Virtue Ethics

Virtue Ethics

• Virtue ethics takes a different approach to Kantian and deontological theories, which are decision making theories - given non-ethical facts, should provide output of morally right way to act.
• An agent-centered theory, concerned primarily with the kind of person a moral agent is, rather than the particular actions they perform.
• Anscombe - there are no longer useful notions of obligation/duty, as they make sense only relative to law (which requires a legislator... i.e. God)
• Should instead think in terms of thick notions

Particularism

• A related doctrine; points out that no set of rules, given a complete non-ethical description of the situation, can tell us what to do
• Features of acts have variable relevance.
• Whether a feature is morally relevant depends on the particular case.
• Applied to non-ethical reasons - if there seems to be a red thing in front of me, though this might generally be a good reason for believing there is a…