Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-02T22:38:53.698Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

3 - Virtue Ethics

from Part I - Intellectual Sources and Disciplinary Engagements

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2023

By
Jonathan Mair
Edited by
James Laidlaw
James Laidlaw
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Get access

Summary

Virtue ethics has been a key concern of some important modern thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum, and Alasdair MacIntyre. Anthropologists have disagreed strongly over whether the categories developed by such writers are useful or a source of ethnocentric distortion when applied to ethnographic and comparative work. This chapter argues for a middle course. Virtue seems to be a universal concern, but in order to understand it cross-culturally it will be necessary to develop a ‘virtue ethics as such’: an understanding that transcends the culture-bound assumptions of modern virtue ethicists. At the same time, those thinkers were concerned to escape from certain limited ways of thinking about ethics that have also stunted anthropological work on morality, so they may provide a uniquely useful starting point for our investigations. Having set this challenge, the chapter goes on to provide some preliminary thoughts on how an anthropology of virtue ethics as such could be pursued, considering concepts such as ‘exemplarity’ and ‘the fragility of the good’ from a comparative point of view, drawing on Confucian, Buddhist, and other traditions.

Keywords

virtuecharacterphilosophycomparisonFoucaultWilliamsmoralityConfucianismBuddhism
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics , pp. 65 - 95
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adkins, Arthur W. H. 1960. Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Al-Mohammad, Hayder and Peluso, Daniela. 2012. ‘Ethics and the “Rough Ground” of the Everyday: The Overlappings of Life in Postinvasion Iraq’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2(2): 42–58.Google Scholar
Al-Mohammad, Hayder, Das, Veena, Mair, Jonathan, Robbins, Joel, Stafford, Charles, and Venkatesan., Soumhya 2015. ‘There Is No Such Thing as the Good: The 2013 meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory’. Critique of Anthropology, 35(4): 430–80.Google Scholar
Ames, Roger T. 2011. Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary. Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ames, Roger T. 2020. Human Becomings: Theorizing Persons for Confucian Role Ethics. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.Google Scholar
Anscombe, G. E. M. 1958. ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’. Philosophy, 33: 1–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Apple, J. B. 2017. ‘Pāramitā’, in Sarao, K. T. S. and Long, J. D. (eds.), Buddhism and Jainism: Encyclopedia of Indian Religions. Dordrecht: Springer.Google Scholar
Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Baron, Marcia. 1985. ‘Varieties of Ethics of Virtue’. American Philosophical Quarterly, 22(1): 47–53.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity.Google Scholar
Cook, Joanna. 2010. Meditation in Modern Buddhism: Renunciation and Change in Thai Monastic Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cook, Joanna, Laidlaw, James, and Mair, Jonathan. 2009. ‘What If There Is No Elephant? Towards a Conception of an Un-Sited Field’, in Falzon, Mark-Anthony (ed.), Multi-Sited Ethnography: Theory, Praxis and Locality in Contemporary Research. London: Routledge: 47–72.Google Scholar
Cowan, Jane K. 2021. ‘Modes of Acting Virtuously at the Universal Periodic Review’, in Vilaça, Guilherme Vasconcelos and Varaki, Maria (eds.), Ethical Leadership in International Organizations: Concepts, Narratives, Judgment and Assessment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 176–202.Google Scholar
Csordas, Thomas J. 1990. ‘Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology’. Ethos, 18(1): 5–47.Google Scholar
Dave, Naisargi. 2012. Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Durkheim, Emile. 1976 [1912]. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Evans-Pritchard, Edward E. 1937. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Faubion, James D. 2001. The Shadows and Lights of Waco: Millennialism Today. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Faubion, James D. 2011. An Anthropology of Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Faubion, James D. 2013. ‘The Subject That Is Not One: On the Ethics of Mysticism’. Anthropological Theory, 13(4): 287–307.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foot, Philippa. 1978. Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Forbess, Alice. 2015. ‘Paradoxical Paradigms: Moral Reasoning, Inspiration, and Problems of Knowing among Orthodox Christian Monastics’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 21(S1): 113–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1978 [1976]. The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel 1985 [1984]. The History of Sexuality, Volume Two: The Use of Pleasure. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel 1986 [1984]. The History of Sexuality, Volume Three: The Care of the Self. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel 1997. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. The Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Volume One. Edited by Rabinow, Paul. London: Allen Lane.Google Scholar
Friedman, Jonathan. 2018. ‘Situating Morality’, in Kapferer, Bruce and Gold, Marina (eds.), Moral Anthropology: A Critique. London: Berghahn Books: 182–98.Google Scholar
Held, Virginia et al. 2006. The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hoffman, Lisa M. 2010. Patriotic Professionalism in Urban China: Fostering Talent. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Holbraad, Martin. 2018. ‘Steps Away from Moralism’, in Kapferer, Bruce and Gold, Marina (eds.), Moral Anthropology: A Critique. London: Berghahn Books: 27–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huff, Benjamin I. 2013. ‘The Target of Life in Aristotle and Wang Yangming’, in Angle, Stephen and Slote, Michael (eds.), Virtue Ethics and Confucianism. London: Routledge: 119–29.Google Scholar
Humphrey, Caroline. 1997. ‘Exemplars and Rules: Aspects of the Discourse of Moralities in Mongolia’, in Howell, Signe (ed.), The Ethnography of Moralities. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hursthouse, Rosalind. 1999. On Virtue Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kapferer, Bruce and Gold, Marina. 2018. ‘Introduction: Reconceptualizing the Discipline’, in Kapferer, Bruce and Gold, Marina (eds.), Moral Anthropology: A Critique. London: Berghahn Books: 1–26.Google Scholar
Keane, Webb. 2021. ‘From Ethics to Politics. Comment on Grohmann, Steph. 2020. The Ethics of Space: Homelessness and Squatting in Urban England’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 11(2): 813–17.Google Scholar
Keown, Damien. 1992. The Nature of Buddhist Ethics. Basingstoke: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Kipnis, Andrew B. 2008. ‘Audit Cultures: Neoliberal Governmentality, Socialist Legacy, or Technologies of Governing?’ American Ethnologist, 35(2): 275–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kirsch, Thomas G. 2004. ‘Restaging the Will to Believe: Religious Pluralism, Anti-Syncretism, and the Problem of Belief’. American Anthropologist, 106(4): 11.Google Scholar
James., Laidlaw 1995. Riches and Renunciation: Religion, Economy, and Society among the Jains. Oxford: Clarendon Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
James., Laidlaw 2002. ‘For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom’. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 8(2): 311–32.Google Scholar
James., Laidlaw 2014. The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Laidlaw, James and Mair, Jonathan. 2019. ‘Imperfect Accomplishment: The Fo Guang Shan Short-Term Monastic Retreat and Ethical Pedagogy in Humanistic Buddhism’. Cultural Anthropology, 34(3): 328–58.Google Scholar
Lambek, Michael. 2000. ‘The Anthropology of Religion and the Quarrel between Poetry and Philosophy’. Current Anthropology, 41(3): 309–20.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lambek, Michael 2010. ‘Introduction’. In Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action. New York: Fordham University Press: 1–38.Google Scholar
Lambek, Michael 2015. The Ethical Condition: Essays on Action, Person and Value. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lear, Jonathan. 2000. Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Levy, Neil. 2004. ‘Foucault as Virtue Ethicist’. Foucault Studies, 1: 20–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Liangjian, Liu. 2013. ‘Virtue Ethics and Confucianism: A Methodological Reflection’, in Angle, Stephen and Slote, Michael (eds.), Virtue Ethics and Confucianism. London: Routledge: 82–9.Google Scholar
Loy, Hui-chieh. 2014. ‘Classical Confucianism as Virtue Ethics’, in Stan, van Hooft (ed.), The Handbook of Virtue Ethics. New York: Acumen Publishing: 285–93.Google Scholar
Lynteris, Christos. 2012. The Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China: Socialist Medicine and the New Man. Berlin: Springer.Google Scholar
MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1981. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. London: Duckworth Books.Google Scholar
Mahmood, Saba. 2001. ‘Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival’. Cultural Anthropology, 16(2): 202–36.Google Scholar
Mair, Jonathan. 2015. ‘Proposing the Motion: The Concept of Neoliberalism as a Moral Schema’, in Soumhya Venkatesan (ed.), ‘Debate: The Concept of Neoliberalism has Become an Obstacle to the Anthropological Understanding of the Twenty-First Century’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 21: 911–23.Google Scholar
Mair, Jonathan. 2023. ‘The Anthropology of Buddhism’, in Coleman, Simon and Robbins, Joel (eds.), Oxford Handbook of the Anthropology of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Mattingly, Cheryl. 2012. ‘Two Virtue Ethics and the Anthropology of Morality’. Anthropological Theory, 12(2): 161–84.Google Scholar
Mattingly, Cheryl 2014. ‘The Moral Perils of a Superstrong Black Mother’. Ethos, 42(1): 119–38.Google Scholar
Muehlebach, Andrea. 2012. The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Munro, Donald J. 1971. ‘The Malleability of Man in Chinese Marxism’. The China Quarterly, 48: 609–40.Google Scholar
Munro, Donald J. 1982. The Concept of Man in Contemporary China. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Nussbaum, Martha C. 1986. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Nussbaum, Martha C. 1988. ‘Non-Relative Virtues: An Aristotelian Approach’. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 13: 32–53.Google Scholar
O’Neill, Onora. 1983. ‘I. Kant after Virtue’. Inquiry, 26 4): 387–405.Google Scholar
O’Neill, Onora 1996. ‘Kant’s Virtues’, in Crisp, Roger (ed.), How Should One Live: Essays on the Virtues. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 77–99.Google Scholar
Pang, Keum Young Chung. 2000. Virtuous Transcendence: Holistic Self-Cultivation and Self-Healing in Elderly Korean Immigrants. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Read, Kenneth E., 1955. ‘Morality and the Concept of the Person among the Gahuku-Gama’. Oceania, 25(4): 233–82.Google Scholar
Roberts, Robert C. 2017. ‘Varieties of Virtue Ethics’, in Carr, David, Arthur, James, and Kristjánsson, Kristján (eds.), Varieties of Virtue Ethics. Berlin: Springer: 17–34.Google Scholar
Scanlon, T. M. 1998. What We Owe to Each Other. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Shahar, Meir. 2008. The Shaolin Monastery: History, Religion, and the Chinese Martial Arts. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Slote, Michael A. 2001. Morals from Motives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Slote, Michael A. 2010. Moral Sentimentalism. Oxford: Oxford University PressGoogle Scholar
Slote, Michael A. 2013. ‘The Impossibility of Perfection’, in Angle, Stephen and Slote, Michael (eds.), Virtue Ethics and Confucianism. London: Routledge: 99–109.Google Scholar
Slote, Michael A. 2020. Between Psychology and Philosophy: East-West Themes and Beyond. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Song, Jesook. 2009. ‘Between Flexible Life and Flexible Labor: The Inadvertent Convergence of Socialism and Neoliberalism in South Korea’. Critique of Anthropology, 29(2): 139–59.Google Scholar
Swanton, Catherine. 2003. Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Swanton, Catherine. 2015. The Virtue Ethics of Hume and Nietzsche. Chichester: John Wiley.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
van Norden, Bryan. 2007. Virtue Ethics and Consequentialism in Early Chinese Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Walker, Matthew D. 2013. ‘Structured Inclusivism about Human Flourishing: A Mengzian Formulation’, in Angle, Stephen and Slote, Michael (eds.), Virtue Ethics and Confucianism. London: Routledge: 110–18.Google Scholar
Williams, Bernard. 1976. ‘Moral Luck’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, 50: 115–51.Google Scholar
Williams, Bernard 1985. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. London: Fontana Press.Google Scholar
Williams, Bernard 1993. Shame and Necessity. London: Taylor & Francis.Google Scholar
Wright, Fiona. 2016. ‘Palestine, My Love: The Ethico‐Politics of Love and Mourning in Jewish Israeli Solidarity Activism’. American Ethnologist, 43(1): 130–43.Google Scholar
Yun, Hsing. 2007. Buddhism, Medicine and Health. Hacienda Heights, CA: Buddha’s Light Publishing.Google Scholar
Zagzebski, Linda. 2010. ‘Exemplarist Virtue Theory’. Metaphilosophy, 41(1–2): 41–57.Google Scholar
Zigon, Jarrett. 2011. ‘A Moral and Ethical Assemblage in Russian Orthodox Drug Rehabilitation’. Ethos, 39(1): 30–50.Google Scholar
Zigon, Jarrett 2014. ‘Attunement and Fidelity: Two Ontological Conditions for Morally Being-in-the-World.’ Ethos, 42(1): 16–30.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Virtue Ethics
  • Edited by James Laidlaw, University of Cambridge
  • Book: The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics
  • Online publication: 11 May 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108591249.003
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Virtue Ethics
  • Edited by James Laidlaw, University of Cambridge
  • Book: The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics
  • Online publication: 11 May 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108591249.003
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Virtue Ethics
  • Edited by James Laidlaw, University of Cambridge
  • Book: The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics
  • Online publication: 11 May 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108591249.003
Available formats
×