Customer Reviews

Virtue Ethics (Prometheus Lecture Series)

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Richard Taylor is, in my view, one of the most clear, engaging, and philosophically rigorous writers of the last 35 years. This is why I found this book such a disappointment. While Taylor's prose sparkles (as always), his argumentation through much of the book is feeble or worse. To be sure, the book contains many valuable insights concerning the virtuous life, but these are embedded within a tangled nest of confused reasoning and bare assertion.

Taylor's aim is to repudiate "the debilitating egalitarianism of modern ethics in favor of the ideals of the ancient pagan moralists." That is, he defends an ethics of individual excellence in which modern notions of right, duty, and equality play no part. After introducing his subject matter in the first two chapters, Taylor spends the next two developing an "imaginative reconstruction" of the origins of civilization featuring two imaginary peoples, the Suekil and the Rehto. This story is supposed to show three things: 1) social norms are purely conventional, 2) the concepts of right and wrong were invented to give divine sanction to social norms, and 3) without such sanction, the concepts of right and wrong are incoherent.

These chapters have several problems. First, they are corny: For example, the names of the tribes are "like us" and "other" spelled backwards. Second, they are unoriginal: Nietzsche employed the same strategy as Taylor, but with far more subtely and insight, in _On the Geneology of Morals_. Third, these chapters are utterly devoid of argumentation. Taylor baldly asserts 1, 2, 3, and offers nothing in their defense but an elaborate just-so story. And where he does bother to give occasional arguments, in chapters 5-9, these almost always commit the ad hominem fallacy, the genetic fallacy, or both.

If the book ended here, I would give it only one star. However, the remaining chapters, 10-16, give an interesting and often compelling interpretation of Aristotelian virtue ethics. His treatment of Aristotle's "golden mean" is controversial and his potshots at religion are uncharitable. Nevertheless, these final chapters are very much worth reading. Any student or teacher of ethics would do well to read Taylor's account of intellectual virtue, the virtue of pride, and true and false happiness. Perhaps the best thing about this book is its unqualified, unapologetic defense of individual excellence; a clearer statement of this ideal would be hard to find.

While this book is ostensibly about virtue ethics, it is probably better read as part II of his previous work Good and Evil (Great Minds Series). There, he discusses the, as he argues, wrong turn philosophy made when it began treating ethics as if it were something discovered rather than invented, and as if its wellspring was reason rather than emotion.

Here, he does much of the same. While the discussion is about Aristotle and virtue ethics, much of the time is spent comparing the Aristotlean ethical tradition (and other classical Greek traditions) with our modern view of ethics, the former held to be vastly superior to the latter. Virtue ethics, Taylor says, treats the primary ethical question as how to live a good life rather than how we should treat others, sees the latter question as a question of artificial custom, and is not hampered by the modern egalitarian view that everyone can achieve moral excellence.

As the reviewers below note, this last piece may be the most controversial part of Taylor's present book. In a way highly reminiscent of Nietzsche, Taylor suggests that modern ethics went wrong with the start of the Christian religion and is largely engaged in the hopeless task of justifying essentially Christian moral positions without appealing to God. And one of these positions - one Taylor believes is quite wrong and that Aristotle and the Greeks never subscribed to - is the moral equality of people. Contra this view, Taylor regards it as obvious that if morality (in the Aristotlean tradition) is about achieving personal excellence, some will simply fare better than others. And worse still, one is morally excellent based on who one is not necessarily what one does - even though the latter clearly pertains - so SOME factors which will make a person excellent are 'luck' factors like lack of disability, natural intelligence, etc.) Simply put, Taylor's interpretation of Aristotle's virtue ethics is elitist and while we may be off-put by this, Taylor's argument is nonetheless interesting (and probably quite true to Aristotle).

About 2/3rds of this book is devoted to explaining why, in Taylor's view, modern moral philosophy has gone astray in treating matters of how we should treat others (matters of custom, essentially) as having truth content, and why Aristotle's ethic is a more fruitful path for moral philosophy. The rest of the book is devoted to explication of Aristotle's moral philosophy, discussing what the virtues are and what the very tricky concept of eudaimonia is (and how it relates to virtue ethics).

Here's what this book will not be: Taylor is concerned with explicating, not arguing, the virtue ethic position. While he does argue that the virtue ethic is a more fruitful way to think about ethics, he does not work out areas that (is it just me?) seem very problematic and sometimes contradictory. One problem I have, for instance, is that virtue ethics is so vague as to border on vacuity. (How should I be in terms of generosity? Reasonably generous. Hmmm...) Second, there HAS to be an account of the virtues aside from looking at and identifying what virtuous people do (in order to get out of the circularity that comes from asking how we identify virtuous people if we do't ALREADY have an idea of what the virtues are). Of course, then there are the typical objections that would come from Taylor's very direct admittance that questions of how to behave toward others are questions only of convention. If that is the case, then why does it still make sense naturally to ask whether current conventions are right or wrong, and why do we make changes in our conventions at all? (And Taylor will have trouble explaining why religious conventions are wrong, as he implies many times throughout the book.)

Taylor answers none of these and doesn't even try. This book is about explication, not argument. Those who are coming to it skeptical of the virtue ethic approach will likely not be convinced, because that is just not what Taylor is trying to do.

For further reading, I'd recommend reading some other contemporary virtue ethicists - namely, John Kekes (The Art of Life; The Examined Life) and Julia Annas (Intelligent Virtue). Both have different takes on virtue ethics than Taylor and should be interesting for further reading.

[excerpts from a full essay posted at the Rationally Speaking blog, [...]]

It is unfortunate that one has to constantly get past the author's obvious and not at all subtle disdain for the common lot, with constant references to how the ancient Greeks thought that real virtue and eudaimonia (the good life, but literally "being possessed by a good demon") can by necessity only be achieved by the few. Aristotle & co. probably did think that, in which case too bad for Aristotle & co. (I mean, after all, Aristotle also believed that both women and slaves were inferior beings, but no modern author feels obliged to follow the Greek sage there). Unfortunate, because otherwise the book is indeed an excellent introduction to virtue ethics, an approach to moral philosophy that I recognize as my own -- with some caveats.

Taylor argues that utilitarianism and deontology -- despite being wildly different in a variety of respects -- share one common feature: both philosophies assume that there is such a thing as moral right and wrong, and a duty to do right and avoid wrong. But, he says, on the face of it this is nonsensical. Duty isn't something one can have in the abstract, duty is toward a law or a lawgiver, which begs the question of what could arguably provide us with a universal moral law, or who the lawgiver could possibly be. His answer is that both utilitarianism and deontology inherited the ideas of right, wrong and duty from Christianity, but endeavored to do without Christianity's own answers to those questions: the law is given by God and the duty is toward Him.

The situation -- again according to Taylor -- is dramatically different for virtue ethics. Yes, there too we find concepts like right and wrong and duty. But, for the ancient Greeks they had completely different meanings, which made perfect sense then and now, if we are not mislead by the use of those words in a different context. For the Greeks, an action was right if it was approved by one's society, wrong if it wasn't, and duty was to one's polis. And they understood perfectly well that what was right (or wrong) in Athens may or may not be right (or wrong) in Sparta. And that an Athenian had a duty to Athens, but not to Sparta, and vice versa for a Spartan.

Taylor argues that the proper way to understand virtue ethics is as the quest for the use of intelligence in the broadest possible sense, in the sense of creativity applied to all walks of life. He says: "Creative intelligence is exhibited by a dancer, by athletes, by a chess player, and indeed in virtually any activity guided by intelligence [including -- but certainly not limited to -- philosophy]." He continues: "The exercise of skill in a profession, or in business, or even in such things as gardening and farming, or the rearing of a beautiful family, all such things are displays of creative intelligence."