruth Benedict's "Anthropology and the Abnormal" (Benedict 1934, pp. 59-82).

3 For an enjoyable and stimulating summary of this approach, read the first chapter of Hauerwas' A Community of Character (Hauerwas 1981).

4 See Lawrence Becker's On Justifying Moral Judgments (Becker 1973) for an extended defense of the multi-perspectival thesis.

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virtues, rules, and the foundations of ethics

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