Volume 4, Number 3
September 2010
ARTICLE

Four Solutions to the Alleged Incompleteness of Virtue Ethics

Volume 4, Number 3, September 2010, Pages 1–21
https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v4i3.44
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Abstract

In “Virtue and Right,” Robert Johnson argues that virtue ethics that accept standards such as Virtuous Agent (A’s x-ing is right in circumstances c iff a fully virtuous agent would x in c) are incomplete, since they cannot account for duties of moral self-improvement. In this paper I offer four solutions to the problem of incompleteness. The first discards Virtuous Agent and counts actions as wrong iff a vicious person would perform them. The second retains Virtuous Agent but counts self-improving actions as countererogatory: wrong but nonetheless good to do. The third replaces Virtuous Agent with a standard appealing to the Mengzian virtue of righteousness, understood as situational appropriateness. The fourth replaces Virtuous Agent with a standard that holds an action right if it promotes the agent’s virtue. Each solution accommodates duties of moral self-improvement, so a virtue ethics embracing any of them would not be incomplete.
Copyright © 2010 Sean McAleer
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.
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