Target Centred Virtue Ethics

Christine Swanton is, without question, one of the leading scholars in contemporary virtue ethics. Nevertheless, and somewhat surprisingly, her target-centered account of virtue ethics, which was developed in Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic Account (2003) and a series of articles, has not garnered much support. Part of the reason has to do with the sheer popularity of Aristotelian virtue ethics, in particular Rosalind Hursthouse’s book On Virtue Ethics (1999). However, I suspect that the main reason for its comparative lack of popularity is the complexity of her work. Swanton’s analyses tend to be much deeper and more detailed than her competitors’ work. She draws from, and assumes a familiarity with, a wide range of scholarly literature as well as different philosophical traditions, with the result that her work is inaccessible to students. As George Harris (2004) writes in his review of Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic Account, the book is “[w]ritten for advanced specialists in moral theory [and] … framed within a technical vocabulary that requires concentrated effort to master before its contributions can be appreciated. Even those who are already familiar with a good bit of the virtue-ethics literature will have to orient the issues to her terminological framework.” Target Centred Virtue Ethics is no exception. It is aimed at advanced specialists in normative theory and metaethics. However, I was pleased to see that some of the chapters are accessible to students. In particular, Chapter 5, in which Swanton explains and defends the basic features of target-centered virtue ethics, can (and should!) be incorporated into an upper-level ethics syllabus alongside the standard introductory readings on Aristotelian virtue ethics.I give a summary of the main features of Swanton’s account and then comment on the structure of the book.Target-centered virtue ethics shares two features with other forms of virtue ethics: it takes thick evaluative concepts, such as generous, kind, callous, and cruel, as central, and it evaluates actions and agents through the notions of virtue and vice. It has two distinguishing features. The first is its account of right action. On the Aristotelian view proposed by Hursthouse (1999), an action is right if it is what an ideally virtuous agent would characteristically do in the circumstances. Swanton rejects this view on the grounds that a virtuous agent—someone with practical wisdom—is fallible. Instead, she proposes that an action is right if it hits the target(s) of the relevant virtues. The basic idea is fairly simple: The target of benevolence is to promote the good of others, so an action is right if it succeeds in doing so. Swanton further develops this idea with the help of Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean. Aristotle takes the mean to be multidimensional: It is not simply a matter of hitting the mean between, say, giving too much and giving too little, but also of “acting in the right circumstance, in the right manner, at the right time, to the right extent, for the right reasons, with respect to the right people or objects, deploying the right instruments” (42). A further complication is that the target of a particular virtue depends on the context, including things such as the agent’s role and relationships, as well as cultural and historical features. Swanton argues that virtue ethics needs to move beyond its reliance on “basic” virtues such as honesty, generosity, justice, and so on. These abstract notions are not very useful. To apply to the real world, the basic virtues should be differentiated according to the agent’s role and stage of life, cultural location, historical features, and so on. One possible advantage of this approach is that it allows us to solve the familiar “dilemma of role ethics.” That is, it acknowledges the existence of role-differentiated obligations, while at the same time it denies that role occupiers are sometimes required to act immorally (181–98).The second distinguishing feature of target-centered virtue ethics is that it gives a pluralistic account of what makes a trait a virtue. Aristotelian virtue ethicists subscribe to some version of the eudaimonist thesis: “It is a necessary condition of a trait being a virtue that it characteristically benefits its possessor” (123). Swanton rejected this thesis in her earlier work (2003), but in doing so she invited the objection that she denies the link between virtue and flourishing. Such a denial is implausible because it is easy to demonstrate how being virtuous—kind, honest, compassionate, just—benefits the agent (and, conversely, how being vicious—dishonest, cruel, selfish, unreliable—makes them unhappy). However, the objection is unfounded, for as Swanton explains, she does not reject the claim that “agents need virtue to flourish.” The latter specifies a necessary condition on flourishing, and a noneudaimonist can support this view. Rather, she rejects the claim that it is a necessary condition for virtue that it characteristically benefits its possessor. One of her reasons is that it is simply not true that every virtue characteristically benefits its possessor. For example, a freedom fighter might be truly courageous without it being the case that their courage characteristically promotes their flourishing (124). Eudaimonism also encounters the familiar egoism (or narcissism) objection: If the virtuous person is ultimately motivated by her own flourishing or excellence of character, that is, if she takes her own flourishing to be the finest good for her, then she is intolerably egoistic rather than genuinely virtuous. Swanton argues that eudaimonism can only avoid this problem by establishing a problematic disconnect between the virtuous agent’s final ends (her own flourishing) and her motives for acting (such as helping others, respecting their rights, etc.). A target-centered account avoids the disconnect objection by claiming that “what makes actions right is hitting the targets of (relevant) virtues in relation to action, what makes traits virtues is determined by their targets or aims, and what should motivate an agent at both fundamental and everyday levels are these very features” (134–35). It is, as she puts it, “everywhere direct” (133).The book has three parts. Part I (“Metaphysics”) develops a “new metaphysics” for virtue ethics as an alternative to the metaphysics inspired by Philippa Foot’s influential book, Natural Goodness (2001). Swanton describes it as “a form of response-dependence view inspired by Heidegger, Hume, and McDowell” (8). It is committed to the following metaethical theses: ethical realism (factualism and objectivism), descriptivism, and reasons and/or fittingness fundamentalism. Although the material is clearly structured, part I is written for specialists in metaethics and assumes a familiarity with McDowell’s critique of Aristotelian naturalism as well as Heideggerian ontology.Part II (“Nature”) gives an account of the nature of Swanton’s virtue ethics. Chapter 5 begins with a critique of eudaimonism and then presents the main features of target-centered virtue ethics, including its account of right action. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 explore the idea that virtue is “differentiated.” A virtue such as generosity exists in many different forms, depending on cultural and historical features, the role someone occupies, their stage of life, relationships, and so on. This view raises important questions about the link between differentiated virtue (or “role ethics”) and “ordinary morality,” and Swanton argues for what she calls an “integrated view,” namely that role-differentiated morality is constrained by ordinary morality (158). Chapter 8 draws on research in moral psychology to counter the popular Aristotelian view that the young cannot be virtuous. Swanton argues that virtue is differentiated according to stage of life, so we can speak of children’s virtues and virtues that are proper to old age. Chapter 9 gives a pluralistic account of the “grounds” of virtue (i.e., the features that make a trait a virtue) and is an attractive alternative to monistic accounts such as eudaimonism and consequentialism.Part III (“Application”) addresses a number of theoretical issues related to right action and action guidance. The first two chapters will be of interest to all normative theorists. Chapter 10, “Has Virtue Ethics Sold Out?” addresses an important question about right action: Given Elizabeth Anscombe’s (1958) claim that the notions of “moral obligation and moral duty” should be “jettisoned” (1), is it a mistake for contemporary virtue ethicists to offer an account of right action? Swanton answers in the negative, and she argues that we should not interpret Anscombe as rejecting deontic notions per se. Anscombe rejects the notion of moral obligation or moral rightness, where the moral has a special “mesmeric force” that commits the theorist to a dubious metaphysics (a “supreme lawgiver”), and virtue ethics does not offer an account of moral rightness in this special sense. Does this mean virtue ethics is not playing the same game, that it uses “rightness” in way that differs from standard usage? Swanton’s response is that there is no standard conception of rightness. It is, as W. B. Gallie puts it, an “essentially contested” concept (249). Unlike some virtue ethicists, Swanton thinks we should accommodate rightness understood in terms of requirements, permissions, and obligations, and that virtue ethics can do so without using the concept in the problematic special sense. Chapter 11 addresses the familiar objection that virtue ethics cannot provide action guidance because it is committed to particularism and therefore “uncodifiable.” Swanton embraces a fairly radical (but reasonable) form of particularism. She argues that the fact that an action is honest, say, does not necessarily count as a reason in its favor. However, she thinks virtue ethics is sufficiently codifiable through the “virtue rules” as long as these are understood as providing “default reasons.” Thus, for example, one should “be honest” unless “certain complicating factors intervene” (266). The final two chapters revisit topics discussed in part I relating to the logos of ethics (Chapter 12) and epistemology (Chapter 13).Swanton makes some helpful suggestions about how different chapters can be grouped together according to themes (11). To readers who are not familiar with Swanton’s virtue ethics, I would suggest reading the introduction, in which Swanton identifies two theses that characterize virtue ethics as a family, and then moving on to Chapter 5 (“Eudaimonistic versus Target Centred Virtue Ethics”), Chapter 9 (“On the Grounds of Virtue”), and Chapter 10 (“Has Virtue Ethics Sold Out?”). Readers who are familiar with Swanton’s work will notice that the volume contains material that is published elsewhere in some form. To them, I would strongly suggest reading the volume from cover to cover. It contains a significant amount of new material, and the previously published work is suitably modified such that the volume gives a comprehensive and systematic framework for understanding ethics. Swanton’s target-centered virtue ethics shares many of the attractive features of Aristotelian virtue ethics, but it is much more refined and sophisticated and thereby (arguably) avoids many of the weaknesses of Aristotelianism.