5 - Virtue ethics and moral sentimentalism

Summary

Virtue ethics dominated the ancient philosophical world (at least in the West) and in recent decades has revived in a very strong way. The original impetus to that revival came from Elizabeth Anscombe (1958), who called for more attention to Aristotelian moral psychology and a more Aristotelian eventual approach to ethics itself, but although the recent revival of virtue ethics originally centred pretty much entirely around the ideas and influence of Aristotle, other forms of virtue ethics eventually emerged: virtue ethics influenced by the Stoics, by Hume and by Nietzsche. Of these newer forms of revived virtue ethics, only the Humean or sentimentalist variety seems to stand much of a chance of gaining wide philosophical acceptance in present-day circumstances. And the current possibilities for moral-sentimentalist virtue ethics have also led philosophers into more intense historical studies of Hume, and of his teacher, Francis Hutcheson, as virtue ethicists or as at least approximating to virtue ethicists.

Moral sentimentalism, very roughly, is the view that moral distinctions and motivations derive from emotion or sentiment rather than (practical) reason; and in the present chapter, I want to consider some of the most important historical forms of sentimentalist virtue ethics (or of forms of sentimentalism that contain major elements of virtue-ethical thinking) and then go on to discuss the problems and prospects of such virtue ethics in and for contemporary philosophical circumstances (which include normative approaches that are far from virtue ethics, and some forms of virtue ethics – for example, the neo-Aristotelian – that are very different from any kind of sentimentalism).