6 - Virtue ethics and utilitarianism

Summary

A major stimulus for the emergence of contemporary virtue ethics was the growing philosophical consensus that standard forms of utilitarianism could not adequately recognize the moral significance of personal relationships, emotions and motives. By contrast, such phenomena are central features of the various forms of virtue ethics which have been developed in recent years. The most influential contributions to this critique were made by Michael Stocker (1976) and Bernard Williams (1981b), who argued that utilitarianism could not consistently allow us to have friendships and loving relationships. These arguments echoed Elizabeth Anscombe's (1958) plea for moral philosophy to draw on a more adequate philosophical psychology than that which utilitarian and consequentialist approaches (among others) were capable of providing. The critique initiated by Stocker and Williams influenced the rise and contours of contemporary virtue ethics, and it is intriguing to contemplate whether contemporary virtue ethics would have placed quite such an emphasis on friendship and partiality had it not been for the impartialist orientation of its major rivals. Much of this critique focused on the act-utilitarianism advocated by philosophers such as J. J. C. Smart (1973) and others, though it also targeted earlier forms of utilitarianism, such as those developed by G. E. Moore ([1903] 1988) and Henry Sidgwick ([1907] 1981), which explicitly acknowledged the importance of virtues in living a good life but generally as only instrumentally valuable. Stocker (1976: 458–9), for example, objected that Moore's pluralistic “ideal utilitarian” account of the value of loving relationships makes one's beloved replaceable, since where developing a loving relationship with some other person instead would likely better instantiate the abstract good of such relationships, then on Moore's account it would seem that one ought to leave the former relationship for the latter.