1 - Distinguishing virtue ethics from the ethics of duty

Summary

Most philosophical discussions of ethics and morality in the past several hundred years have focused on duty. As a result, the current renewal of interest in virtue ethics has been articulated by way of drawing contrasts between the ethics of duty and virtue ethics. Indeed, much of the contemporary understanding of virtue ethics has been developed by criticizing the ethics of duty. I shall follow this pattern by building my discussion in this chapter around the table of distinctions in Table 1. (And I shall explicate the technical terms in Table 1 in the text that follows.)

As I elucidate Table 1 it needs to be remembered that I am not in a position to fully explicate the points in the column headed “The ethics of duty”. This phrase covers a number of different moral theories and each of them has been widely discussed and elaborated in a variety of ways. I cannot hope to do justice to all the complexities and nuances that moral theorists have developed over hundreds of years. I shall need to assume that the reader has a sufficiently broad familiarity with these traditions to allow me not to explicate them more fully. Moreover, there are many proponents of the ethics of duty who argue that the criticisms that virtue ethicists have made can be answered and that the characterizations of duty ethics that I list below do not apply to their particular enunciations of that tradition.