Contra Virtue Theory

In his article, "Virtues and Vices," in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Bernard Williams states that there are a number of matters on which a modern account of the virtues would disagree with of Aristotle's classical account in the Nicomachean Ethics, one of which is their reality.

"Aristotle conceived of the virtues as objective dispositional characteristics of people which they possess in at least as robust a sense as that in which a magnet possesses the power to attract metals, though people, unlike magnets, have of course acquired the dispositions - in the way appropriate to such things - by habituation . . . Modern scepticism, however, to some extent supported by social and cognitive psychology, questions whether we can take such a naive view of what it is for someone to have a virtue. There are at least two different sources of doubt. One is the extent to which people's reactions depend on situation: it is claimed that they will act in ways that express a given virtue only within a rather narrow range of recognized contexts, and if the usual expectations are suspended or even, in some cases, slightly shifted, may not act in the approved style.

"The other doubt concerns ascription. When we understand people's behaviour in terms of virtues and vices, or indeed other concepts of character, we are selecting in a highly interpretive way from their behaviour as we experience it, and the way in which we do this (as, indeed, we understand many other things) is in terms of stereotypes, scripts, or standard images, which may range from crude 'characters' to sophisticated and more individualized outlines constructed with the help of types drawn, often, from fiction. The available range of such images forms part of the shifting history of the virtues. At different times there have been pattern books of virtue and vice, and one of the first was the Characters written by Theophrastus, a pupil of Aristotle's . . .

"Even assuming such ideas to be correct, it is not clear exactly to what extent they have a negative impact on virtue theory. Everyone knows that virtues do not express themselves under all circumstances, and also that agents may be very rigid in their ability to understand how a situation is to be seen in terms of virtues. Again, with regard to ascription, it is very important that if it is true that we construct our interpretations of another person's character in terms of a stock of images, it is equally true that the other person does so as well. The point is not so much that there is a gap between the interpreter and the person interpreted, but rather that all of us, as interpreters of ourselves and of others, use shared materials that have a history. There are lessons in such ideas for ethics generally and for virtue theory, but they need not be entirely sceptical. The points about the situational character of the virtues and about their ascription serve to remind us that an agent's virtues depend in many different ways on their relations to society: not simply in being acquired from society and reinforced or weakened by social forces, but also in the ways in which they are constructed from socially shared materials."

Aristotle on Self-Discipline

Virtue Ethics