Full Definition of virtue. Examples of virtue in a Sentence He led me across the concrete floor, through a concrete warehouse, and to the concrete screening room, where he began to extol the virtue and beauty of his eleven-mile-long sewage interceptor. He may well have devoted a great amount of ink to virtue and order, but he checked those concepts at the door of the beau monde; he made it clear that he was not too good for that world … — Stacy Schiff , A Great Improvisation , Nerviness is considered a virtue , a good machine, an energy that builds nations, businesses and dynasties.
Handed down from generation to generation, like a caustic strand of DNA, it infects the unhappy, the unfortunate and the unlucky, and turns them into desperate strivers, prepared to do anything to realize their ridiculous ambitions. Recent Examples on the Web And is there an estimate of, of the number of lives that might be saved by virtue of having our private companies that have over employees, either having their employees receive a vaccination or get a weekly test?
Russo, chicagotribune. First Known Use of virtue 13th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1a. History and Etymology for virtue Middle English vertu, virtu , from Anglo-French, from Latin virtut-, virtus strength, manliness, virtue, from vir man — more at virile.
Learn More About virtue. Time Traveler for virtue The first known use of virtue was in the 13th century See more words from the same century. Phrases Related to virtue make a virtue out of necessity paragon of virtue. Style: MLA. Kids Definition of virtue. Only happiness is an end in itself, so it is the ultimate end at which all our activities aim. As such, it is the supreme good. Aristotle defines the supreme good as an activity of the rational soul in accordance with virtue. Virtue for the Greeks is equivalent to excellence.
A man has virtue as a flautist, for instance, if he plays the flute well, since playing the flute is the distinctive activity of a flautist. A virtuous person is someone who performs the distinctive activity of being human well. Rationality is our distinctive activity, that is, the activity that distinguishes us from plants and animals. All living things have a nutritive soul, which governs growth and nutrition. Humans and animals are distinct from plants in having a sensitive soul, which governs locomotion and instinct.
Humans are distinct above all for having also a rational soul, which governs thought. Since our rationality is our distinctive activity, its exercise is the supreme good. Unlike Murdoch and Chappell, his starting point is not a set of claims about our consciousness of goodness. Rather, he begins with an account of the metaphysics of goodness. And like Augustine, Adams takes that perfect good to be God.
God is both the exemplification and the source of all goodness. Other things are good, he suggests, to the extent that they resemble God Adams The resemblance requirement identifies a necessary condition for being good, but it does not yet give us a sufficient condition. This is because there are ways in which finite creatures might resemble God that would not be suitable to the type of creature they are.
To rule out such cases we need to introduce another factor. That factor is the fitting response to goodness, which Adams suggests is love.
Virtues come into the account as one of the ways in which some things namely, persons could resemble God. This is one of the reasons Adams offers for conceiving of the ideal of perfection as a personal God, rather than an impersonal form of the Good. Many of the excellences of persons of which we are most confident are virtues such as love, wisdom, justice, patience, and generosity.
A Platonistic account like the one Adams puts forward in Finite and Infinite Goods clearly does not derive all other normative properties from the virtues for a discussion of the relationship between this view and the one he puts forward in A Theory of Virtue see Pettigrove Goodness provides the normative foundation. Virtues are not built on that foundation; rather, as one of the varieties of goodness of whose value we are most confident, virtues form part of the foundation.
Obligations, by contrast, come into the account at a different level. Other things being equal, the more virtuous the parties to the relationship, the more binding the obligation. However, once good relationships have given rise to obligations, those obligations take on a life of their own. Their bindingness is not traced directly to considerations of goodness. Rather, they are determined by the expectations of the parties and the demands of the relationship. A number of objections have been raised against virtue ethics, some of which bear more directly on one form of virtue ethics than on others.
In this section we consider eight objections, namely, the a application, b adequacy, c relativism, d conflict, e self-effacement, f justification, g egoism, and h situationist problems. At the time, utilitarians and deontologists commonly though not universally held that the task of ethical theory was to come up with a code consisting of universal rules or principles possibly only one, as in the case of act-utilitarianism which would have two significant features: i the rule s would amount to a decision procedure for determining what the right action was in any particular case; ii the rule s would be stated in such terms that any non-virtuous person could understand and apply it them correctly.
Virtue ethicists maintained, contrary to these two claims, that it was quite unrealistic to imagine that there could be such a code see, in particular, McDowell More and more utilitarians and deontologists found themselves agreed on their general rules but on opposite sides of the controversial moral issues in contemporary discussion.
It came to be recognised that moral sensitivity, perception, imagination, and judgement informed by experience— phronesis in short—is needed to apply rules or principles correctly. Hence many though by no means all utilitarians and deontologists have explicitly abandoned ii and much less emphasis is placed on i. Nevertheless, the complaint that virtue ethics does not produce codifiable principles is still a commonly voiced criticism of the approach, expressed as the objection that it is, in principle, unable to provide action-guidance.
Initially, the objection was based on a misunderstanding. It is a noteworthy feature of our virtue and vice vocabulary that, although our list of generally recognised virtue terms is comparatively short, our list of vice terms is remarkably, and usefully, long, far exceeding anything that anyone who thinks in terms of standard deontological rules has ever come up with.
Much invaluable action guidance comes from avoiding courses of action that would be irresponsible, feckless, lazy, inconsiderate, uncooperative, harsh, intolerant, selfish, mercenary, indiscreet, tactless, arrogant, unsympathetic, cold, incautious, unenterprising, pusillanimous, feeble, presumptuous, rude, hypocritical, self-indulgent, materialistic, grasping, short-sighted, vindictive, calculating, ungrateful, grudging, brutal, profligate, disloyal, and on and on.
This worry can take two forms. It is possible to perform a right action without being virtuous and a virtuous person can occasionally perform the wrong action without that calling her virtue into question. Some virtue ethicists respond to the adequacy objection by rejecting the assumption that virtue ethics ought to be in the business of providing an account of right action in the first place. Following in the footsteps of Anscombe and MacIntyre , Talbot Brewer argues that to work with the categories of rightness and wrongness is already to get off on the wrong foot.
Contemporary conceptions of right and wrong action, built as they are around a notion of moral duty that presupposes a framework of divine or moral law or around a conception of obligation that is defined in contrast to self-interest, carry baggage the virtue ethicist is better off without. Other virtue ethicists wish to retain the concept of right action but note that in the current philosophical discussion a number of distinct qualities march under that banner.
In others, it designates an action that is commendable even if not the best possible. In still others, it picks out actions that are not blameworthy even if not commendable. A virtue ethicist might choose to define one of these—for example, the best action—in terms of virtues and vices, but appeal to other normative concepts—such as legitimate expectations—when defining other conceptions of right action.
As we observed in section 2, a virtue ethical account need not attempt to reduce all other normative concepts to virtues and vices. What is required is simply i that virtue is not reduced to some other normative concept that is taken to be more fundamental and ii that some other normative concepts are explained in terms of virtue and vice.
Appealing to virtues and vices makes it much easier to achieve extensional adequacy. Making room for normative concepts that are not taken to be reducible to virtue and vice concepts makes it even easier to generate a theory that is both extensionally and explanatorily adequate. Whether one needs other concepts and, if so, how many, is still a matter of debate among virtue ethicists, as is the question of whether virtue ethics even ought to be offering an account of right action.
Either way virtue ethicists have resources available to them to address the adequacy objection. Insofar as the different versions of virtue ethics all retain an emphasis on the virtues, they are open to the familiar problem of c the charge of cultural relativity.
Is it not the case that different cultures embody different virtues, MacIntyre and hence that the v-rules will pick out actions as right or wrong only relative to a particular culture? Different replies have been made to this charge. They admit that, for them, cultural relativism is a challenge, but point out that it is just as much a problem for the other two approaches.
The putative cultural variation in character traits regarded as virtues is no greater—indeed markedly less—than the cultural variation in rules of conduct, and different cultures have different ideas about what constitutes happiness or welfare. That cultural relativity should be a problem common to all three approaches is hardly surprising. A bolder strategy involves claiming that virtue ethics has less difficulty with cultural relativity than the other two approaches. Much cultural disagreement arises, it may be claimed, from local understandings of the virtues, but the virtues themselves are not relative to culture Nussbaum Charity prompts me to kill the person who would be better off dead, but justice forbids it.
Honesty points to telling the hurtful truth, kindness and compassion to remaining silent or even lying. What shall I do?
Of course, the same sorts of dilemmas are generated by conflicts between deontological rules. Deontology and virtue ethics share the conflict problem and are happy to take it on board rather than follow some of the utilitarians in their consequentialist resolutions of such dilemmas and in fact their strategies for responding to it are parallel.
Both aim to resolve a number of dilemmas by arguing that the conflict is merely apparent; a discriminating understanding of the virtues or rules in question, possessed only by those with practical wisdom, will perceive that, in this particular case, the virtues do not make opposing demands or that one rule outranks another, or has a certain exception clause built into it.
Whether this is all there is to it depends on whether there are any irresolvable dilemmas. If there are, proponents of either normative approach may point out reasonably that it could only be a mistake to offer a resolution of what is, ex hypothesi , irresolvable. Another problem arguably shared by all three approaches is e , that of being self-effacing. Michael Stocker originally introduced it as a problem for deontology and consequentialism.
He pointed out that the agent who, rightly, visits a friend in hospital will rather lessen the impact of his visit on her if he tells her either that he is doing it because it is his duty or because he thought it would maximize the general happiness.
In its particular versions, for deontology there is the question of how to justify its claims that certain moral rules are the correct ones, and for utilitarianism of how to justify its claim that all that really matters morally are consequences for happiness or well-being. For virtue ethics, the problem concerns the question of which character traits are the virtues. Some believe that their normative ethics can be placed on a secure basis, resistant to any form of scepticism, such as what anyone rationally desires, or would accept or agree on, regardless of their ethical outlook; others that it cannot.
Virtue ethicists have eschewed any attempt to ground virtue ethics in an external foundation while continuing to maintain that their claims can be validated. A misunderstanding of eudaimonia as an unmoralized concept leads some critics to suppose that the neo-Aristotelians are attempting to ground their claims in a scientific account of human nature and what counts, for a human being, as flourishing.
Others assume that, if this is not what they are doing, they cannot be validating their claims that, for example, justice, charity, courage, and generosity are virtues. Eudaimonia in virtue ethics, is indeed a moralized concept, but it is not only that. Claims about what constitutes flourishing for human beings no more float free of scientific facts about what human beings are like than ethological claims about what constitutes flourishing for elephants.
In both cases, the truth of the claims depends in part on what kind of animal they are and what capacities, desires and interests the humans or elephants have. The best available science today including evolutionary theory and psychology supports rather than undermines the ancient Greek assumption that we are social animals, like elephants and wolves and unlike polar bears. No rationalizing explanation in terms of anything like a social contract is needed to explain why we choose to live together, subjugating our egoistic desires in order to secure the advantages of co-operation.
Like other social animals, our natural impulses are not solely directed towards our own pleasures and preservation, but include altruistic and cooperative ones. This basic fact about us should make more comprehensible the claim that the virtues are at least partially constitutive of human flourishing and also undercut the objection that virtue ethics is, in some sense, egoistic.
One is a simple confusion. A related version ascribes bizarre reasons to the virtuous agent, unjustifiably assuming that she acts as she does because she believes that acting thus on this occasion will help her to achieve eudaimonia. On the view that the exercise of the virtues is necessary but not sufficient for eudaimonia , such cases are described as those in which the virtuous agent sees that, as things have unfortunately turned out, eudaimonia is not possible for them Foot , Either way, such heroic acts can hardly be regarded as egoistic.
This is a mistake on two counts. Firstly, justice and benevolence do, in general, benefit their possessors, since without them eudaimonia is not possible. There have been other responses as well summarized helpfully in Prinz and Miller But giving up the idea that practical wisdom is the heart of all the virtues, as Adams has to do, is a substantial sacrifice, as Russell and Kamtekar argue.
Over the past thirty-five years most of those contributing to the revival of virtue ethics have worked within a neo-Aristotelian, eudaimonist framework.
However, as noted in section 2, other forms of virtue ethics have begun to emerge. Theorists have begun to turn to philosophers like Hutcheson, Hume, Nietzsche, Martineau, and Heidegger for resources they might use to develop alternatives see Russell ; Swanton and ; Taylor ; and Harcourt These explorations promise to open up new avenues for the development of virtue ethics.
Although virtue ethics has grown remarkably in the last thirty-five years, it is still very much in the minority, particularly in the area of applied ethics. However, the last decade has seen an increase in the amount of attention applied virtue ethics has received Walker and Ivanhoe ; Hartman ; Austin ; Van Hooft ; and Annas This area can certainly be expected to grow in the future, and it looks as though applying virtue ethics in the field of environmental ethics may prove particularly fruitful Sandler ; Hursthouse , ; Zwolinski and Schmidtz ; Cafaro That suggests that at least those virtue ethicists who take their inspiration from Aristotle should have resources to offer for the development of virtue politics.
But, while Plato and Aristotle can be great inspirations as far as virtue ethics is concerned, neither, on the face of it, are attractive sources of insight where politics is concerned. However, recent work suggests that Aristotelian ideas can, after all, generate a satisfyingly liberal political philosophy Nussbaum ; LeBar a. Moreover, as noted above, virtue ethics does not have to be neo-Aristotelian. It may be that the virtue ethics of Hutcheson and Hume can be naturally extended into a modern political philosophy Hursthouse —91; Slote Following Plato and Aristotle, modern virtue ethics has always emphasised the importance of moral education, not as the inculcation of rules but as the training of character.
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