4 - Naturalistic virtue ethics and the new biology

Summary

INTRODUCTION: A VERY PECULIAR NATURALISM

Spinoza ([1677] 1996: 68) famously criticized those who, when writing about human affairs, “treat not of natural things, which follow the common laws of Nature, but of things which are outside Nature”. If a naturalist is someone who endorses this criticism, most Anglo-American philosophers are naturalists. Ethics, however, represents something of an anomaly, for here the dominant tone is, if not supernaturalist, then decidedly non-naturalistic. The selfsame considerations which prompt philosophers to be naturalistic realists in their metaphysics seem to urge anti-realism in ethics. The dominant image has us projecting our values onto a disenchanted landscape.

Most of the key figures in the now familiar story of the renaissance of virtue ethics would consider themselves naturalists, and yet their naturalism is very different from that found in metaphysics, epistemology or the philosophy of mind. Aside from debates about character, there is little serious engagement with empirical science. My aim in this chapter is to evaluate the peculiar form of naturalism that is found in virtue ethics rather than in ethical naturalism more broadly. I will argue that while there are good reasons to distance virtue ethics from scientistic naturalism, we should be wary of “conceptual purism”: the idea that philosophy should have no truck with empirical matters. While such a position does insulate virtue ethics from some fairly devastating criticisms emanating from the biological sciences, it concedes too much to scientistic naturalism in its conception of what an engagement with the sciences must look like.