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Belief
Belief is primarily a psychological or mental phenomenon. More specifically, it is a psychological phenomenon which is cognitive rather than conative or emotive. The use of the term "belief" often displays an ambiguity: it can be used to refer to the cognitive activity or process of believing, or it can refer to the content of belief or what is believed. To mark this distinction which is sometimes masked by the blanket use of the term, philosophers distinguish between Attitude- the activity of believing, and what is believed- the Content.
Language and belief are closely connected. We regularly use language to express our belief. This explains why so often truth and falsehood are predicated of both beliefs and the sentences used to express them. Still, beliefs and linguistic expressions are not the same and frequently are decoupled and operate independently of one another. For ethics the fact that people can and do lie makes this evident.
Conscience is the source of the deeply held convictions an agent has about the moral status of his own actions, past or future. Thus, an individual acts in good conscience when he acts with the sense of certainty that what he does is morally permissible or required; he acts from a guilty or bad conscience if what he does he believes deeply is morally forbidden. To let conscience be one's guide is to act on one's most deeply felt sense of what for oneself morality demands. In this sense conscience has rightly been compared to a unique individual voice: it speaks to the individual about what, for him, is of the highest moral importance and urges him to act accordingly. For this reason, conscience is often understood not only as a privileged source of moral conviction, but also as the seat of moral motivation. Agents act on what conscience urges.
Conscience is fallible: an agent can, when acting conscientiously, nevertheless be mistaken. An agent can, for that reason, do wrong in good conscience, or right with a guilty one. Thus, conscience is not the capacity for knowing what morality requires.
Because conscience is epistemically fallible no matter how firmly it convinces, agents who want to insure the justification of their actions must not follow conscience blindly or act without questioning its dictates. Whether what conscience urges is what morality requires depends on whether the content of conscience can win independent warrant. And conscience itself cannot answer that question. For the content of conscience may indeed be nothing but internalized conventional morality, a moral content which, upon examination, may not pass muster. Euthyphro, for example, is convinced that he must prosecute his father for murder. Socrates shows that this conviction is subject to doubt and revision. It is a conviction which stems, in part, from conventional beliefs about pollution and the poets' theology. Consequently, the appeal to conscience is not sufficient to justify an action, although a conscientious agent guilty of wrongdoing on independent grounds, is not for that reason a wicked person.
Sets of beliefs or statements expressing beliefs are consistent or inconsistent. A set of beliefs or statements expressing them is consistent, provided that it is possible although not necessary for all the members of the set to be true. A set of beliefs or statements expressing them is inconsistent if it is not possible for all the members of that set to be true.
Beliefs or statements expressing beliefs are contradictory. A belief or statement expressing it is a contradiction if it conjoins two beliefs or statements together one of which is the negation of the other. A contradiction is necessarily false, i.e. it is not possible for a contradictory belief or statement to be true.
Disposition
Dispositions are properties of things: they are their tendencies or propensities. Dispositions can be tendencies to be or to do certain sorts of things.
For example, Socrates is a philosopher. This can be understood as meaning that he has a disposition to philosophize. This is not an occurent property: Socrates is not always engaged in philosophy; sometimes he sleeps. If he is wise, just, noble, and good, then he possesses virtue. Virtue is often thought to be a dispositional property as well. For to say that Socrates is just is to say that he is the sort of person who does just actions when such actions are called for.
"Episteme" is a Greek term, usually translated simply as knowledge or specifically as scientific knowledge. It is easy and accurate to define epistemology succinctly and clearly: it is the theory of knowledge. There are a variety of theories of knowledge and they differ depending in part on the meaning of "theory" and of "knowledge" within the specific epistemology. The traditional definition of knowledge has it that knowledge is justified true belief. Not every epistemology accepts this account of knowledge. In recent times it has come under attack for providing neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for knowledge. Epistemologists do not even agree that the theory of knowledge should take the form of an analysis of the necessary and sufficient conditions of the concept of knowledge. Some epistemologists hold that theories of knowledge should have the status of scientific theories and be subject to the same sorts of constraints of empirical evidence as are other scientific theories. The idea that theories of knowledge should take the form of scientific theories and so be continuous with science is part of what philosophers mean when they state that epistemology must be naturalized. Epistemology addresses several central questions: If theory is a kind of knowledge, then epistemology is knowledge about knowledge. Questions immediately arise: is the knowledge which is the object of the theory the same in kind as the theory? Does theory of knowledge at least necessarily incorporate into its account of knowledge an understanding of the sort of knowledge theory of knowledge embodies? If there are distinct kinds of knowledge, what are they and how do they differ? What is the structure of knowledge? Is the model for knowledge scientific knowledge? What is scepticism and what is its relation to knowledge? Is the task of epistemology to describe actual knowledge or to prescribe epistemic norms which determine what ought to count as knowledge? What is epistemic justification? What is belief and how does it differ from knowledge? What role does experience play in knowledge?
Epistemology is of importance to ethics in the form of moral epistemology, a field of metaethics. Moral epistemology concerns itself matters such as the nature of moral belief, moral knowledge, moral justification, moral truth and moral reality.
Ethics is the philosphical discipline which deals with the ethical or moral dimension of agents, their actions and interactions, and the consequences of those actions and interactions.
The term "ethics" has a variety of uses but most writers would agree that the term can serve to name a branch of philosphy or a philosophical discipline, and in this course the term will be used in keeping with this convention. That branch is often called moral philosophy; if this is maintained, ethics and moral philosophy are synonyms. Not all writers of ethics are willing to identify them; for some draw what they consider an important distinction of both historical and conceptual significance between morality and ethics, and they want to use the linguistic difference to mark this substantive distinction. Nevertheless, in this course, the two expressions will be used interchangeably unless noted otherwise.
Knowing that ethics is philososphy does not take us very far without some further clarification of what philosophy is. Philosophers and others notoriously dispute about philosophy itself, and this disagreement spills over into the understanding of ethics. For example, some would see ethics as the analysis of concepts central to the practice of morality and to the reflection on those topic-specific concepts. Thus, ethics analyses conccepts such as obligation and duty, good, justice, virtue, ought and the like. This construal of ethics takes for granted the analytic conception of philosophy. The tradition of ethics, shows that ethics is more than analysis: it is also in the business of evaluation and justification of ethical claims deploying those concepts as well as attempting to systematize the latter. In this course different conceptions of philosophy and of ethics will come under discussion, but no particular conception deliberately adopted to the exclusion or in favor of another.
Ethics is thought to have greater, more immediate relevance to our ongoing individual and collective, urgent human concerns than other, more fundamental branches of philosophy such as metaphysics, logic, and epistemology. Ethics has a subject matter, the entirety of ethical and moral phenomena. It has a history, traditions, sub-disciplines, and schools of thought, a set of canonical texts which form its traditional core, leading questions, problems and proposed solutions. As already noted, its methods are manifold: it is analytic, explanatory, evaluative, critical, and justificatory. As is true of virtually every philosophical discipline, the boundries of ethics are contested, the answers it has provided to questions it has posed are often controversial and subject to ongoing objection and even rejection, its identity is in question, it remains unsettled, with few if any definitive results. Still, ethics is the best we have of human efforts, by reason alone, to reach an understanding of ethical and moral phenomena. As a theoretical discipline its vitality consists in its continual openness to rational criticism across the entire range of its concerns.
Like so many of our words in English, the word "ethics" has a Greek root, "ethos", a word which is also employed in English. The Greek term refers to the moral character of a person rather than to his personality. A person’s ethos or moral character is, in this sense, what constitutes the sort of person, morally speaking, that the individual is. Thus, to judge of a person’s ethos is to make a moral judgement about that person. For instance, to judge that Socrates is courageous is to characterize his ethos or moral character. If courage is a virtue, and ascribing a virtue to someone is a positive moral evaluation, then judging that Socrates is courageous is making a positive moral evaluation about Socrates.
In English the term "ethos" can be used to refer to the way of life or mores of a group, society, tribe, or people. It is in connection with this sense that we use terms such as ethnography, ethnology, ethnographer, and ethnologist. Ethnographers and ethnologists try to understand the way of life of the groups they study. Sometimes the way of life which is the object of theoretical interest is understood as the culture of the group. Thus, cultural anthropology is the study of the variety of human cultures or ways of life across space and time.
Ethics is related to these two ideas of moral character and way of life. Since the term "morality" is sometimes used as a synonym for ethics, it is clear that ethics bears a relation to the idea of moral character. If the term "ethics" were to gain its meaning directly from this sense of "ethos", then it would restrict itself to the study of moral character. It would take the form of virtue ethics.
However, ethics is also concerned with culture or way of life: it concerns itself with the variety of norms or rules and ideals, written and unwritten, explicit and implied, to which group members believe they ought to conform or aspire.
Evaluating Beliefs
Beliefs can be evaluated as to their truth-value, i.e. truth and falsehood, consistency, and justification. Our understanding of evaluative judgements about the truth-values of beliefs depends upon how we conceive truth. A set of beliefs are judged to be consistent if it is possible for all the members of the set to be true. Finally, judging that a belief is justified implies that the belief has the properties specified by the concept of justification assumed implies in the judgement.
Typically, beliefs are evaluated indirectly by evaluating the sentences which express or manifest those beliefs.
Judgement
The term "judgement" is ambiguous. It can be understood as a mental or linguistic entity. If mental, it can mean a mental process of judging or the result of such a process. If linguistic, it is the assertion or what is asserted in the utterance. In this linguistic sense judgements are assertoric statements involving reference and description. In this course the term "judgement" will be used, unless noted otherwise, to mean the propostional content of the linguistic assertion.
Whereas judgements are often made to describe the properties things of various kinds have, in ethics the idea of normative rather than descriptive judgement is particularly important. Normative judgements divide into evaluative and prescriptive judgements. Moral judgements, perhaps even more central to ethics, are a species of normative judgements; thus, they take the form of evaluative and prescriptive judgements.
A justification is a validation process in which a candidate is evaluated according to criteria or standards of justification. Alternatively, justification does not signify the process of validation, but rather the resultant stamp of validation or warrant that a candidate for justification receives after successfully undergoing such a process of evaluation. The process is often triggered as a response to a challenge to the purported authoritative status a candidate claims or is thought to have. The process is one in which the candidate is evaluated in light of a standard or criterion of justification; it achieves legitimation if it is shown to conform to the criterion. Beliefs, actions, rules, principles, practices, claims, and even emotions can all be challenged, require, and thus become candidates for justification.
Because there are different sorts of candidates for justification, there are distinct types of justification with their appropriate types of norms or standards. Epistemic justification, for example, deals primarily with the validation of beliefs claiming the status of knowledge or at least the status of justified beliefs; their justification consists in testing them against epistemic norms or criteria. Epistemic norms specify justifying properties which a belief must have in order to win title to the status it is alleged to have. For instance, a belief may be justified if has a reliable source or if it is supported by relevant evidence or good reasons.
Moral justification tests the conformity of actions, persons, policies, institutions and practices, emotions and the like to moral norms, standards or criteria. If adultery is immoral, then there must be a moral criterion to which the practice does not conform or which it violates.
Since justifying a candidate requires appeal to criteria of justification, any challenge to those criteria will call for a second-order of justification of those first-order norms. This in turn will require recurrence to criteria to evaluate the justifiedness of those first-order norms. If all norms at every level can be challenged anew, then justification will continually be postponed. To end the postponement there must be criteria which have ultimate justification. Whether there are such is a central question for philosophers.
Justifying Reasons
Justifying reasons for action are those which provide justification, warrant, or permission for an action. Unlike motivating reasons, justifying reasons do not explain, causally or otherwise, an agent’s action. Instead they offer a justification or warrant for the action under consideration by referring to the norms or criteria which confer justification or warrant upon the considered action. It is important to note that an action-explanation can be correct even if the action is, morally or prudentially speaking, absolutely wrong, ie. unjustifiable and even inexcusable.
Three sorts of justifying reasons - moral, prudential, and legal reasons - are of particular significance in ethics.
Moral reasons present considerations which, according to the criteria of morality, require or at least permit a specific action-type.
Prudential reasons present considerations which, according to criteria of rationality or self-interest, require or at least permit a specific action-type.
Finally, legal reasons present considerations which, according to the law, require or at least permits or a specific action-type.
The primary purpose of normative ethical theories is to specify the moral norms and criteria of justification which inform moral reasons.
Knowledge
Knowledge is a vast topic. Traditionally, it has been defined as justified true belief; however, not all epistemologists would accept this account. There seems to be agreeement that there are different kinds of knowledge. For example, knowing how is thought to be different from knowing that and knowing that is considered different from knowing why. Knowledge is different from belief in one decisive respect: beliefs can be true or false, whereas there is no such thing as false knowledge. Although there is no agreement about how best to understand epistemic justification, it is clear that beliefs can be true yet lack justification, while knowledge essentially involves justification in some way. Whatever else is said about knowledge, claims to its possession are false if they cannot withstand the scrutiny of some degree of rational criticism. Beliefs, on the other hand, need not be rational at all.
For ethics what is crucial is whether there is moral knowledge and what sort of thing it is, what its relation is to action, whether it of general principles or of particular cases or of their relation.
Mental or Psychological Elements of Action
The mental or psychological elements of action are three-fold: cognition, conation, and emotion. All partake of a general psychic form. That form is a correlation structure relating a mental act- what philosophers since Bertrand Russell have called an attitude- to content. In turn, philosophers commonly distinguish propositional and objectual kinds of content in the sense that, for example, an agent can see a starving child- so have one sort of cognitive attitude towards an object- but can also believe that the starving child is hungry and cold, in which case his attitude is again cognitive, albeit of a distinct sort, but in this case the content is a proposition.
Just as cognitive attitudes can have different contents of different kinds, so an agent can have different non-cognitive attitudes towards various contents of different kinds. Thus, displaying a conative attitude ( from the Latin, "conatus", meaning striving, desiring, or endeavoring), someone might want, upon seeing a starving child, help the child find nourishment. Or knowing that there are starving children, a person may feel angry (hence an emotional or pathetic- from the Greek "pathe" meaning passion or feeling -attitude) about a state of affairs in which innocent children are starving.
"Metaethics" is a term used to mark a sub-discipline of ethics. It is part of a tripartite division internal to ethics: methaethics is contrasted with normative ethics, on the one hand, and with practical or applied ethics on the other. As this internal division is ordinarily understood, normative ethics proposes specific normative principles and offers justifiying arguments in their support. Applied ethics adopts various normative principles and applies them in particlar areas of ethical concern. For example, in health ethics moral issues such as euthanasia and allocation of scarce medical resources arise; decisions as well as general and particular judgements made regarding these matters appeal to norms which normative ethical theories analyse and attempt to justify. Metaethics poses more general questions of semantics, epistemology, ontology, and philosophy of mind. Thus, metaethics considers the nature of moral language and judgement; moral belief, knowledge, and justification; moral facts and moral reality; and moral motivation and action.
The most enduring works in ethics do not concentrate on one of these areas of ethics to the exclusion of the others. On the contrary, they are the most important works partly because they incorporate into a unity all these conceptually distinct dimensions of ethics. Thus, the three subdisciplines are misunderstood if thought to be utterly independent of one another, instead of as co-determining parts of a theoretical whole.
There are philosophers, as always, who want to restrict ethics to one of these subdisciplines to the exclusion of the others. For example, there are those would limit ethics to metaethics, and more specifically to a special set of semantic questions about moral language and expell normative and practical ethics from philosophy proper. These philosophers have their reasons to justify such a stance. One of the main reasons often given in support of such a view is that these other areas not matters cognition and knowledge but of practical commitments about which, it is thought, philosophers can have nothing to say. This is the view of those who take the position of Non-cognitivism or Anti-realism.
1. The behavior of a moral agent is not automatic, habitual,
or the result of operative conditioning. Not all that a moral
agent does is due to impulse, immediate inclination or desire,
drive, instinct, reflex, or a function of chemical-biological
processes, eg. genes, cosmic, physical forces or of some other
non-rational or sub-rational factor.
2. Were this true, the eminent practical question, "What
should I do?" would have no purpose. For this question
assumes that it is up to the agent to deliberate and decide upon
a course of action. To settle on an answer requires that the
agent engage in practical reasoning.
3. The conduct of a moral agent, in short, is not always or
solely caused and to be explained by natural or, broadly
speaking, social determinants external to or independent of the
agent’s own reason. The moral agent is first of all a
rational agent, capable not only of practical reasoning, but free
to act on or be motivated by that reasoning.
4. Moral agents not only engage in practical reasoning, i.e.
consider and evaluate ends, purposes, goals of action according
to relevant criteria (including the just, noble, good),
deliberate about means to those ends by weighing options, make
decisions, choose a course of action. Moral agents not only have
reasons for action; they also act for those reasons. Their
practical considerations serve as motivating reasons by which we
can explain those actions.
5. Moral agents’ actions are not only susceptible to
reason-explanation; since moral agents act for reasons, and
reasons can serve to justify as well as to motivate action,
agents’ reasons can provide agents with justifying reasons
for their actions. When agents’ reasons for action serve as
justifying reasons, the justification is a practical
justification. When those justifying reasons are moral reasons,
the practical justification is a moral justification.
6. Thus, at the heart of the idea of a moral agent is that of
reasons. But the idea of a reason is broader than that of
practical reason which is so central to the idea of moral agency.
For reasons do not serve solely to motivate or justify action,
their means and ends. Reasons also function as theoretical
reasons: these are reasons which function to motivate or justify
belief. These are the reasons which function as the premises of
an argument and whose ultimate point is to lend support to its
conclusion.
7. Moral agents are able to ask the practical question and set
about answering it by engaging in practical reflection in order
to arrive at reasons for action. If the question is simply about
what means will, if chosen, most likely lead the agent to his
end, whatever it is, the practical reasoning is instrumental. If
the question is about which ends are those which the agent should
pursue, whatever the means, his reasoning is teleological. If his
question is what morality requires of him, then he is involved in
moral reasoning. Thus, there are different kinds of reasons.
8. Of reasons, Socrates restricts himself primarily to three
different sorts of considerations: that of the just, noble, and
the good. The first two we often think of as moral reasons; the
last we take to be about self-interest or personal advantage and
we assume that such a selfish reason is not a moral reason.
Moral Belief
Moral belief is a species of belief. Moral beliefs are distinguishable from other sorts of belief in large measure due to their unique moral content. The nature and function of moral beliefs in our lives is a central issue for ethics.
Moral Character
A person’s moral character constitutes the sort of person an individual is for the purposes of moral evaluation. Moral character is not the same as an individual’s personality.
Moral Epistemology
Epistemology is the philosophical study of knowledge. Moral epistemology is the philosophical study of moral or ethical knowledge. Just as epistemology deals with claims to know the truth, their nature and justification, so moral epistmology handles claims to substantive moral knowledge- about right and wrong, good and bad, what ought and ought to be and to be done- and the justification of these claims.
Many of the same sorts of questions, puzzles, problems, and solutions which arise generally in epistemology show up in moral epistemology. Thus, moral epistemology deals with questions about the sources of moral knowledge, the capacities for such knowledge, the structure of this type of knowledge, the justification of moral beliefs and the nature of moral justification more generally, the challenge of moral skepticism and the variety of different types of moral skepticism.
Moral epistemology is not utterly independent of matters of moral realism and anti-realism. For some philosophers, who take an anti-realist position, hold that there is no moral reality to be known. Thus, there is no point to moral epistmology at all. Although it seems that our moral judgements and deliberations are geared towards some moral reality, this is a false impression. The anti-realists contend either that our judgements really do function as statements purporting to be about the real properties of objects and events comprising moral reality, or that moral judgements in fact do not have this function, but rather serve another, non-cognitive purpose of expressing the appraiser’s attitudes, emotional reactions, and commitments. Thus, on this last view moral judgements do not have truth values at all; they are not, as the saying goes, truth apt.
Whether such an anti-realist rejection of the claim that there is a moral reality is a kind of skepticism depends on how one understands skepticism. As some philosophers construe it, the refusal to countenance the idea of moral knowledge on the grounds that there is nothing specifically moral to be known is a form of skepticism. Other philosophers accept only the more restricted view that skepticism is concerned with questioning whether are moral beliefs which are true and justified and hence have the status of genuine knowledge.
Moral Judgement
Moral judgements, central to moral practice and thus of major concern in ethics, are a species of normative judgements; thus, they take the form of evaluative and prescriptive judgements. By their means, their users give advice, issues commands, express their moral praise and blame, approval and disapproval, and in general moral pro and con attitudes and feelings towards the objects of judgement. Moral judgements refer to many different sorts of objects of moral evaluation and prescription. Actions, character, consequences and states of affairs, motives, decisions, feelings, beliefs- all of these are commonly the object of moral judgements.
Typical moral predicates used in moral judgements are contrastive pairs good/evil and right/wrong as well as so-called thick contrastive terms such as virtuous/wicked, just/unjust, noble/base, courageous/cowardly.
Evaluative moral judgements bespeak a primary concern with norms of goodness and justice of agents, their actions and interactions, and the outcomes or consequences the latter bring about, as well as the nobility or beauty of the moral agent. Prescriptive moral judgements express the moral ought, what the object of the judgement ought to do and/or ought to be.
The English term "mores" is from the Latin "mores"; mores are conventions, customs, practices or codes of conduct and character of an individual or group. In this sense an individual or group is said to have a morality or an ethos. The morality is my or our morality. Distinguished from conventional morality, whether social or individual, is the idea of true morality: this is the idea of a moral code or set of moral rules concerning conduct and character, which has an ultimate justification and thus is capable of withstanding rational criticism. Whether there is a morality which fits this description is a question which ethics tries to answer.
Moral Philosophy
Moral philosophy is the attempt to find answers to fundamental questions such as, What is the good life for a human being? What sort of life is worth living? What choices should a person make in order to achieve it? Moral philosophy clarifies these questions, considers answers to them, and evaluates these answers by examining their adequacy according to criteria of rational criticism. So understood, moral philosophy and ethics are the same.
Moral Realism and Anti-realism
Is there an independently existing moral reality which moral judgements, capable of having a truth-value, refer to and describe? This is the question which elicits the opposing responses of moral realism and anti-realism, with the moral realists answering affirmatively and the anti-realists negatively.
This opposition between moral realism and anti-realism repeats, in the domain of morality, a very old if not perennial standoff in philosophy between realism and anti-realism. With regard to any specific domain the realism/anti-realism debate raises the metaphysical question of existence. Reality is presumed to be mind-independent existence, where by "mind-independence" philosophers usually mean that the facts thought to have real existence are not constituted by beliefs about or attitudes towards them. Mind-independence in this sense is the idea that the reality in question does not have, as an essential property, a relation to a cognizer’s evidence for that reality.
Anti-realism is sometimes called idealism. Identifying idealism and anti-realism can be misleading or even mistaken, however, if idealism is construed, as has often been the case, as the view that reality is idea-like or mental, or spiritual rather than material or physical. It is the view that only minds, spirits, souls, ideas exist whether we know or believe that there are such kinds. Every other sort of entity exists only if it stands in some kind of relation to mind or soul. In this sense an idealism is a form of realism about minds, spirits, or souls. Only the idealism that holds that even those sorts of things fail the mind-independence test genuinely anti-realist.
If Socrates thinks that it is wrong for him to escape from prison and he is a moral realist about facts or truths about actions being right or wrong, then the judgement that it is wrong for him to escape from prison or that he ought not to escape is true even if he does not believe it or know it.
Anti-realism is typically defined in oppostion to realism. Thus, anyone who rejects realism in any domain, is an anti-realist with regard to that domain. There are two distinct ways, however, in which one can oppose realism and hence take an anti-realist position. Either one can deny that there is such a reality, i.e. such particular kinds of facts, events, objects, or and their properties; or one can allow that there are such entities but claim that those entities fail the realism test of mind-independence because they are in some way essentially related to beliefs or attitudes towards them. Some theorists use the term "constructivism" to label the view that facts are mind-dependent, whether it is one or more minds and regardless of the nature of that mind or minds.
If, for example, suppose that Socrates believes that piety is what the gods love or hold dear, then he is an anti-realist about piety; for although he does not deny the reality of piety, he will maintain that it not mind-independent. The piety of an action or person is essentially related to pro-attitude which the gods take toward it.
Finally, a realist about one domain, say, about nature as studied by natural science, could be an anti-realist with regard to the domain of morality. A global anti-realist is one who rejects realism with regard to every domain.
Moral skepticism is skepticism as it pertains to matters of moral belief, justification, and knowledge. The skeptic challenges the theorist’s claims by demanding that the theorist, faced with the skeptical denial of the truth or justifiability of those claims, provide reasons, in the form of argument, to justify them. Typically the skeptic is either supremely confident that the claimant will not be able to supply the requested justification, or he lacks confidence that the claimant will be able to deliver the goods.
Philosophers, constantly shadowed as they are by the skeptics, will sometimes try to shake them by showing that the skeptic already harbors knowledge himself in the form of known criteria of justification which he brings to bear in his challenge to the theorist. If the skeptic knows, then he has no right to his skeptical denials. After all, the skeptic can only demand satisfaction if he can say what would satisfy him and this requires that he provide the criteria of successful response to his challenge. Ether he can defend his commitment to those criteria in which case he undermines his own skepticism or, if he cannot, then he has no right to apply them in evaluating the theorist. If the skeptic has such knowledge, then it is harder for the theorist to take seriously his challenge to the theorist’s knowledge claims.
The skeptic has two responses to the theorist’s attempt to undermine his corrosive demands. First, the skeptic can simply allow the theorist to propose his own criteria of justification and demand simply that the theorist live up to them. The skeptic’s denial will then be tantamout to the theorist hoisting himself on his own petard. The theorist must have such standards, since he is the one making the claims the skeptic is challenging. The skeptic can evaluate the theorist’s claim by using the standards which the theorist implicitly if not explicitly has already endorsed. These criteria encode the justifying properties which a claim to know must possess in order to pass muster. By adopting the theorist’s own standards the skeptic avoids having to make epistemic commitments of his own, commitments which, were he to make them, might leave him vulnerable to the theorist’s charge of self-referential inconsistency.
The skeptic can offer an additional response. Unless the skeptic’s challenge is global, he can deny the theorist knowledge claim as a claim to a certain kind of knowledge, while not denying that there are other kinds of knowledge. The moral skeptic can deny that there is moral knowledge while maintaining that there is knowledge of nature, for example, in the form of natural science. If the epistemic standards which apply to natural science also apply to claims to moral knowledge or justified belief, then he only has to establish that the moral claims fail to instantiate the justifying properties those standards specify. Or if it is thought that moral knowledge claims, because they are different in kind from those in natural science, require distinct epistemic criteria, then the skeptic can allow for standards appropriate to moral claims and again insist that these claims lack the justifying properties needed to win justification.
Moral skepticism includes a range of challenges to morality. As with skepticism generally, moral skepticism questions whether any moral beliefs are true, or whether moral beliefs can be justified even if true, or whether there is any moral knowledge. In addition, some moral skeptics question whether there are moral rules or laws which specify duties that morality demands that agents fulfill or whether, even if there are such moral requirements, that it is rational for agents to obey what morality commands.
In analogy with skepticism regarding theistic belief may be helpful. Consider the belief that there is a god and the additional, related belief about god’s nature. A skeptic will deny that the believer has a true belief or that the belief is justified or that the believer has knowledge. The skeptic can arrive at this denial simply by first denying that there is any real entity for there to be such beliefs about. Or the skeptic can argue that even if such a being does exist, still our beliefs about it are false or that they are, even if true, not justified, or that we can have no knowledge of such a being.
Some philosophers want to distinguish the skeptical attack on knowledge claims from the view that there is no reality to be known or believed in the first place. They argue that skepticism is, in general, the view that although we claim to know we really do not; we are ignorant. Thus if, for example, there is no god to be known, then there is nothing about which we are ignorant and so nothing for the skeptic to complain about. Similarly, if there is no moral reality, then we cannot be ignorant about it and nothing for the moral skeptic to worry about. If there are no moral facts to know or believe, then rather than calling the view that there are no such facts or reality a kind of skepticism, it is better to see it as a form of non-cognitivism.
Non-cognitivsm in ethics is often understood as a claim about the actual function of moral discourse: it is not, as it may appear, fact stating, descriptive, assertoric, and truth-evaluable or, as philosophers put it these days, truth-apt. Its function is quite different: moral discourse serves to express the speakers moral emotions, attitudes, commitments and the like. Whether the non-cognitivist in ethics must accept the ontological thesis that there are no moral facts or reality to be known in order to make the argument about the function of moral discourse is open to question. Does non-cognitivsm have to rest on this independent ontological denial or is it the case that the ontological denial actually follows from the claim about the nature of moral discourse or are the two claims, the one about discourse and the other the ontological denial, simply logically independent of one another and providing no support either way?
The skeptic, who denies that there are any justifiable moral duties, rules, laws, or requirements, does acknowledge that agents believe that there are, share these beliefs, and often actually act, individually and collectively, in order to obey what they take to be what morality demands. What the skeptic refuses to accept is the claim that these duties, which agents have internalized in one way or another, are capable of justification in their own right no matter how socially, politically, or psychologically effective they may be.
Motivational Internalism and Externalism
Is it possible that an agent, knowing that a course of action is rational or in his best interest, nevertheless does not act on that knowledge? If such knowledge provides the agent with a prudential reason to act, and if nevertheless the agent does not act for that reason, then the reason he has, in virtue of what he knows, is not a motivating reason. For the motivating reason is the reason for which the agent acts. It is what explains why the agent acts (and, as many philosophers would claim, what causes him to act) as he does. If the reason the agent has justifies a course of action, the reason is a justifying reason. Motivational externalism is the view that an agent’s possession of a justifying reason for action is not sufficient to insure its status as a motivating reason.
Similarly, is it possible that an agent, knowing that a course of action is the moral one, nevertheless does not act on that knowledge? The externalist will hold that an agent can have a justifying moral reason to act, in that it accords with or derives from morality, which, despite this, does not function as a motivating reason. That a justifying moral reason which an agent has is not sufficient to give it the status of a motivating reason is precisely the view of motivational externalism.
Motivational internalism, by contrast, is the thesis that if an agent has a justifying reason (whether moral or prudential) for action, it is sufficient to motivate action. Internalists will maintain a common opposition to externalism, but will dispute among themselves whether motivating reasons are cognitive or conative in character. Thus, conative internalists will insist that an agent has a motivating reason only if the agent has a desire do take that action; the cognitive internalist will hold, by contrast, that if an agent knows that an action is for his own good or is what morality requires, this knowledge constitutes a motivating reason and so is sufficient to guarantee that he will act for that reason.
For example, suppose that Socrates believes it is best for him to remain in prison rather than, following Crito’s contrary advice, to escape. In this case, Socrates has a prudential reason to remain in prison.
Motivating Ethics
The question often arises, Why Ethics?
This question, like many why-questions, can understood in two different ways:
First, it can be asking for an explanation: what can account for existence of the practice of ethics?
Secondly, however, it might also be taken to ask a different question: what reasons justify pursuing philosophy in the form of ethical inquiry?
Here are two arguments, starting from a Socratic conception of philosophy, which offer an answers to the second question.
A1: Self-knowledge is the goal that defines philosophy as the examination of opinion. Knowledge of one’s own opinions or beliefs, of what they are, their origin and justification, their action-guiding role, furthers that goal. Ethics is a philosophical discipline precisely to the extent that it continually subjects its own traditional claims to rational criticism. Some of our moral beliefs owe their origin to the tradition of ethics. Thus, knowledge of the tradition will aid in the search for self-knowledge.
A2: I want my life to go well. I want it to be successful; I want to live the good life. To achieve what I want, I must know what makes for such a life and what actions contribute, as ingredients and as instrumental means, to living such a life. I have to know not only what the good life is, but also, to the extent that having such a life is within my control, what courses of action I need to choose in order to live such a life. If I am to acquire such knowledge I must pursue ethics. For it is through ethics alone that such knowledge becomes possible.
An agent’s motivating reason is the reason for which the agent acts. It is what explains why the agent acts (or, as some philosophers would claim, what causes him to act) as he does. The motivating reason orginates the action. When Socrates asks Euthyphro why he is prosecuting his father, he is asking first of all for an explanation of Euthyphro’s action which he hopes to get by finding out from Euthyphro what led him to do what he is doing.
Necessary and Sufficient Conditions
A condition p is necessary for q if q is not possible without p; p is that without which there can be no q. On the other hand, to say that a condition p is sufficient for q means that if p is given then q must be given as well. The existence of p guarantees the existence of q.
Example: In his discussion with Euthyphro, Socrates suggests to Euthyphro that to justify his claim that, contrary to conventional public morality, the action he is taking against his father is pious, Euthyphro must provide a definition of piety. If Euthyphro does not know the nature of piety, he cannot know that his own action is pious. However, even if he can demonstrate that he has such knowledge, its possession is not sufficient to insure that his prosecutorial action against his father is pious. For from the conjunction of Euthyphro's theology, derived from the poets, and his proposed definition that piety or holiness consists in what the gods love and impiety in what they hate, it follows that his action is hated by at least one of the gods and so is impious. In such a case, the application of his definition of the idea of piety in the judgement about his own action leads to the conclusion that his action is not justified after all.
Generalizing from the example, the justification of an action has necessary and sufficient conditions. It is a necessary condition of justification that one be able to define the justifying property, i.e. that characteristic which will justify the action if the action has that characteristic. It is also necessary that one be able to apply that definition in a true judgement about the action. Thus, for any action A and for any property F, to justify A it is necessary to be able to define F and to be able to apply F in a true judgement, A is F, about A. These two conditions are jointly sufficient for the justification of A, each is necessary for its justification and there are no other necessary conditions.
The example implies, in addition, that knowledge has necessary conditions. Being able to define a property is a necessary condition for knowledge. Yet it is not sufficient for knowledge. It is also necessary that one's definition be consistent with one's background knowledge. In particular, it must be consistent with the truth of judgements applying those defined ideas, especially those judgements whose objects are the actions claimed to be justifiied.
Some philosophers interested in the matter of causation, a concept absolutely central to our lives, our actions, and thought, try to analyse causation in terms of the ideas of necessary and sufficient conditions.
Cognitivism is the view that there knowledge or the capability of acquiring it or, at a minimum, the capability of adopting a cognitive attitude such as belief toward some subject matter. Non-cognitivism is the denial of cognitivism.
Cognitivism in ethics is the more specific position that there is moral knowledge or the capability of acquiring it, or, at a minimum, the capability of adopting a cognitive attitude such as belief toward moral judgements. Non-cognitivsm in ethics is the denial of cognitivism in ethics. More specifically, it is better understood as a thesis about the actual function of moral discourse. It is a mistake to think that moral judgements operate as factual claims purporting to be true, ascribing moral properties to objects of moral judgement. prescriptive and evaluative moral judgements are not, contrary to appearances, fact stating, descriptive, assertoric, and truth-evaluable or, as some philosophers put it these days, truth-apt. Its function is quite different: moral discourse serves to express the speaker’s moral emotions, attitudes, commitments and the like. This expressive function of moral language is non-cognitive in that moral judgements and claims have no cognitive or epistemic significance because they are not subject to evaluation in terms of truth and falsehood. Thus, non-cognitivism is primarily a semantic thesis about the nature of moral language.
If knowledge entails true belief, and beliefs are expressed by assertoric judgements, i.e. judgements which can be true or false, then if non-cognitivism is true, there can be no moral knowledge; for moral discourse contains no assertoric moral judgements expressing truth-evaluable beliefs. Therefore, non-cognitivism is not just a semantic claim, but has implications for moral epistemology.
According to some philosophers non-cognitivism includes the anti-realist view that there are no moral facts. So understood, non-cognitivism comprises not only a semantic and epistemological thesis, but also an ontological or metaphysical one as well. Some philosophers who accept this more comprehensive version of non-cognitivism explain the semantics and epistemology as the consequence of the ontological claim denying the existence of distinctively moral facts or moral reality.
However, the comprehensive version is perhaps a bit too ambitious. Whether the non-cognitivist in ethics must accept the ontological thesis that there are no moral facts or reality to be known in order to make the argument about the function of moral discourse is open to question. Does non-cognitivsm have to rest on this independent ontological denial of distinctively moral facts or moral reality, or does the ontological denial actually follow directly from the claim about the nature of moral discourse? Or are the two claims, the one about discourse and the other, the ontological denial, simply logically independent of one another, providing no support either way?
However this may be, it is evident that a sharp division between normative [ethics] and [metaethics] follows from non-cognitivism. Only the latter is cognitivist.
Normative Judgement
Normative judgements apply norms, standards, or criteria to objects of judgement, whatever those may be. If those norms are evaluative, then the normative judgements are evaluative or value judgements.
Normative judgements can be classified according to sphere and kind. According to sphere, normative judgements can be classified as non-moral and moral. According to kind, they are either evaluative or prescriptive. If the norms are prescriptive, then the normative judgements are prescriptive. Prescribing a course of action, for example, that one ought to honor one’s parents, is a prescriptive normative judgement. An evaluative judgement such as, parenting is a noble endeavor, is an normative evaluative judgement. These two divisions can be combined: the combination yields non-moral as well as moral evaluative and prescriptive judgements.
Normative judgements function in moral practice as, among other things, a means of expressing praise and blame, approval and disapproval, and in general pro and con attitudes and feelings towards the objects of judgement.
The normative predicates used in normative judgements to ascribe normative criteria to objects of judgement typically come in contrasting pairs. Good/bad, right/wrong, correct/incorrect are just some of the most general evaluative terms used to evaluate the objects of normative judgements. Ought/ought not are the most common contrasting pairs for prescriptive judgements.
Objectivity in Ethics
According to some philosophers, morality is objective or there is objectivity in ethics in that moral judgements are fact-stating, their function is to describe moral facts, and so they are capable of having truth-value and expressing moral knowledge or beliefs about those facts. In this sense objectivity in ethics is connected with cognitivsm in ethics. If those objective facts are mind-independent in the relevant way required for moral realism, then objectivity entails moral realism. However, objectivity is compatible with the denial of moral realism if the moral facts are not mind-independent, but instead constructed. There are, therefore, stronger and weaker versions of objectivity in ethics corresponding to realist and constructivist views of moral reality.
There is another aspect of objectivity in ethics which, although related to the first, is not a matter of the fact-stating, descriptive nature of moral judgement, but rather of the methods and procedures adopted in evaluating those judgements. There is, in this second sense, objectivity in ethics in that the methods of evaluation are independent of idiosyncratic features of the evaluators and take into account only relevant evidence pertaining to the facts themselves.
If ethics is objective, it should be possible to evaluate the truth or falsehood of the judgement that it is wrong to kill a man for practicing philosophy by appealing to facts about philosophy and the characteristics which make it right or wrong- unless the evidence is not accessible. Thus, if ethics is objective in both senses, the judgement is about some actual objective fact, the alleged wrongness of killing a man for his philosophical activity, and there is an objective method to determine whether or not the judgement is true by appealing to the evidence regarding the practice. Were there no objective facts about philososophy and about wrongness or no access to evidence to verify or falsify our judgements about these objective facts, there could be, in this sense, no objectivity in ethics.
Philosophy
Philosophy has been and continues be a contested term. Three different, although perhaps related, conceptions of philosophy which merit mention present it as 1) a specific way of life devoted to questioning and examination of opinions concerning matters of fundamental significance to human existence. In connection with this, it is viewed as the exercise of a sceptical habit of thinking or mind; 2) as formulating and disseminating presumably true doctrines about these fundamental matters, and so as a kind of wisdom; 3) the pursuit of wisdom by subjecting claims to wisdom to rational criticism.
This course operates with the conception of philosophy given by #1 and #3, and understands these to encapsulate the heart of what Plato’s Socrates understood by philosophy.
While definitions of philosophy are characteristically bones of contention among philosophers, very often appeal is made to the etymology of "philosophy" as support for the view that philosophy is the love or desire for wisdom. Philosophy is not, so understood, the possession of, but rather the quest for wisdom. Thus, philosophy is an activity, indeed it is a way of life. This view is almost always associated with Socrates in his Platonic creation. Socrates connects this conception of philosophy with the idea, which he formulates most famously in Plato’s Apology, that the philosopher has not divine, but human wisdom, the wisdom that comes from self-knowledge of ignorance. Socrates desires to know, knows that he does not know, examines those who claim to know, and reveals that they do not. By submitting themselves to his philosophical interrogation, those who profess to know come to know of their own ignorance; Socrates in turn confirms his own human wisdom; for he already knows about himself what his interlocutors, otherwise lacking in self-knowledge, first learn about themselves through his examination of them.
It is Socrates’ claim that the philosophic life devoted to the pursuit of wisdom is the only life worth living; a life without examination is not worth living at all. With this claim, Socrates links philosophy directly with one of the fundamental questions of ethics, How should one live or what is the good life for a human being?, and provides an answer to the question motivating ethics in the first place.
Not all philosophers have endorsed the Socratic conception of philosophy. For example, some philosophers have claimed that philosophy is not simply the pursuit of wisdom. Their emphasis is not on the idea of philosophy as a kind of activity, but instead understand it as a kind of knowledge or wisdom. Once the idea that philosophy is a kind of knowledge, a new investigation opens: what sort of knowledge is philosophy? Is it akin to natural science or mathematics? Does it have methods unique to it? Does it have its own canons of evidence? Does it have a unique subject matter and special goals or purposes?
Practical Wisdom
Practical wisdom, also referred to by the Greek term, "phronesis", and as prudence, from the Latin "prudentia", is action-guiding knowledge. Broadly, practical wisdom is knowledge of the ends of action as well as of the means to those ends. Since the desire for such knowledge is one factor motivating ethics, there is a direct relation between practical wisdom and ethics.
The Practice of Evaluation
Evaluation is a familiar human practice, as common to human life as observation and description. The practice involves making evaluative judgements about things. There are a variety of different objects of evaluation as well as different criteria of evaluation. Here is a very incomplete list of some of the many different kinds of objects of evaluation: beliefs and actions, arguments, experiences, instruments and methods, works of art, institutions of various kinds, laws, reasons and evidence, even evaluative criteria. Making evaluative judgements requires the appeal to criteria or norms of evaluation which are typically expressed by contrasting terms of evaluation. Good and bad, for example, are very general terms of evaluation applicable to all sorts of things, while legal and illegal are much more specifically applicable to actions or policies. P
Prudence and Prudential Reasons
"Prudence" is a term deriving from the Latin "prudentia" which translates the Greek "phronesis". Phronesis is practical intellectual virtue, an agent’s ability to deliberate well about how to act in order to achieve his own good. An agent is prudent or has prudence in this sense if he has this capability.
The idea of prudential reasons borrows from this conception of prudence. An agent has a prudential reason to act if the action under consideration is for his own good or well-being, will benefit him, or is in his self-interest. An agent acts prudentially if his action serves his own good.
The idea of prudential action is connected with a certain understanding of rationality. An agent who fails to act in his own best interest or whose action undermines that interest is thought to be irrational.
Are there absolute or universal moral truths or moral standards? The negative answer to this question is the thesis of ethical or moral relativism.
The assertion of relativism in ethics frequently begins from the observation that there is moral diversity or difference of moral belief or practice. Most philosophers agree that there are a plurality of contrasting ethical opinions and practices: their prime evidence is taken from their own experience, travellers’ stories, and ethnographers’ professional monographs. Moral appraisers evaluate the same things differently. They disagree in their strongly held moral judgements. Thus there are different and moral beliefs about how one ought to deal with the dead: some bury their dead, some burn them. Different groups have different views about the treatment and roles of women in marriage, family, and society, about female circumcision, about capital punishment, homosexuality, drinking and gambling, and atheism - just to name a few. These differences may distinguish the shared beliefs of the members of groups or societies, or they may differentiate individuals’ moral opinions within or across groups. This factual diversity of moral belief is referred to by a variety of different names, such as descriptive relativism, cultural relativism or conventionalism.
Such factual diversity of moral belief is sometimes mistaken for other sorts of differences. For example, there can be differences in interpretation and application of shared beliefs and judgements. Or people can engage in the same moral practices or hold similar moral views for different reasons. Or it may be that certain differences in belief are not really differences in moral belief, but instead differences regarding the facts. Still, it is doubtless a simple fact of human life as old as human interaction itself that such differences in moral opinion and practice do exist.
Philosophers wonder what may be concluded from this fact of conventional moral difference. Different tribes have their different mores. The moral beliefs of the tribesman bespeak the views of the tribes’ shared moral code. If asked to provide justifying reasons for those beliefs, tribesman base their beliefs on the standards they find given to them by their local ethical codes. The question arises whether those codes themselves can be appraised morally in the light of standards not taken from the codes themselves or from some other conventional code. The claim of ethical or moral relativism is that there are no standards which are not simply those of some conventional code or other. Were there such non-local standards they would be absolute or universal rather than relative, and this would be sufficient to establish ethical absolutism or universalism.
The claim of ethical relativism does not follow from that of cultural relativism. For the fact of diversity or disagreement in moral opinions does not by itself warrant the denial that there are universal or absolute standards. An argument by analogy with disagreement in non-moral matters can buttress this point. People can and do hold diverse opinions about a number of things, and yet often those disagreements end when it turns out, according to standards of truth and justification everyone must accept, that not all those diverse are true. Science in particular breeds disagreement; nevertheless, some of those hypotheses turn out to be false by appeal to standards of epistemic justification which are not those of any specific scientific theory. If moral beliefs are like ordinary or scientific beliefs, then they are not provincial beliefs confined to consumption by fellow tribesman, and there should be criteria available to evaluate a specific moral belief which are not those of a specific moral code of a specific tribe.
There is another way, however, to use the diversity of moral opinion and practice as a premise from which to draw the relativist conclusion. Even if from diversity alone relativism does not follow, relativism may be the best way to explain the fact of diversity. After all, if there are universally valid judgements and standards of truth and justification there should not be the kind of diversity and disagreement which the factual claims suggest that there is. There is no better account of these facts of moral pluralism than that there are no universal or absolute moral truths and standards of justification.
Philosophers have provided two additional sorts of argumentative support for ethical relativism. First, arguments supporting the thesis of ethical relativism sometimes apply to moral belief more general arguments in epistemology in favor of relativism regarding all types of belief. If the truth or justification of any belief is measured in light of standards of truth and justification which are relative to individual believers or communities of believers, then so too for moral belief specifically. Note that this general epistemological argument for relativism, if valid, will apply to belief in science and so undermine the argument by analogy blocking the inference from cultural to ethical relativism.
Secondly, some philosophers can deny the analogy between moral beliefs and ordinary or scientific beliefs, not by claiming that all beliefs are subject to relativism, but by arguing that moral beliefs uniquely are. In this way it is possible to back ethical relativism without having to accept general epistemological relativism. There are several ways philosophers have set out in this way to divide and conquer. For one, ordinary and scientific beliefs share in common that they are about a mind-independent reality which serves as the ultimate court of appeal in matters of truth and justification. In matters of moral belief, by contrast, there is no mind-independent moral reality to play this role but only the world constructed by the shared beliefs of the tribe or the subjective moral point of view of the individual, and relativism is the consequence. For another, while ordinary and scientific beliefs are about the world, moral beliefs are not cognitive attitudes toward propositional contents at all, but rather the moral feelings and attitudes, commitments, evaluations, and prescriptions which moral agents form in response to agents and events in that world. These beliefs are, therefore, relative to the moral agents who have these non-cognitive attitudes. Thus, philosophers use anti-realist and non-cognitivist arguments from metaethics to reach ethical relativist conclusions.
Subjectivism is a form of relativism. It is the view that all truths or standards of justification are relative to the individual. Cognitivist relativism is the view that all truth is relative to the beliefs of the individual; non-cognitivist subjectivist relativism holds that the standards of justification are relative to the non-cognitive attitudes, feelings, or commitments of individuals.
Conscience is often understood as a form of subjectivism. For conscience is something private and inner, the seat of the individual's own moral conviction. To be guided by conscience is to follow one's own sense of what, morally speaking, one ought to do. In this subjectivist sense, the measure of morality, the ultimate moral standard, is relative to the deepest recesses of the subject herself.
Theoretical Wisdom
Theoretical wisdom is the systematic knowledge of all reality. Reality is a whole of parts. Wisdom is therefore, a whole of parts; this whole of wisdom is composed of knowledge of the parts of reality. Knowledge of the parts is according to principles. The parts of wisdom divide into topic neutral and topic specific knowldedge. Topic specific knowledge includes subject matters such as nature, God, mind, politics and morality. Neutral topics include logic, epistemology, and metaphysics.
Truth
We say that beliefs are true, that the sentences we utter are true, that the thoughts we express are true. Is the attribution of truth to beliefs, sentences, or the thoughts they express the ascription of a property to them? If truth is a property, what sort of a property is it?
Truth is often and traditionally understood as correspondence. So understood, a belief, for example, is true in the sense that its content accurately represents the way things are.
In ethics, truth becomes an important issue when the question is whether, on any account of truth, there are distinctively moral or ethical truths. For those for whom truth is correspondence, the idea that there are moral truths turns out to be unacceptable if there is no way to make sense of the underlying assumption that there a ways things morally really are.
Virtue or excellence is an ideal of perfection. In the very widest sense, animals and even instruments can have their virtue. As it pertains to human agents, virtue is attributed to those whose outstanding performance manifests an underlying disposition or habit which motivates the excellent conduct. Thus, we speak of an outstanding pianist or vocalist as a virtuoso if she typically gives recitals of the highest quality. It is not the great performance per se which warrants the attribution: it could have been a flash in the pan. Rather it is from the manifestation of the virtue which explains why the performance is not just a unique, non-repeatable event that we infer the virtuosity of the performer.
And the explanation is a causal one: it is the settled disposition to perform which causes the excellent performance; for the virtuous agent is motivated to act for the sake of the beauty or nobility of the outstanding action.
The idea of virtue is connected with performance of a specific function. Artificial kinds, for example, have their special functions. Knives are for cutting; some are not so sharp or even dull-edged and so do not perform their cutting function very well. However, a particularly good or excellent knife cuts especially well. Those which do not cut very well do not function as they should. An excellent knife does precisely as the ideal of the perfect knife implies that it ought. Eyes perform their function. Those which are capable of 20/20 vision are outstanding.
In the sphere of ethics or morality it is primarily agents, not actions or states of affairs which possess virtue. Philosophers distinguish a variety of virtues or perfection and classify them into different kinds. In the Plato’s Republic, Plato’s Socrates distinguishes between moderation, courage, justice, and wisdom. Since Aristotle, at the latest, philosophers have distinguished between moral and intellectual species of virtue, and have sorted the plurality of virtues into these different kinds.
Virtue Theory in Ethics
Virtue theory in ethics is a specific strand of normative ethics. It starts with the view that the agent and not actions or their consequences should be the primary moral focus for moral judgement. Conformity to moral rules is not sufficient for genuine moral worth. Only the agent whose conforming actions originate in his virtuous moral character is the proper object of moral appraisal. The moral qualities of the agent are paramount; the agent’s actions are of importance only because those actions manifest the moral qualities and character of the agent.
Thus, for the virtue theorist the moral appraisal of Socrates should concentrate on the kind of man he was, not on his specific deeds, except those which provide evidence of his character.