Aristotle Virtues (Discussion Post)

Aristotle says that the virtues are necessary for humans to attain happiness, but he happiness for him is something closer to what we might call “flourishing” or “living well”, not just feeling good. Thus, according to Aristotle some people might feel that they are happy, but because they lack the virtues, they are not truly flourishing.  However, imagine someone who is deceitful, selfish, greedy, self-indulgent, yet enjoys great pleasure and appears to be quite content. Is someone like this truly happy or not?  Explain your answer this by referring to this week’s readings and media, and if possible provide examples from real life and/or from literature, film, TV, etc.

Paragraph must be atleast 300-400 words long.  Below are the required readings for this week.

Congratulations on completing Week 3! As in Week 2, there is no paper assignment for this week, but there is plenty of material to cover. Here are the topics covered in this guidance.

• What is virtue ethics?
• What are virtues?
• Four kinds of person
• Applying ethics: the environment
• To-do list for the week

What is virtue ethics?

During Weeks 2 and 3, we studied two approaches to formulating an ethical theory: consequentialism and deontology. This week, we will examine a third approach, one that has a quite different starting point from the first two. This third approach is called virtue ethics.

Recall that, in Week 1, we learned that ethics is concerned with two questions.

1. What is the best way to live?
2. How do we distinguish between right actions and wrong ones?

Consequentialism and deontology begin by formulating answers to the second of these. Although they differ in the details, both are primarily concerned with finding a way to distinguish between morally right actions and morally wrong ones. Once this distinction is in place, the answer to the first question is pretty straightforward: one lives the best kind of life by performing as many morally right actions as possible.

Virtue ethics, by contrast, begins by answering the first question before turning to the second. That is, a virtue-ethical theory will begin by formulating some kind of conception of what makes a life good; right actions, then, will be those that are conducive to living such a life.

Different kinds of virtue-ethical theories will offer different accounts of the best kind of life. The most influential of these is that proposed by the most influential virtue ethicist: Aristotle. According to Aristotle, the best kind of life is a happy life. This might sound trivial, but it has important consequences. By insisting that happiness is the ultimate good in life, Aristotle is able to rule out as unimportant all of those things that are not necessary for happiness. For example, since it is possible to be happy without being wealthy, Aristotle concludes that wealth is not essential to a good life (though he grants that abject poverty will make living a happy life very difficult).

What are virtues?

Since virtue ethics is concerned primarily with entire lives and not with individual actions, it does not try to provide guidelines for exactly how one should act in any given situation. Rather, virtue-ethical theories attempt to identify certain virtues whose cultivation is most likely to lead to the kind of life that the theories propose as the best. A virtue is a certain kind of habit rather than an individual action. Thus, people who have a certain virtue will be likely to act according to that virtue without really thinking about it.

To understand the advantage of developing virtuous habits rather than evaluating individual courses of action, consider an analogy. Say that we want to explain how to be a good driver. To do this, we can begin by identifying certain things that good drivers must do: drive at safe speeds, obey traffic laws and conventions governing the right of way, avoid sudden maneuvers, etc. Indeed, good drivers do these things automatically. If you had to think hard about every move you made while driving, you would not be a good driver. Rather, good drivers almost automatically do what they need to do in order to drive safely and effectively. This is why we have driving students navigate around cones in empty parking lots before hitting the road; they need to develop the habits of good drivers in a safe environment before they are ready to move to driving with traffic on real roads.
Safe driving requires cultivating good habits. What kinds of habits are important for good living?

Virtue ethicists think that living is a lot like driving. In order to live well, according to virtue ethicists like Aristotle, it is not enough to know what to do in the abstract. Rather, one must cultivate the habits conducive to a good life; by doing so, one will reliably act in a way that best promotes one's overall well-being.

Four kinds of person

Aristotle's idea that virtues are certain kinds of habits leads him to identify four different kinds of person who are distinguished by their degree of moral cultivation.

1. The virtuous person has fully developed the habits that are most likely to lead to a good life. He or she does what is right without having to think too hard about it or feeling the pull to do something else.
2. The contintent person cares about living a good life and knows what is required. He or she generally acts in ways that promote this kind of life, but he or she is often tempted by non-virtuous actions that may lead to greater short-term happiness.
3. The incontinent person also cares about living the good life but tends to be overpowered by his or her desires. He or she usually sacrifices long-term interest for short-term pleasure.
4. The vicious person does not care about living the best kind of life. He or she acts without regard for whether the action is in his or her long-term best interest.

Virtue ethics allows us to draw these distinctions, which would be too fine from a consequentialist or deontological point of view. After all, the latter approaches give us precise rules for evaluating individual actions only. Thus, we wouldn't be able to distinguish between a person who performs good actions out of habit (the virtuous person) or only by resisting the pull of his or her desires (the continent person). Thus, one advantage of virtue ethics over the other approaches that we have studied is that the former helps us to draw distinctions that we may be inclined to draw independently of any ethical theory. To the extent that we want our ethical theories to capture at least some of the moral concepts that we already use, this is a point in favor of virtue-ethical approaches to ethics.

Applying ethics: the environment

This week, we will apply our study of virtue ethics to two practical issues. We will continue to explore ethical issues surrounding the military. In addition, we will examine some of the ethical issues concerning our relationship to the environment. Since we already looked a bit at military issues last week, we will focus in this guidance on the environment.

The importance of the environment to human lives is well known. After all, we depend on the environment for much of what we need to survive: food, clean water and air, and raw materials for production, among other things. Nevertheless, many of our practices change the environment in ways that make it gradually less hospitable to human beings. This raises an ethical issue because, in order to live the best lives possible, we need to satisfy our material needs, and doing so depends on our ability to make use of natural resources. If the climate and environment change so drastically that we can't use these resources, then we will hinder our ability to maximize the quality of our lives. Rettner (2011) describes some of the effects that human-caused climate change can have on our health.
Severe weather is one effect of the changes that human behavior makes to the environment. How can virtue ethics provide a framework for changing this behavior?

Virtue ethics can be a useful tool when thinking about how to address the behaviors that lead to environmental degradation and climate change. Part of the difficulty we face when dealing with these issues is that the kinds of actions that need to be stopped are very entrenched in our everyday lives. Things like the cars we drive, the food we eat, and the way in which we use electricity have profound effects on the environment. At the same time, changing people's behaviors in these respects is challenging. For example, it's hard to convince people that their habits of driving into work by themselves every day need to change to incorporate more carpooling and mass transportation.

Now, utilitarianism and deontology can try to address this issue, but their focus on individual actions rather than habits and character traits may make them less effective than virtue ethics. Since many of our habits are so entrenched, it is hard for us to break them even when we are convinced that they are morally wrong. Since virtue ethics places more emphasis on cultivating habits that lead to the best kind of life, it may provide us with a more effective route to changing those behaviors that are damaging to the climate and the environment.

For more on the effects of climate change, check out this video from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an organization under the auspices of the United Nations. As you watch the video, think about how virtue ethics might be useful to those working to limit the harms that human behavior causes to the environment.

To-do list for the week

1. Read all of the required materials for the week, including this guidance and the assigned material from Chapter 6 of the textbook.
2. Post your initial responses to both discussion prompts by Thursday, and post at least three additional contributions to each discussion by the end of the week. This discussion will give us an opportunity to discuss virtue ethics and its applications in more detail.
3. Take this week's quiz by the end of the day on Monday.
4. Watch the video about the End of Course Survey. You will have the opportunity to earn extra credit by completing this survey during Week Five.

If you have any questions about this week's material or assignments, please let your instructor know via email or the Ask Your Instructor forum.

References

Rettner, R. (2011, April 22). 5 Ways Climate Change Will Affect Your Health. Retrieved from http://www.livescience.com/35635-climate-change-health-countdown.html.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). (2014, March 30). English - Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaption, and Vulnerability. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMIFBJYpSgM.