2014-12-20
15 分钟This is philosophy bites with me, Nigel.
Warburton, and me, David Edmonds.
Philosophy bites is unfunded.
Please help us keep it going by subscribing or donating at www.philosophybytes.com, or you can become a patron at Patreon.
Philosophers often divide moral theories into three categories.
The consequentialist says an action is to be judged purely by its consequences, whether it maximises happiness, for example, the deontologist disagrees.
The justification or otherwise of torture cannot merely be assessed by whether or not it produces the best state of affairs.
Aside from consequentialism and deontology, there's a third category of moral virtue theory.
Virtue theory emphasises character.
Its origins go back to Aristotle, and it finds an advocate in University of Arizona professor Julia Anas.
Julia Anas, welcome to philosophy Bites.
Thank you for inviting me.
The topic we're going to discuss is, what is virtue ethics for?
Just before we get onto the point of virtue ethics, maybe you could just give a little sketch of what virtue ethics is.
Virtue ethics is an ethical theory where the central concepts are those of virtue and of very generally, happiness or eudaimonia.
Not happiness in the sense of feeling good or having a great time, but in the sense of living a good life with which you feel satisfied.
And a virtue is a disposition that you acquire, a disposition to learn from experience and deal intelligently with experience, so that you learn to act and act for reasons of a certain sort, and your feelings become educated and formed so that you go along with those reasons.
So the emphasis is on living a good life rather than on particular moral judgments.
It's about developing character traits.
So could you give an example of a virtue?