It is customary, when starting an article about virtue ethics, to mention that it is ‘gaining in popularity’ or has been ‘getting a lot of attention in recent years’. In mentioning this I’ve more or less said it, so I’ll just dive right in.

‘Virtue Ethics’ in its modern incarnation is often seen as an alternative to ‘principlist’ ethical theories. The two big projects of this latter type are Utilitarianism and Kantian ethical theory. ‘Principlist’ because both of these projects assume that the question of ethics is the hunt for some clinching principle towards which we just need to conform our actions. Virtue ethics, it is thought, offers itself as an alternative; seeing in ethics a question of multiple virtues (justice, honesty, kindness, generosity, benevolence, friendship, etc), not singular principles. Against the cool, calculating Utilitarians, and the duty bound hyper-rational Kantians, virtue ethics focuses on questions of character, the complexity of lived situations, and interpretation: rather than “what should I do?” the question becomes “what sort of person should I be?”.

This has largely been financed by a return to Aristotle, but also Hume, and even the ‘virtue based’ writings of Kant, Mill and Bentham. Nussbaum has argued (1999) that ‘virtue ethics’ is not a useful category at all, but instead loosely picks out a number of critical projects utilizing a host of theoretical resources, with a host of targets, more or less only unified by their rejection of the ethical paradigm that has reigned supreme in the anglosphere since the 1950’s. That is, a particular approach by both Utilitarians and Kantians that conceives the paradigmatic ethical object as the ‘choice’, free from all situational and particular conditions. Hence the proliferation of ‘trolley problem’ like problems. The thinkers who get lumped into the bucket of ‘virtue ethics’, she writes, have a huge number of different axes to grind against a huge number of grindstones. Anti-Utilitarians, Anti-Kantians, Neo-Aristotelians, Neo-Humeans, Nietzscheans, Feminists, and Existentialists…

Nussbaum is firmly in the Neo-Aristotelian camp. Her paper, Non-Relative Virtues: An Aristotelian Approach (1988/2013), presents a reading of Aristotle’s philosophy attempting to answer the charges of parochialism and relativism often leveled against an ethics that tries to base itself on virtues and ‘life worlds’ (i.e. aren’t virtues like ‘generosity’ just cultural, historical items?). I want to do a reading of her paper here teasing out some of the (markedly Deleuzian) implications of it. I argue that the interpretation of Aristotle she presents is not just an ‘alternative to’ principlist ethics, but a radically different ethical ontology. I feel this point has been underappreciated. That is to say, the ‘virtue ethics’ Nussbaum presents is not just a simple matter of offering ‘virtues’ as an alternative, or addition, to ‘utility’ or ‘duty’, but a new paradigm altogether.

Nussbaum’s Aristotelian Virtue Ethics

In Nussbaum’s interpretation of Aristotle, virtues precipitate on domains of human activity. It is not the case that there is simply something that it is to be, say, “generous”, considered in isolation; generosity, rather, is the name of ‘excellent conduct’ in a particular sphere of human activity. Thus, a particular virtue is a function of a class of problems and sequences of conduct, native to a sphere of life and human activity. The spheres of human activity are multitudinous, and thus the virtues (as terms denoting the excellent conduct vis-à-vis the problems inherent in various spheres) will be likewise. One can be a great parent but a miserable friend, for example.

Her reading Aristotle in this way is financed both by Aristotle’s mode of presentation (introducing spheres of human activity prior to discussing ‘excellent conduct/virtue’ in that sphere) and by Aristotle’s admission that the terms he is using for the virtues and vices are inexact, because what he wants them to denote is in a sense being discovered by his analysis. She characterizes Aristotle’s analysis as:

“beginning from a characterization of a sphere of universal experience and choice, and introducing the virtue name as the name (as yet undefined) of whatever it is to choose appropriately in that area of experience.” (Nussbaum, 2013, p.633)

However, there’s another reason why we want to put things in this orientation, with problems preceding and defining virtues, rather than supposing that virtues precede the problems they overcome. If we take virtue ethics as affirming those virtuous characteristics called up by familiar names today (i.e. making an appeal to ‘generosity’ as it is commonly understood) we will have a circle emerging. ‘Generosity’ is not a mere descriptive label for a particular kind of conduct, but is already normatively flavoured. It already sits at the ‘golden mean’ between stinginess and profligacy, as ‘sharing resources with others in a good and selfless way’. That is to say, we can’t reach for the dictionary or our pre-theoretical understanding about what these virtues consist in because we discover that perhaps Aristotle’s thought, and its subsequent interpretation through the ages, precedes us. However, as mentioned just above, Aristotle didn’t see the meanings of the virtue and vice terms as a solved matter, so we have to wonder where this intuition of the inherent goodness of the mean between stinginess and profligacy (themselves normative terms) comes from. If we don’t question this, but accept ‘generosity’ as fundamentally good by definition (as our pre-theoretical understanding presents it), then we beg the question.

Hursthouse (2013) identifies this circularity, that the injunctions of virtue ethics are “couched in terms, or concepts, which are certainly ‘evaluative’ in some sense” (p.648), but minimizes it by pointing out that principlist ethical theories have the same defect. Despite initial appearances, Utilitarians and Kantian deontologists do depend, for example, on concepts like ‘murder’ over the more purely descriptive but less determinate ‘kill’. The job, then, for everyone is to examine and define these evaluative concepts that are indispensable for ethical theories. However, this “you too” counter-argument is a little unsatisfying: ideally this issue should be faced where it stands.

It would seem the widespread and prolonged adoption of a particular ethical theory creates the conditions for that ethical theory to appear intuitive (putting aside the obvious question here as to what preconditions precede the initial entertaining of the theory in the first place). Think of taking the famous ‘trolley problem’ to a New Guinean highland village. Where the presentation of the problem requires the elicitation of Utilitarian intuitions in the first stage in order to bring about the contradiction of intuitions in the second stage (fat man on the bridge), the presentation, in that different context, might become arrested at part one with questions of who the workers on the track are, how are they related through blood or marriage to the respondent, so on and so forth.

This is not, yet, a relativism issue. I merely hope to point out that when an ethical theory ‘helps itself’ to pre-theoretical, evaluative terms, it risks circularity because ethical thinking throughout the ages (including the contribution of the theory currently being supported and theorized) may have seeded these very evaluations into these terms in advance. Thus, when virtue ethics appeals to the folk-understanding of ‘generosity’, it may be the case that this very understanding is already heavily coloured by Aristotle himself (via, for example, the Christian scholastic readings of Aristotle). Thus, if one isn’t careful, the argument amounts to “everybody already believes this to be the case (generosity is good in itself), so it is the case”. This is all to say that we should tread very carefully here and treat these terms with ample grains of salt.

Nussbaum’s account avoids this circularity by situating the virtue terms as ‘virtual solutions’ to problems inherent in different spheres of human activity, based on common ‘grounding experiences’. Though she uses the word ‘choice’, her definition of the spheres of human activity of interest as those “in which human choice is both non-optional and somewhat problematic” (Nussbaum, 2013, p.633) allows us to talk purely of ‘problems’. To say ‘I have a problem’ is to say there is a non-optional demand upon me to do something (make a choice), which is not a matter of indifference, but rather has some stakes involved which are risked by my ‘response’ to this demand. I want to argue that it is her reframing ethics in terms of problems that marks the basis for a radical shift away from principlism and its interrogation of moral intuitions and customs looking for universalizable principles of choice.