Both theories so far treat a moral agent as a device for producing verdicts on acts, and an older tradition thinks that is the wrong picture of moral life.
Its complaint is easy to state. Most moral failure is not a failure of judgement at the point of decision. It is a failure to notice that anything was at stake, or to care once it was noticed, or to want the right thing when the moment came. A person who works out from first principles that they should visit a sick friend, and does so grudgingly, has done something less good than a person who simply wanted to go, and no theory that scores acts alone can say why. The previous lessons left consequentialism unable to supply constraints and deontology unable to resolve conflicts. This tradition offers a diagnosis of why both keep failing: they are answering a question that was never the primary one.
The question changed
Elizabeth Anscombe reopened the field with a paper in 1958, "Modern Moral Philosophy", which is short, aggressive and among the most consequential things written in the subject in the last century. She also coined the word "consequentialism" in it, as a term of abuse.
Her central charge is historical and conceptual. The distinctively moral "ought", the one that carries a special verdictive force, is a survivor from a legal conception of ethics in which God legislated. Remove the lawgiver, as modern philosophy did, and the notion of a moral law without anyone to make it is left hanging, doing work its foundations no longer support. Her recommendation was to stop doing moral philosophy until we had an adequate philosophy of psychology, and in the meantime to work with concepts that do not need the legal framework: what a person is like, what they are doing, whether they are just or cowardly or truthful.
The tradition she was pointing back to is Aristotle's, principally the Nicomachean Ethics, written in the fourth century BC. Its question is not what to do on a particular occasion but what a good human life consists in, and it takes the practical question to be answered by the sort of person one has become rather than by a procedure applied at the moment of choice.
Eudaimonia and the function argument
Aristotle begins where a modern reader least expects: with the claim that every activity aims at some good, and that there must be some end pursued for its own sake, on pain of an infinite regress that would make all desire empty. That end everyone names eudaimonia, usually translated as happiness and better rendered as living well or flourishing.
Translation matters here. Eudaimonia is not a feeling. It is an activity, not a state; it is assessed over a complete life rather than at a moment; and it is something you can be wrong about, in a way you cannot be wrong about whether you feel cheerful. Aristotle's remark that one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day, is a claim about the kind of thing it is.
The naming settles nothing, since everyone agrees on the word and disagrees about the content, so Aristotle offers an argument. A flute player, a sculptor and a carpenter each have a characteristic activity, and each is good insofar as they perform it well. Does a human being as such have one? He argues by elimination: not mere living, which plants share; not perception, which animals share; what is left is activity of the part of the soul that has reason. So the human good is activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, and if there are several virtues, in accordance with the best and most complete, over a complete life.
The argument is the most contested passage in the book and its weakness should be stated plainly. Two objections stand out. That a species has a distinctive capacity does not show that exercising it is good for its members, so the move from "characteristic" to "good" needs a premise that is not supplied. And picking out reason as the distinguishing feature is a choice among many possible ones. What survives is more modest and still substantial: an account of a good life must be grounded in facts about the kind of creature we are, and cannot be read off a set of rules with no anthropology behind it. Contemporary neo-Aristotelians, notably Philippa Foot in Natural Goodness in 2001, rebuild the argument from claims about what a living thing of a given kind needs in order to flourish, which is a naturalistic strategy with its own problems and a much better relationship with biology.
Virtue as a mean
A virtue, on the account that follows, is a hexis: a settled disposition, acquired rather than innate, concerned with choice, which disposes a person to feel and act in the right way, at the right time, towards the right people, for the right reasons.
The feeling is not decoration. On this view a person who wants to steal and refrains is not generous but continent, and continence is a lesser condition than virtue: the fully virtuous person has brought their desires into line so that doing the right thing is not a struggle. This is one of the tradition's sharpest departures from Kant, for whom the man who acts against inclination shows moral worth most clearly.
The doctrine of the mean says that each virtue lies between an excess and a deficiency in some sphere of feeling or action.
| Sphere | Deficiency | Virtue | Excess |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fear and confidence | Cowardice | Courage | Rashness |
| Bodily pleasures | Insensibility | Temperance | Self-indulgence |
| Giving money | Meanness | Generosity | Wastefulness |
| Claims about oneself | Self-deprecation | Truthfulness | Boastfulness |
| Anger | Lack of spirit | Good temper | Irascibility |
Two qualifications keep this from being trite. The mean is relative to the person and the situation, not an arithmetic midpoint: the right amount of food for a wrestler is not the right amount for a child, and the courageous act in one circumstance is retreat. And not every action or feeling has a mean. Aristotle names spite, shamelessness, envy, adultery, theft and murder as things that are bad in themselves, with no question of doing them at the right time in the right amount. The doctrine is a heuristic about spheres in which excess and defect are both possible, not a universal formula.
Example. Locate the vices flanking honesty in the sense of telling people hard truths, and say what the mean depends on.
The deficiency is a habit of concealment and flattery, saying what will please rather than what is so, which the earlier lesson's business plan case illustrates. The excess is not honesty overdone in the sense of too much truth, since truth cannot be excessive, but a habit of unnecessary and gratuitous disclosure: telling a grieving man that his wife's illness was mismanaged when nothing can be done about it, or announcing every judgement one forms about a colleague. What the mean depends on is who is being told, what they can do with the information, what standing you have to give it, and what it is for. That list is exactly the point of the doctrine: it says the answer is not a rule but a set of factors, and that getting it right is a skill. Notice that a consequentialist reaches the same verdicts here by asking what the disclosure achieves, and a Kantian by asking whether the person is being managed rather than addressed. Convergence in ordinary cases is normal, and the theories separate at the edges.
Now you. Is there a mean of which loyalty is the virtue, and what does the case show about the doctrine?
Answer
Yes, and the deficiency is the easy half: treachery, or an indifference that abandons friends and commitments when it is convenient. The excess is more interesting and more common: the loyalty that covers for a colleague's fraud, that defends a country's atrocity, that keeps a confidence which should be broken. Both ends are genuine failures, so loyalty fits the doctrine well. What the case shows is that the mean cannot be located without appeal to something outside the sphere: what makes the excess an excess is that loyalty has been allowed to override justice, so the doctrine of the mean does not by itself settle any case, and depends on judgement about how the spheres relate. That is not a fatal criticism, because Aristotle says exactly this and gives the judgement a name, but it does mean the mean is a way of organising the question rather than a way of answering it.
How virtue is acquired
Virtues are not innate and not taught by instruction. Aristotle's claim is that we acquire them by practice: we become builders by building and harpists by playing the harp, and likewise we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.
This looks circular. How can you do just acts before you are just? Aristotle's answer distinguishes the act from the way it is done. A learner can perform the act a just person would perform, without yet doing it as a just person does, which requires knowing what one is doing, choosing it for its own sake, and acting from a firm and unchanging state. The learner practises the outward act under guidance, and the disposition forms through repetition, in the way a musician's ear forms through playing. This is why the tradition takes moral education, upbringing and the example of admired people so seriously, and it is a genuine advantage: neither of the other theories has much to say about how anyone comes to be moral, and both quietly assume an agent who already cares.
It also implies that character formation runs largely below the level of decision, through what one is habituated to notice, feel and enjoy. That claim is empirical, and the next lesson is about how it has fared.
Example. A school wants to reduce bullying. Compare what each of the three traditions recommends.
A consequentialist looks for the intervention with the best measured effect on the outcome, which points to whole-school programmes with supervision, clear reporting and consistent response, and treats the children's characters as one causal factor among several. A Kantian frames the wrong precisely, as the treatment of a classmate as a thing rather than as a person with ends of their own, and builds the response around that: rules, their justification, and the requirement that every child be able to see why the rule binds them. A virtue ethicist asks what dispositions the school is actually cultivating, which turns attention to things the other two do not look at: what conduct is admired and by whom, what the adults model when they are tired, whether the ordinary texture of the place rewards contempt or makes it embarrassing, and whether children are given practice at intervening rather than instruction about it. All three have something, and the third is describing the mechanism by which anything the first two do will or will not stick.
Now you. Does the habituation account imply that a person raised badly cannot become good?
Answer
Aristotle comes close to saying so, and it is one of the harshest features of his view. Habituation happens in childhood, before the agent can evaluate what they are being formed into, so a person given the wrong upbringing has had their perception and their pleasures shaped before they could object, and he doubts that argument can undo it: someone who has not been brought up to take pleasure in fine things will not be persuaded into it by a lecture. This is the constitutive luck problem the free will course examined, arriving from the other side, and it should be reported honestly rather than softened. What can be said is that the account leaves room for later change through practice rather than through argument, since practice is what formed the dispositions in the first place, and that the modern evidence on habit change is broadly consistent with this: what alters conduct is repeated action in altered circumstances, not insight. The uncomfortable residue is that a good upbringing is a matter of luck, and that a theory of what makes a life go well has just conceded that much of it was decided for you.
Practical wisdom
The component that does the real work is phronesis, practical wisdom: the capacity to perceive what a particular situation calls for and to act accordingly. It is not cleverness, which is a capacity to hit any target, and it is not scientific knowledge, which is of what cannot be otherwise.
Aristotle's argument for putting perception rather than rules at the centre is worth reconstructing, because it is the tradition's strongest move. Practical situations are indefinitely various, and any rule stated in advance covers them by generalising over features that its author anticipated. When an unanticipated case arrives, the rule either falls silent or gives the wrong answer. His image for the remedy, from the discussion of equity, is the leaden ruler used by builders on Lesbos, which bends to fit the shape of the stone instead of forcing the stone to fit the rule. A decree has to be adapted to the facts in the same way.
This has a modern echo in every field where expertise resists codification. An experienced clinician recognises a presentation that no protocol quite matches; an experienced teacher sees which child needs to be pushed and which needs to be left alone. In each case the expert can rarely state the rule they are following, and attempts to write it down produce something that performs worse than they do. Virtue ethics claims that moral competence is of this kind, which is why it locates moral knowledge in a trained perceiver rather than in a principle.
Practical wisdom also unifies the virtues. Aristotle holds that you cannot fully have one virtue without the others, because each requires knowing how much weight the considerations of its sphere carry against the others, and that knowledge is the same knowledge. The unity thesis is widely thought too strong, since people plainly are brave and unkind, and the defensible version is that the virtues are interdependent enough that a serious deficiency in one distorts the exercise of the rest.
Example. A manager discovers that a well-liked employee has been falsifying expense claims for small amounts over two years. What does each of the three theories ask?
A consequentialist asks what will produce the best outcome: what dismissal does to the team, what tolerance does to the incentives, whether prosecution helps anyone. A Kantian asks what is owed: the employee has treated the firm and colleagues as means, honesty is a perfect duty, and the manager has duties of fairness to everyone else that the employee's popularity cannot override. A virtue ethicist asks what a person of good character does here, and the question opens up material the others miss: whether the manager's own reluctance is compassion or cowardice, whether the two years of not noticing was a failure of attention that is itself a fault, what a just response looks like when it must be both firm and not gratuitously destructive, and how to conduct the conversation. That last cluster is not decoration. Most of what goes wrong in real cases like this goes wrong in the manner rather than in the verdict, and only one of the three theories has anything to say about the manner.
Now you. Rosalind Hursthouse defines a right action as what a virtuous agent would characteristically do in the circumstances. What is the obvious objection, and does the definition survive it?
Answer
The objection is circularity: right acts are defined by the virtuous agent, and the virtuous agent is presumably one who does right acts, so nothing has been said. Hursthouse's answer, in On Virtue Ethics in 1999, is that the virtues are specified independently, as the character traits a human being needs in order to flourish, so the definition is not circular but grounded in an account of human nature, which is where the neo-Aristotelian naturalism of Foot does its work. She adds a practical supplement, the v-rules: from each virtue term comes an injunction usable by someone who is not yet wise, such as do what is honest, do not do what is uncharitable. That answers the second standard objection, that the theory cannot guide action, though only partly, since a novice who does not know what charity requires here is no better off than before. The fair verdict is that virtue ethics guides action about as well as its rivals do once their principles meet a genuinely hard case, and that it is more honest about the residual role of judgement.
What the tradition contributes
Even a reader who ends up a consequentialist should take three things from this lesson.
The first is that moral perception precedes moral judgement. Before you decide what to do about a situation you have to see it as raising a moral question at all, and most failures happen there, invisibly, because nothing ever presented itself as a decision. Iris Murdoch made this her central theme: the work of morality is largely the work of attention, of seeing another person justly, and by the time a choice arrives most of the work is already done or already lost.
The second is that emotions are part of moral competence rather than interference with it. Feeling indignation at cruelty and affection for one's friends is not a distortion of a calculation; it is what a well-formed person's perception consists in, and a person who reached the right verdict with no feeling at all would be defective rather than exemplary.
The third is that moral education is a real subject. If character is built by habituation, then what children are given to admire, practise and enjoy matters more than what they are told, which is a testable claim with practical consequences.
That claim, and the whole account of character it rests on, is an empirical bet: that there are stable traits which explain and predict what people do. A large experimental literature says that bet is much shakier than Aristotle assumed, and the next lesson takes it seriously.