3 - Stoic virtue ethics

Summary

Today's return to neo-Aristotelian forms of virtue ethics within moral philosophy is contemporary with a wide renewal of interest in Stoic philosophy, inside and outside the academy. Stoic ethics shares many features which advocates of neo-Aristotelianism identify as reasons recommending virtue ethics over modern deontological and utilitarian positions. The famous Stoic claim that virtue is the only good marks it off in one way as the definitive ancient “virtue ethics”. Stoic virtue ethics, like Aristotle's, places a premium on the cultivation of the character or ethos of agents, as an ethical pursuit in the light of which questions concerning the rightness of actions are then framed. The Stoics' frequent discussions of the figure of the sophos or sage, a kind of heroic ethical exemplar à la Socrates or the younger Cato, reflect this ethical preoccupation and the cognate observation that virtue is taught best by particular concrete examples, rather than learning universal rules or decision procedures (Kerford 1978; Stephens 1996; Brouwer 2002; Hadot 2010a,b). The Stoics, moreover, were like Aristotle's eudaimonists. They maintained that the aim of virtue ethics was less duty for its own sake than human flourishing, excellence (arete) and happiness. Like Aristotle, the Stoic conception of the virtues was capacious enough to accommodate many non-moral virtues deeply out of alignment with our modern moralistic bite, to invoke Anscombe's famous phrase (Anscombe 1958: 2).