Having a moral life is not the same as selective moral decision making. To lead a moral life has greater meaning than simply one of making the correct decisions in various situations. It’s one thing to end up doing the right thing, while it’s a completely other thing to initially have started out with evil intentions. Let’s assume for a second you woke up one day and decided to all the right things today that society considers to be ethically proper. In this specific and seemingly impossible scenario as well as all others, your day would be going significantly better had you made decisions that were geared to take into consideration people’s well being as opposed to fear solely in conjunction with others think of you and your actions.
Sometimes how you will conduct yourself and the moral decisions will make will simply depend on your mood for that day, even if they are not in accordance with your actual overall intentions or thinking of something or somebody. In certain instances it’s worthwhile to keep up a motivational state that you’ve had for so long. One would call this a personality trait, a statement of character or in other words, a virtue. These states are one in which your moral standing, principles or way of thinking of what is the right thing to do in a certain situation is worthwhile not changing if the situations were slightly different. One could even think of it as a type of conscientiousness. There are certain personality traits considered to be worse than conscientiousness. A person might have tried to acquire material riches for years, having an urge that they consciously worked towards making come true. This could also be considered a statement of character, and a personality trait. If one concentrated on this and only this, then it would go from being a good desire to a bad obsession, because it permeates one’s being and muddies the ethical waters surrounding it, having an impact on what and how moral decisions are decided on and carried out. In this case it would be considered a vice, or avarice.
Your overall life heavily depends on these decisions, and on these personality traits. How well your life will be is heavily tied to this factor. In all they contribute to something called moral character, which determines your reputation as how good of a human being you are perceived by your community.
However, the terminology we need to learn together with this is important.
- Even though virtue tends to be a very old timey type of word, it’s a proficiently useful word for describing a good moral character in a human being, or a positive personality trait in a human being. The word itself is central to philosophical discussions regarding ethics and morality.
- What is referred to having a good moral character is usually synonymous with assessment of what are considered to be the good deeds, actions, will, intentions and motivations of a human being. These assessments can be derived even from comparisons made from aesthetic or religious literature about what good moral character is supposed to be.
The ethics of character are therefore central to the idea of living a moral life. Ethical theory in particular focuses on the ethics of character, although it is not the sole focus of ethical theory as a whole. The ethics of right actions are another compartment of ethical theory, which seeks to evaluate choices for voluntary actions, and which of these would be the morally and ethically correct ones and which ones aren’t. There also exist the ethics behind motives and intention, as well as attitudes in a wider sense. It is also important to note that opinions, motives and intention might not be a long term or permanent aspect of traits of character.
In the 20th century, the primary focus in ethical theory revolved around ethics of action.
In the first few decades of the 20th century it could be said that ethics of action were considered to essentially make up the entirety of substantive ethics. Ethical thinking would revolve around the question “What should we do?” in the sense that the correct manner of behavior always signified good intentions, although we’ve developed beyond this belief. For the last 40 years of the 20th century and moving forward, there has been a paradigm shift in terms of philosophical thinking as it pertains to ethics, where an increasingly larger focus has grown on moral character, virtue or the ethics of character, as a sort of introspective look into not just the surface actions of man, but also what permeates his being. Despite this increase, it does not coexist with the standard mode of thinking among moral philosophers that ethics should constitute exterior exhibitions over interior thought patterns and attitudes. Despite academia’s attempts to discern these two elements of ethics from each other, they are interlinked. While on one hand making the right decision in terms of what you should in certain situations is an important aspect of having a decent personality and good moral character, and where good moral character is lacking, it is often difficult to find the right thing to do as a natural instinctive reaction, which is where a person will be judged on their intentions and not on their action. On the other hand, ethics of virtue and ethics of action as separate entities are both worthwhile to be pondered as they are, even though combining them is essential to establishing clear cut ethical perfection in a human being as well as a society.
In these series of articles, our exploration on the ethics of virtue are derived from their most fundamental reasons for existing. This is not about what most literature tends to exacerbate in terms of virtue ethics requiring a return to it’s root cause, the interior self, where the explanation regarding meaning, justification and truth in ethics lies, is essentially within the heart of virtue ethics.
Instead of attempting to rediscover action ethics through the lens of virtue ethics in order to attach explanations and labels for certain things, this introspective philosophizing regarding the nature of language and the thought regarding ethical norms and values is formally part of the field that is metaethics. There is a difference between metaethics and substantiative ethics, the latter of which is intended to delve into the assessment of ethically significant actions, attitudes and character traits. While these two types of philosophical inquiry are definitely interlinked in some ways more than others, it is important to discern them as separate fields with their own distinct identity. These series of articles can be said to be ones fitting within the category of substantive ethics.
Metaethical philosophizing and thought is what one would classify G.E.M. Anscombe’s paper on “Modern Moral Philosophy”, which is probably the widely regarded as the sparkplug that rekindled a fire in virtue ethics. Anscombe begins to formulate his theory with the idea that the concepts of moral obligation and moral duty should no longer be considered as it pertains to establishing the framework for “modern moral philosophy” is assumed to be of an ethical character that derives it’s being from a “law’s conception of ethics” where divine commands are deemed necessary to categorize these concepts and yet is not recognized by moral philosophers as a proper origin point from which to judge those concepts.
Yet Aristotle showed us that it’s possible to philosophize and reminisce on ethics without a need to fall back on the law conception. Aristotle’s example indeed presents to us with the possibility that an ethical framework can be built upon the concept of virtue. Anscombe’s paper does not attempt to sufficiently demonstrate that metaethics can serve to ascertain a superior sense for concepts of virtue over concepts of moral obligation, albeit does squeeze an inch in terms of presenting aspirations of a possible future where this can be reached if we had a superior philosophy of psychology than the one that existed in 1958.
Anscombe’s paper also presents an interesting curiosity that one shouldn’t lightly dismiss, the fact that she focuses on arguing more in favor of the ethics of action than with the ethics of traits of character, at least in the substantive level of inquiry, as opposed to the metaethical level of inquiry. To critique her focus, she blatantly attempts to advertise actions of ethics as those which should be deemed untruthful, unchaste and unjust, yet does not mention how these and their quality often stem from concepts of virtue at their very core, as they are used as a standard by which those ethics can generally be judged. The most lewdly erect and discernable notion one gets about her paper is her defense of the idea that actions should be judged in terms of moral absolutism or binary logic. She persists on the incorrect notion, for example, that a man should not be judicially be punished for something in which it is determined by the courts that he has clearly not done. There is an incessant obsession with meticulously detailing the differentiation between what would colloquially be referred to as “just” and “unjust”, we arrive at the conclusion that a scenario in which a man is found guilty despite being innocent couldn’t possibly provide some justice on the notion of past and yet unrelated actions, only on the notion of that in which he is currently being judged.
By using the strict and clear emphasis on the definition provided by the words “just” and “unjust”, we cannot be entrapped by the seemingly vague comparative definition we find in the phrases “morally wrong” and “morally right”, which allow the idea that it might indeed provide for a just solution to do this as long as it justifies some greater goal, such as the person being punished for all their past transgressions where evidence was also lacking, yet as in abundance of occurrence, being tried before as today, something is obviously amiss with this person where most innocent men never fall into the lap of the judiciary to begin with, where these questions would even arise. Due to this philosophical style, she laid the foundation for her argument in which descriptive content of an action to judge it as being moral or immoral should be a stronger approach than that in which moral character should be assessed from weaker to stronger degrees as a method of justifying
punishment but also withholding it.
Similar things can be said about Alasdair MacIntrye’s After Virtue. His states that culture is increasingly suffering from a lack or deterioration of ethically centered thinking, leading to a dark cataclysm in which the increasingly total absence of ethical thinking can be categorized as being a metaethical issue. At first glance, it might seem as if the problem is actually one of epistemological proportions, in that, there appears to be no rational approach to simultaneously solving all conflicts between opposing moral perspectives. Due to this polarization and lack of standardization in ethical matters on a societal level has forced people to assume there are always emotivist undertones in the nature of ethical judgement. He further proceeds to keep going on about that in order to prevent this ethical collapse in our culture, we would require a reversal from simply a concept of tradition to a concept of virtual until a conceptual portmanteau is established in which the tradition becomes one of virtue.
While it could be said that MacIntyre is torn between the substantive conclusions reached about traits of character in addition to actions, but similarly to Anscombe, his concern for actions of ethics is particularly ballyhooed. Regardless, MacIntyre’s paper tends to focus on matters of political action as opposed to common actions by the layman, one of those examples include legislation regarding abortion.
At this point, we cannot say for certain that these series of articles are meant to present a solution to issues of a metaethical nature.
Virtue in a more philosophical definition should be that of a person who cultivates his own sense of self in such an excellent manner that his pursuit of good character and needs is never ending. If you were to use this concept of good to envelop yourself and let it permeate your being, it would need to maintain it’s consistency, and then, develop the more specialized aspects of the concept as a whole, which is often frowned upon by some metaethicists in it’s attempt to reach some misleading level of perfection they would argue is impossible to achieve, sensationalist, and therefore not a pragmatic path to go down in the long term. In order to expand upon the belief that virtue should be a core component of ethical theory, more accounts will eventually be added in other articles to compliment these series of articles.
It can be said that for certain it would be a productive shift to have on a metaethical level where the focus goes from that of obligation to virtue, for the furtherance of metaethics itself as a field, in order to sift through questions, answers and paradoxes regarding metaethical issues, and their justification, meaning and grounding in reality.
Just because figuring out a widely accepted truth when it comes to these topics is a difficult endeavor, should not make them universally rejected for consideration, rather, openly discussed as all furtherance and documentation of them will yield great utility down the road. The problem that we are presented with seems to be one of several problems in relations to virtue itself.
VIRTUE AND GOVERNING WHAT’S THE RIGHT THING TO DO
Despite their interrelation and possible mutual usefulness, one should not seek solutions in virtue when it pertains to ethical issues surrounding actions. One should also not attempt to add a character derived from virtue to the concepts of either right or wrong, good and evil, nor to completely get rid of the concepts of right and wrong entirely as their binary nature would conflict with the abstract nature of virtue. The following series of articles is meant to present a contribution, but not an addendum, to ethics of virtue, but not establish some sort of theory of virtue ethics in and of itself. In the instance of a theory of virtue, one gets the implied impression that this theory of virtue is meant to precede other forms of ethical reasoning, and particularly serve as a replacement for other approaches to ethical problems, as it becomes the base from which all further ethical reasoning is derived. The more imperialistic perspective, on the other hand, appears to be barking up the wrong tree as opposed to the right tree, and there is a right tree.
It is important to distinguish these clear specific points that differentiate judgement of either virtue or obligation. The first is clearly one pertaining to character while the second to action. It can also definitely be said that the quality of the act can often stray far from the quality of the character, anomalously. And by itself, having a character that is virtuous is not a guarantee that it will produce actions that are virtuous or ethical. We can envision the example of someone who due to lack of attention or focus unwittingly commits an action that is morally questionable, but that
doesn’t mean that the temporary lack of awareness denotes a stale moral character. In this instance, there could’ve been a good reason that their attention was shifted away from one of moral awareness. Despite this, this is no excuse to completely disregard one’s humanity, ethics, morals, values and related subject matter, in order to commit things that do not require much conscious effort in knowing they are wrong.
There is still the possibility of doing the right thing without having a good moral character. Take the example of a sales person who owns a store. They would not want to conduct business in a manner with a customer that is harmful to their business and ends up making them disreputable. In this case, as a customer, you would have no reason to say the merchant violated their moral obligation towards you, yet, if the merchant gave you attitude, in this case you would recognize that there is a reason to complain. Indeed, the merchant would do what he must as a method of self-preservation rather than out of the goodness of his heart, and would rather do something else if that was morally okay instead. If this was the case with everyone, for every reason, then no one would behave in a way that is considered morally incorrect, as self preservation would constantly be under threat, and therefore force everyone to get along. Despite this, the fact of the matter remains that despite the availability of choices in right or wrong actions, one ends up doing what he is under the moral obligation to do.