4 - Reasonably Virtuous

Summary

What kind of a person should you be? This question, labelled the “ethical” as opposed to the “moral” question, has become, over the past quarter-century, the focal point of a prominent movement in Anglo-American moral philosophy, one that looks back to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics for inspiration and origins. The formal answer is that you should be a virtuous person, and so work in this tradition is generically described as “virtue theory” – the substance and disagreements having to do with what virtue is, or, more practically, requires. Virtue theory's shift of focus makes urgent the further question of why you should be virtuous (on one or another substantive understanding of the notion): does rationality require virtue, or can you be, as Candace Vogler's provocatively titled book has it, reasonably vicious? I hope here to motivate a different way of thinking about virtue, partly in order to give a new spin to this further question about its rationality.

Let me say very synoptically why I am so unhappy with contemporary treatments of virtue that I feel the need to strike out in a new direction. The record shows that even very intelligent and thoughtful philosophers who try their hand at this topic by and large produce work that uncritically consecrates local preconceptions of the morally admirable. The substantive renditions of virtue hold no surprises about what the virtues are, which I take to be a symptom that the kind of theoretical articulation we rely on to keep our premises at arm's length from our conclusions is lacking.