Professor J Garcia, Boston College
Event details
Title: Global Virtue-Basing in Ethical Theory
Abstract: Elsewhere, I’ve sketched, developed, motivated, and defended an ethical theory that is narrowly virtue-based in that it analyzes both our principal judgments & concepts of the objective value and disvalue of states of affairs and our principal judgments & concepts of moral wrongness, prohibition, etc., in terms of moral virtue-judgments & concepts. Here I explore extending virtue-basing to analyze a variety of additional moral concepts. A project in the metatheory of morals, it aims to offer a systematic account that unifies theories of moral value and duty with theories of moral deserving, rights & entitlement, gerundive concepts, modals, and responsibility, by analyzing each in terms of virtuous &/or vicious responses.
I’ve argued that this improves in several ways on philosophers’ familiar claim that such judgments attribute intrinsic value to the state of affairs. Among other theoretic advantages, this virtue-based analysis is more economic ontologically, and unites divergent threads of ethical theory. I’ve also proposed a similar and reformist account of deontic features. According to it, that someone, S, has a duty (is required) to do something, V, reduces to its being vicious of S not to V. It is in fact S’s being virtuous, at least, her not being vicious, that requires her to V. This fits Aristotle’s metaphysical remark that one thing we mean in calling something necessary is that, without it, some evil cannot be escaped. Here, the morally necessary, what’s morally obligatory, is that without which the badness of moral vice cannot be avoided. I have also claimed this analysis yields a number of additional theoretic desiderata.
Following Aristotle, as modified by P. T. Geach, I conceive virtues as qualities its having which “makes a thing and its work good” in the following way. X’s virtues help make X a good K for a certain kind K to which X belongs. In making, say, Excalibur a good sword, its virtues, e.g., sharpness, make it a knife that’s good for use in (certain types of) cutting, good for cutting, good to cut with, good at cutting, and so on. Thus this Aristotelian account accommodates Geach’s strong attributivism about ‘good’, in that to be good is always to be a good K, but does so in a way that also accommodates J.J. Thomson’s so-called ‘adjunctivism’, because it identifies being a good sword with being a sword whose sharpness, etc., make it a good sword for use in certain cutting &, therein, (a) good (sword) to cut with. Likewise, to be a good farmer is to be a farmer whose specialized knowledge & skills help make her (a) good (worker) at farming, a good person to hire to farm a piece of land, etc. To be good food is to have features that make eating this food good (food) for people to eat, food eating which is good (eating) for them. As Geach says, to be a good K is to be a K that is X, Y, & Z (where these are ‘natural’ qualities), but these can be complex predicables such as ‘a sword sharp enough to be (a) good (sword) for use in cutting & (a) good (sword) to cut with’, and ‘food sufficiently nutritious that eating it is good (eating) for someone to do’, and so on.
The moral virtues of someone, S, are features of S that contribute to (either by helping cause or by counting toward) S being a good R in relation to someone S*, for certain role-relationships, R. Vices, including moral vices, are bad-making features, understood along similar lines mutatis mutandis.
My view not only treats virtues as basic to morality, but also treats virtue-attributions themselves as relative to roles, focused on our actions’ and other responses’ moral patients, driven by an action’s input, and generally personalist. (However, I do not much draw on those additional metatheoretic features in this project.)
Here I extend and expand this project to what we can call global virtue-basing: sketching and defending accounts of moral desert (both positive and negative), moral rights and entitlement, certain moral gerundives, the moral modals, and moral responsibility, each in terms of moral virtue- and vice-concepts.
Abstract: Elsewhere, I’ve sketched, developed, motivated, and defended an ethical theory that is narrowly virtue-based in that it analyzes both our principal judgments & concepts of the objective value and disvalue of states of affairs and our principal judgments & concepts of moral wrongness, prohibition, etc., in terms of moral virtue-judgments & concepts. Here I explore extending virtue-basing to analyze a variety of additional moral concepts. A project in the metatheory of morals, it aims to offer a systematic account that unifies theories of moral value and duty with theories of moral deserving, rights & entitlement, gerundive concepts, modals, and responsibility, by analyzing each in terms of virtuous &/or vicious responses.
I’ve argued that this improves in several ways on philosophers’ familiar claim that such judgments attribute intrinsic value to the state of affairs. Among other theoretic advantages, this virtue-based analysis is more economic ontologically, and unites divergent threads of ethical theory. I’ve also proposed a similar and reformist account of deontic features. According to it, that someone, S, has a duty (is required) to do something, V, reduces to its being vicious of S not to V. It is in fact S’s being virtuous, at least, her not being vicious, that requires her to V. This fits Aristotle’s metaphysical remark that one thing we mean in calling something necessary is that, without it, some evil cannot be escaped. Here, the morally necessary, what’s morally obligatory, is that without which the badness of moral vice cannot be avoided. I have also claimed this analysis yields a number of additional theoretic desiderata.
Following Aristotle, as modified by P. T. Geach, I conceive virtues as qualities its having which “makes a thing and its work good” in the following way. X’s virtues help make X a good K for a certain kind K to which X belongs. In making, say, Excalibur a good sword, its virtues, e.g., sharpness, make it a knife that’s good for use in (certain types of) cutting, good for cutting, good to cut with, good at cutting, and so on. Thus this Aristotelian account accommodates Geach’s strong attributivism about ‘good’, in that to be good is always to be a good K, but does so in a way that also accommodates J.J. Thomson’s so-called ‘adjunctivism’, because it identifies being a good sword with being a sword whose sharpness, etc., make it a good sword for use in certain cutting &, therein, (a) good (sword) to cut with. Likewise, to be a good farmer is to be a farmer whose specialized knowledge & skills help make her (a) good (worker) at farming, a good person to hire to farm a piece of land, etc. To be good food is to have features that make eating this food good (food) for people to eat, food eating which is good (eating) for them. As Geach says, to be a good K is to be a K that is X, Y, & Z (where these are ‘natural’ qualities), but these can be complex predicables such as ‘a sword sharp enough to be (a) good (sword) for use in cutting & (a) good (sword) to cut with’, and ‘food sufficiently nutritious that eating it is good (eating) for someone to do’, and so on.
The moral virtues of someone, S, are features of S that contribute to (either by helping cause or by counting toward) S being a good R in relation to someone S*, for certain role-relationships, R. Vices, including moral vices, are bad-making features, understood along similar lines mutatis mutandis.
My view not only treats virtues as basic to morality, but also treats virtue-attributions themselves as relative to roles, focused on our actions’ and other responses’ moral patients, driven by an action’s input, and generally personalist. (However, I do not much draw on those additional metatheoretic features in this project.)
Here I extend and expand this project to what we can call global virtue-basing: sketching and defending accounts of moral desert (both positive and negative), moral rights and entitlement, certain moral gerundives, the moral modals, and moral responsibility, each in terms of moral virtue- and vice-concepts.
Professor J Garcia, Boston College