VIRTUE ETHICS

The prominence of rules, consequences, rights, and duties is a relatively recent phenomenon in moral thought. For Plato, Aristotle, Laozi (or Lao-tzu), Confucius, the Buddha, and Jesus, the primary focus of the good life was on cultivating virtues and battling vices. Yet among these diverse traditions moral character and its significance for personal and social good have been subject to considerable debate—which continues in the early twenty-first century by drawing on the thought and research in sociology, anthropology, film studies, folklore, religion, biology, neurophysiology, pedagogy, medicine, and other disciplines. Both ancient reflection and contemporary scientific inquiries seek to identify the principle virtues and vices and how they develop or weaken. Adversaries debate whether the virtues (and vices) are intertwined, whether they exist independently, or whether there is a chief virtue (or vice). Such inquiries easily lead to more general questions of human flourishing and distinctiveness, so that ultimately at issue are basic questions concerning the nature of human happiness and the good society.

From the perspective of virtue ethics, science and technology are arguably enduring components of the good life. Aristotle (384–322 b.c.e.), for instance, describes virtue as a kind of human excellence or striving for perfection. (The Greek word for virtue is arête, which encompasses both moral capability and specific talents. A musician, for example, might give a virtuoso performance.) In this sense both episteme (knowledge or science) and techne (craft, art, skill, know-how) are forerunners to the modern notion of technology and involve human arête. Controversies about the responsibility of scientists and engineers evoke this twofold sense of virtue, insofar as they address the special types of knowledge they pursue as well as their moral positions regarding the results and applications.

Scientific discoveries and technological products also pose challenges to understanding and embodying a virtuous life. Studies of animal and human behavior raise questions about possible similarities between animals and humans in promoting cooperation or fostering competition. In place of proposals for political utopias and personal desires for posthumanist transformations, can advanced technosciences be limited or guided by the values found in folk wisdom, venerable sages, or sacred texts? Or do many technical inventions thwart the search for a virtuous life by zealously promoting and catering to ordinary vices? Instead of assisting with the cultivation of temperance, justice, courage, love, or charity, do they perhaps tempt humans with vanity, sloth, anger, lust, and greed?

Background

A virtue-based ethics is agent centered, presumes a telos or purpose for human life, and encompasses both personal and public goods. In light of ecological problems growing out of the human use of technology, critics have charged virtue ethics with being anthropocentric. It neglects or devalues the welfare of animals, natural entities, and the environment. Defenders of virtue ethics respond that a fundamental virtue such as humility promotes recognition of human limits and asks humans to view themselves as simply parts of a larger cosmic whole. Moreover, the concept of virtue as a perfection applies to nonhuman as well as human entities. While the idea of a telos or purpose in nature is problematic for science and technology, the topic remains a source for lively discussion among philosophers of biology who study possible adaptations to ethical theory. Indeed, even in the philosophy of technology, analyses of the role of functions is a research issue of potential relevance to virtue ethics.

As such issues indicate, despite the tendency to portray virtue ethics as a settled tradition of strong consensus and enduring narratives, there have always been lively debates about the scope of a virtuous life, the relative strengths or weaknesses of specific virtues and vices, and the best vision of human happiness. For example, three classic representatives of virtue ethics emphasize contrary views on pride. Aristotle considered it a principal virtue. One should attain a proper sense of self—one's accomplishments and contributions. A proud individual is not driven by vanity or boasting, for these lead to excesses of indulgence that would be unworthy of a free and rational person. The proud individual is courageous—the most fundamental virtue, for without courage one can hardly embody other cardinal virtues such as justice or prudence. A model is the citizen whose democratic participation is free of destructive vices such as envy or rancor.

Augustine of Hippo (354–430) and Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), though, were among many Christians and religious thinkers who believed pride to be indicative of an exaggerated sense of self, involving vanity or, worse, the temptation to view oneself in godlike or superhuman terms. Pride was the queen of vices, for it spawned the decline toward deadlier ones, such as envy, anger, and lust. Such vices corrupt one's moral character and undermine efforts to become a just person. This distortion of self brings about neither happiness nor salvation, only ruin or damnation.

Buddhism and Daoism, meanwhile, taught that true virtue seeks the no-self or personal transcendence. This involves overcoming the drive for individuality in which satisfying the desires and needs of one's physical self is primary. Intellectual nitpicking may derail this goal. But reflection on the nature of this goal remains essential, and can generate parables and paradoxes that are potential guides to enlightenment (see Saeng 1991, Chuang Tzu 1996). Enlightenment is realized not when one becomes a dutiful citizen or achieves self-esteem, but is moved by compassion for another. This is an experience of insight and joy.

Disciples and pedagogues have continually debated the nature and prominence of the virtues. The Western tradition that featured the seven cardinal virtues—courage, justice, temperance, and prudence among pagans, and love, hope, and charity as the Christian additions—is hardly carved in stone. Seven has been a magical number, but other virtues have also been considered essential to the good life. Aristotle, for instance, devotes more attention to friendship than any other single virtue, and friendship may be considered the basis of scientific and technical communities.

At the same time the underpinnings of virtue have been extensively debated. For example, pagans focus on the meanings and demands of individual courage or the extent of its relation to political justice, whereas monotheists anchored a moral life not in self and society, but primarily in God. The contentiousness of these disputes and their failures to successfully promote virtue eventually led to a radical challenge of virtue ethics that nevertheless did not eliminate its relevance. Rather, according to the historian of modern moral philosophy J. B. Schneewind (1998), these disputes relegated the virtues and vices to secondary status. Displacing them as the primary focus of ethics were duties, happiness or pleasure, autonomy rather than character, and the right rules or laws for gauging ethical conduct.

After more than 200 years of rationalism and emotivism in moral theory, toward the end of the twentieth century virtue ethics underwent a revival. Dissatisfied with the inability of prominent moral theories to address human well-being, resolve concerns about justice in an increasingly technological world, and inform or guide individuals toward the good, philosophers began reassessment of the centrality of virtue. A key contributor to this was Alasdair MacIntyre, author of After Virtue (1981) and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988). Invoking the wisdom of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, along with the lessons of contemporary social and political thought, MacIntyre espoused an enriched view of the integral and narrative self that challenged rival notions of the self as little more than a utility maximizer or logical servant to duty.

MacIntyre's learned eloquence and sharp critique of his own intellectual and moral times spawned a veritable industry. Responses ranged from best-selling children's books on the virtues to theoretical and scientific inquiries into the nature of moral character, whether or how it can be taught, and the relation of individuals to others: other humans, other species and life-forms, even deities. Some scientists have contended that, contrary to MacIntyre's emphasis on human identity as flourishing in cultural and historical storytelling, human morality should more sensibly emulate animals. Monkeys and chimpanzees, birds and elephants, according to zoologists, illuminate more accessible and realistic moral guidance than the (less realistic) heroes and saints who permeate human literature.

Such disputes—interweaving disciplines, incorporating historical and cultural contexts, responding to calls for justice or courage and to temptations of anger or lust—underscore the lasting appeal of virtue ethics. Unable to resolve all the philosophical questions put to it in journals and seminars, nor ready to dictate every moral situation (which theories can?), virtue ethics highlights controversies as vigorously as any other moral theory. Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than in relation to science and technology.

Sloth, Leisure, Efficiency

Medieval Christians learned the seven deadly sins through the mnemonic device of an acronym—s-a-l-i-g-i-a. Each letter represented a deadly sin in order from the queen of vices (superbia being pride) to the deadliest (acedia or sloth). In between are situated avaritia (greed or covetousness), luxuria (lust), invidia (envy), gula (gluttony), and ira (anger). Warnings against sloth—from the Benedictine rule concerning the dangers of idleness to popular jokes about couch potatoes—represent it as the death of the soul as well as the spirited body. Sloth is more than laziness or lethargy; it constitutes a lack of purpose, an indifference to others and the goings-on of the world. In his Pensees (c. 1660), Blaise Pascal frequently remarked how people fill their time with diversions, such as games, chatter, and sensual delights. These prevent contemplation of more defining matters that include the meaning of one's death or a believer's relation to God.

By contrast, leisure is upheld as a sign of independence and accomplishment. What Pascal denigrates as diversions can be praised as just desserts. In leisure individuals explore their potential, be it in time of play, hobby, volunteer work, or even, as G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) wryly noted, "the time to do nothing at all." To this end inventions promise to lessen arduous chores while opening more opportunities for whatever one desires. Household gadgets save on cleaning and organizing; robotics and assembly lines spare the sweat and blood of labor; sophisticated weaponry produce greater damage with risk to fewer personnel. Leisure relies on the promises of efficiency. These promises, however, can be misleading insofar as they exchange one set of difficult expectations for another. For example, the historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan (1983) has demonstrated the deceptive attractions of household technologies. The washing machine cuts down the once-a-week ardor of washing by hand and wringers, but introduces the everyday demand for a clean set of clothes, hence making laundry a daily chore. The invention of the four-burner stove with oven shifts family expectations from variations of a pot of stew to a five-course meal, hence the popularity of the cookbook. The overall result is that technologies tend to reduce the physical pressure of housework while increasing the solitariness and frequency of household tasks. The promise of more leisure, concludes Cowan, is often illusory.

From a virtue ethics perspective, however, there remain additional concerns with leisure. While scholar derives from the Latin word for leisure—implying both an individual and cultural good—leisure nevertheless poses considerable danger. As studied by Sissela Bok in Mayhem (1998), many leisure technologies involve decadent forms of play. Video games, television shows, and movies featuring callous and malicious regard for human (and animal) life have gradual effects on participants and audiences that can be just as pernicious as the tortures of ancient spectacles. This danger prevents individuals from seeking or realizing their potential as genuine human beings.

From the perspective of what might be called a technological virtue—if not technological duty—of efficiency, which emphasizes cost–benefit analysis, convenience, speed, and reliability, these gradual and pernicious effects are difficult to assess. A consequentialist or utilitarian option might consider measurable and substantive results enjoyable in the near future or negative influences on other virtues. Indeed, there are kinds of leisure that mask opportunities for sloth. This is not free time as envisioned by those who endorse human flourishing, but an appeal to vanity that plants the seeds for a slow death of one's humanity and moral character. Worse, humans become less focused on other virtues, such as justice, care, or loyalty.

Pride, Vanity, Control

As noted, Aristotle and his adherents view pride as a positive value, whereas Christian philosophers see it as vicious. Though numerous moral traditions and religions challenge pride, often what they have in mind is hubris or vanity. Hubris involves a kind of arrogance, boasting, or overweening confidence. Vanity involves an undue or unrealistic sense of one's self. Hubris is portrayed in one who fails because of unwarranted sense of self-worth. Vanity is depicted in one who wants to look younger, richer, more powerful, or more knowledgeable than one really is. Boasting, begrudging, and being envious are some of the cravings of vanity. These cravings are often driven by a technological fix, the unshaken belief that a device will always arise—such as diet pills, cosmetic surgery, or transplants—that helps to overcome the effects of aging or unwanted anatomical features. The vain person thus hopes others see a version of oneself that one does not quite believe. That is why medieval moralists pictured the vainglorious person staring into the mirror.

Pride is ambiguously presented in the human trait that desires control. Humans are increasingly adept at withstanding or overcoming natural forces. Protecting themselves from the whims of weather, rechanneling water sources so they can dwell in deserts, or regulating their own predatory or procreative tendencies, they find in science and technology the powers to explain and control the forces of nature. Humans also attempt to extend this control to human domains that were previously resolved in terms of freedom, wisdom, upbringing, or environment. For example, by reclassifying a vivacious or imaginative child as one with attention deficit disorder or disciplinary problems, the child shifts from a subject in need of a certain kind of pedagogy to a candidate for Ritalin.

Determining when technological control should yield to a moral approach is a perennial concern for virtue ethics, particularly for those who support Aristotle's notion that part of a virtuous life is striving for the means between the extremes. With increasing capabilities brought by a variety of technologies, humans still need to strike a balance between turning nature into a managed artifact and resigning themselves to all the challenges and threats nature presents.

The desire for control can nevertheless be another form of vanity. That the world, nature, or other people act without any regard for one's wishes or well-being—indeed, that they seem oblivious to one's very existence—insults a person's own (inflated) sense of self-worth. Symptomatic of this inflation is the ubiquity of cell phones. Owners insist they carry them for possible emergencies. But this claim is betrayed by its omnipresent use. Is the desire to be always and immediately accessible to anyone a symptom of vanity, justified pride, or unending control?

Honesty, Loyalty, Responsibility

Honesty is often described as an intellectual and a moral virtue. The ability to understand things clearly, to know one's own motives and aspirations, and to comprehend circumstances and other humans involves intellectual abilities that precede and accompany moral deliberations and actions. Yet the temptation to deceive others and manipulate the truth also makes honesty a moral issue.

This temptation is especially pronounced in professional ethics. Given their expertise, authority, and the confidence ordinary humans have in them, scientific and technical professionals have a distinctive responsibility to understand and articulate the possible effects of their research. The details of this responsibility can be overshadowed by conflicting loyalties. According to the American philosopher Josiah Royce (1855–1916), loyalty is a virtue essential to the good life. Though its etymology comes from law (lex in Latin), Royce views loyalty more in terms of love, purpose, and commitment. Individuals find meaning in their lives when anchored by the object of their loyalty; moreover, this attitude generates respect for the loyalties that give others a purpose.

In professional circles, however, loyalties are not always unified. Among researchers and engineers, for example, there can be obligations to one's employer, the sponsor of a research grant, colleagues and the principles of the discipline, families, and of course the general public. A notable exemplar is the scientist Joseph Rotblat (b. 1908). He was a contributor to the Manhattan Project, in which the United States developed the atomic bomb during World War II. After the defeat of Germany, Rotblat concluded that the project was no longer justified by the danger of Nazi bomb development and left the project. His is a difficult example to follow. Often researchers and even college professors can elucidate the lofty principles that they are supposed to adopt, but when millions of dollars from a grant are at stake, their loyalty to truth can be compromised by loyalty to the research momentum. Some moralists believe the virtues of integrity, self-respect, and honesty can overcome conflicts of loyalty and corruptible compromises. In complex enterprises, however, the notion of personal responsibility can be overshadowed by demands of the workplace or a competitive climate in which one sticks to the proverbial rules and goals of the game rather than challenging the legitimacy of the rules and goals. In such a context, the virtue of responsibility may be torn between courageous criticism and loyal adherence to the team, group, or community.

Justice, Greed, Progress

According to Plato and Aristotle, justice is a virtue that involves harmony or analogy between perfections in citizens and in the state. Modern political philosophy has been skeptical of this view and questioned whether the virtues of individual and society need to reflect one another. In his famous The Fable of the Bees (1705) Bernard Mandeville contended that a society can flourish in spite of—and often because of—the vices of its citizens. With appropriate constraints—such as a competitive market or constitutionally separated powers—the natural impulses and selfish appetites of the populace can be harnessed to yield social benefits. As Mandeville poetically noted: "Thus every part was full of vice / Yet the whole mass a paradise." This attitude persists insofar as economists claim that even though gas-guzzling sport-utility vehicles (SUVs) fuel vanity and greed, the Internet indulges lust, and fast food sates gluttony, economic growth and the general welfare are assured.

Virtue ethics theorists nevertheless question such an assessment. For instance, John Casey (1990) argues that justice is first and foremost a disposition within individuals, and defends the traditional view of the truly just person as one who leads a balanced life, recognizing the claims and goods of others. From this perspective, economic greed threatens justice. Though often associated with tycoons, royalty, and celebrities, greed is a temptation in nearly everyone. This is why, A. F. Robertson (2001) writes, stories and concerns about greed cross all ages, and are manifest in everything from children's tales such as "Puss in Boots" to intergenerational squabbles over property and controversies about professionals who appear more devoted to income and prestige than family or service to society. Daniel Callahan (1987) has further argued that with the advances of medical technology, the question needs to be raised whether humans have become greedy for life, attempting to live in excess of a natural life cycle, when they can no longer function or contribute, and at the expense of the well-being of younger generations.

From a virtue perspective, it is essential to ask whether greater affluence spawns generations of more just individuals (and more just societies) or creates more possibilities for vices to thrive (and injustice to grow). How often have parents and grandparents not lamented that increases in the number and glamour of toys among children are not easily correlated with any increases in willingness to share? To what extent does the example of the United States, whose abundance is historically unprecedented, but whose level of government-sponsored foreign aid is not particularly impressive, bear on assessments of political justice? According to Leo Marx (1987), in eighteenth-century America, philosophers such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson saw both personal and social justice as essential measures for assessing national progress. In the nineteenth century, however, the meaning of progress shifted from rights, equality, and personal freedom to material gain and industrial growth, a change that continued across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

Scholars such as Dinesh D'Souza contend that many critics miss the central issue on the debates over the meaning or evidence of progress. Instead of seeing wealth as a potential obstacle for the establishment or expansion of justice, D'Souza sees wealth as the key to increasing global well-being. While he acknowledges that enormous increases in scientific knowledge, technological power, and material prosperity characteristic of the 1980s and beyond have carved new gaps between the world's rich and the poor, he points out that in absolute terms the poor and the rich today live much more comfortable lives than did the poor and the rich 500 years ago. Whereas in 1500 only the most wealthy had indoor plumbing and well-heated homes, today even the traditional poor—such as students, seasonally employed, or those too feeble to work—possess cars, reside in secure surroundings, and rely on pricey media such as the Internet, cable TV, and cell phones. Interpreting Thomas Jefferson as a defender of class hierarchies based on a natural aristocracy of individual merits D'Souza believes capitalism has been a gift rather than curse to human life. The desire and search for wealth tames the destructive potential of greed and envy. Guided by a virtue of prosperity, capitalism embodies the prudence to use science and technology that, according to D'Souza, "... has in practice done more to raise the standard of living of the poor than all the government and church programs in history" (D'Souza 2000, p. 240).

This systematic effort towards greater wealth can also be the basis for an essential social virtue—namely, trust. Trust involves a common and cooperative regard for norms or mutual self-interest. In the view of social scientist Francis Fukuyama, this regard is most effective in communities where social capital and ethical values are most prominent. These communities are not, however, rooted in traditional units such as the family. They are instead found in associations that transcend kinship, such as businesses and companies. The benefits of these associations are most notably seen in three advanced technological and capitalist societies: the United States, Germany, and Japan. Here, according to Fukuyama, one understands the basis of other social virtues and their relation to a life of prosperity.

The estimated benefits of capitalism's virtues are not readily supported by research. Contrary to those who assume a millionaire's summer palace that perilously rests on the ledge of a shore cliff is the spark to global justice, demographers and ecologists find that prosperity's recipients are segmented rather than universal. That is, pockets of great wealth often have negligible or negative influences on the range of human (and non-human) suffering, starvation, or disease. Moreover, excesses of fortune foster a sense of obliviousness to the conditions of others. Such obliviousness—a potential vice insofar as it is interpreted as willful ignorance—turns a blind eye to human threats to the climate. It overlooks human causes of continual increases of pollution, thus jeopardizing the traditional lifestyles of native peoples. It downplays the continued emphasis on consumption of natural resources that generate droughts and scarcities among the world's poorer populations. Obliviousness becomes vicious when it pooh-poohs scientific claims that drastic changes in weather patterns brought on by human pollutants—in the year 2000 each American produced 4.5 pounds of garbage per day—endanger the lives of animals and fish throughout the planet (See, for example, De Souza, Williams, and Meyerson 2003, Post and Forchhammer 2004).

Character, Self, Other

Proponents of virtue ethics emphasize the development of moral character. This development assumes that there is an integral person, a core to an individual that is definitive. Moral pedagogy is directed to this core. The lessons about courage, loyalty, justice, or compassion found in traditional narratives, folktales, sacred texts, honest dialogue, or exemplars help form one's true or genuine identity. These sources reside in other humans, those who spin the narratives, relay the tales and texts, or are admired exemplars. Despite Voltaire's quip that character is so inborn humans could no more change it than wolves could lose their instincts, proponents of virtue ethics generally argue that moral character can be developed, taught, changed, and practiced.

This assumption has three challenges. The first is biological. Paul M. Churchland (1998), for one, proposes that human virtues can be more thoroughly understood from a neurophysiological perspective. Pedagogy and environment obviously have some influence, but they play a secondary role to identifying and treating malfunctioning synapses or chemical imbalances that might prevent the moral agent from successfully cooperating in the well-being of the group. Zoologist and ethnologist Frans de Waal (1996) contends humans have much to learn from animals who exhibit uncanny methods for establishing justice, tolerance, and compassion, and resolving conflicts, without resorting to massacres and war.

Second is a scientific and creative challenge. This challenge stems from the ambiguous human disposition of curiosity. Humans want to know, a desire that seems unquenchable. Curiosity is a likely culprit behind the original sin of Adam and Eve. The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) describes the attempt to know another as a form of capture. At the same time, inventions give humans radical new ways for seeing, hearing, and learning about the world and the universe. Anyone with a stereo can hear Beethoven indefinitely more times than residents of nineteenth-century Europe. The depths of the oceans and dark abysses of the universe are as impossible for human curiosity to resist as exploring their own genetic material or the chemical charges that drive their urge to mate. And under the rubric of transhumanism, researchers are exploring how such fields as genetics and nanotechnology can reinvent the human forms of intelligence, emotion, physiology, and communication. This curiosity does not have to lead to identification of a true self; it can introduce possibilities for creating new selves. With the advent of cyberspace, according to Allucquère Rosanne Stone (1995), humans have found evermore ways of experimenting and playing with a variety of identities. The face-to-face encounter is not the ideal, just one of many options. It has its own limitations, from which cybercommunities can be valued as liberating rather than alienating.

Third is a philosophical and pedagogical challenge. The idea of a core self is neither self-evident nor coherent. For example, Alphonso Lingis (2004) describes an array of virtuous deeds—of illiterate mothers, gallant youths, mute guerillas, compassionate prisoners, free-spirited nomads—that cannot be attributed to an integral or holistic self. The realization of a virtuous capacity seldom springs from proper habits, one's internal biology, or the narratives of ancestors or cybercommunities. Instead, humans learn about courage, justice, or love as imperatives from contact with others—in their physical or embodied presence. Science and technology should expand rather than displace the possibilities for face-to-face encounters. Such possibilities suspend the insistence on control and self-respect by emphasizing respect for and openness to others, regardless of whether or not they are neighbors, friends, strangers, or aliens. This respect is not grounded in or preceded by understanding or knowledge of shared values. Instead, writes Lingis, it involves courage rather than caution to trust another insofar as trust dissipates one's own projects and identities. "Trust is a force that can arise and hold on to someone whose motivations are as unknown as those of death. ... There is an exhilaration in trusting that builds on itself" (Lingis 2004, p. 12).

Such challenges recognize an ambiguity in the human relation to science and technology. Whether this ambiguity demonstrates progress or regress in ethical life is subject to debate. From a virtue-ethics angle, this debate must include the relative strengths of the virtues and vices, their personal and social significance, whether or how they can be taught, and to what extent science and technology primarily guide humans to realization of their true selves or invite them to devise or create other ways of being.

ALEXANDER E. HOOKE

SEE ALSO Aristotle and Aristotelianism;Augustine;Buddhist Perspectives;Christian Perspectives;Confucian Perspectives;Jewish Perspectives;Islamic Perspectives;Pascal, Blaise;Plato;Shinto Perspectives;Thomas Aquinas;Thomism.

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