The Nicomachean Ethics - rational and practical.

Aristotle's ethics is great because it is practical. What is important to Aristotle is that people develop phronesis (practical wisdom or prudence), and that they actually improve their character. As James Keenan has put it, virtue ethics asks 3 questions: 'who am I?'; 'what should I become?'; and 'how do I get there?' In other words, we basically need to follow the Greek mantra: "know thyself", and know how to be better people.

Lots of religions teach their followers how to be better people, so maybe this is not so new after all. Christianity has explicitly taken a virtue ethics approach - in Aquinas' writings, for example -and Catholics today continue to endorse such ideas by talking of the 'cardinal virtues' and the theological virtues that St Paul mentions in Corinthians 13: "faith, hope and love" (the greatest being love).

I have no problem with the elevation of love - (compassion, agape, caritas - whatever you want to call it) - to such an important place. Actually, if I could make one major change to the Nicomachean Ethics, it would be to insert a chapter extolling the virtue of empathy and loving kindness. I don't mind hope either... I like optimism, and I would agree that one needs to find a golden mean between wishful-thinking and pessimism. However, treating faith as a virtue is much more dubious. Everyone places faith in certain basic ideas, such as that we exist, and other people's minds are not an illusion, and there is a physical world around us which does not disappear when we shut our eyes. But, of course, St Paul meant for us to have faith in something essentially unknowable and unfalsifiable.

Numerous atheists (yes, including Richard Dawkins, of course) have pointed out the survival-value that is conferred upon religion by promoting that kind of 'faith' as a virtue. But its practical benefit to us is negligible (aside from providing comfort). It is only useful for those who already have accepted the other clever survival-ensuring idea that religion promotes: that we are innately bad people, doomed, sinners, in need of salvation, etc.

Aristotle's account of the virtues is great because they allow us to find a more practical balance between selfishness and selflessness. Christianity has always promoted self-sacrifice, so much so that it is hard not to see it as a virtue. Yet, it does not take much to see that it is essentially irrational and not 'universalisable' in the Kantian sense. Aristotle ethics is by no means individualistic, but instead offers hope that one can aim for both the good of the community and one's own good at the same time.

To finish, I shall quote from 'Pol Culture' - a fine blog, which contains, amongst other things, a detailed explanation of the Nicomachean Ethics:

"Justice requires wisdom, which Aristotle defines as "the union of intuitive reason and science". One must know what is good, and one must know how to go about achieving it. As Aristotle writes, "He who is absolutely wise in deliberation is he who aims, by a reasonable process, at that which is best for a man in practical life". The means to wisdom is prudence, which employs the scientific and deliberative capacities to determine the best course of action in practice. Its goal is wisdom, and it rules in wisdom's interest."

[emphasis is mine]

MacIntyre: bring back Aristotle's approach to ethics!

Alasdair MacIntyre has argued that ethical theories such as Bentham's Utilitarianism or Kant's deontological ethics have led Western moral philosophy into a dead-end. Anyone who has taken a course in ethics has probably been presented with dilemmas such as the famous hypothetical scenarios (there are lots of variations on this theme) where you can kill one person in order to save 5 others, or where you must choose between things such as betraying a friend or telling a lie. The thing is, he argues, such dilemmas are unsolvable, because there are so many unknown variables and there is no real context to the scenarios.

However, who cares?
After all, these aren't real cases.

However, anyone who has taken a course in ethics has probably also been presented with real ethical problems too: What should the law be on euthanasia? Is embryo research in order to find cures for diseases justifiable? Western moral philosophers seem just as unable to come up with consistent answers to these debates. After all, where do we start? Which meta-ethical scheme should we start with?

MacIntyre suggests that since the enlightenment, this never-ending argument has led Western ethics towards an impasse. Since there is no agreement on a starting point, the different sides to these debates have become 'incommensurable'. When people get understandably disillusioned, they set out on a road towards a moral relativism (or Nietzschean nihilism) where there are no right answers; where anybody's viewpoint is considered equally valid and there is no such thing as moral truth. Whilst I can sympathize with some of those who have argued that such relativism is rational, I share MacIntyre's distaste for this state of affairs. It is all too easy for people to take the cop-out route of just saying: this is my point of view, that's your view, and that's that.

Aristotle's ethics, however, offers us a starting point. There is a common goal to moral philosophy: to achieve eudaimonia (i.e. to live well). Everybody wants to be good, and everybody wants to be happy. Being virtuous, the Nicomachean Ethics showed us, was not a choice between doing the right thing or being happy. One isn't tied to fixed rules, nor does one have to act as if 'beneficial' consequences are all that matters.

Although I admit that it's not as if everything falls into place once you accept this basis of eudaimonia, I am inclined to agree that this is the way forward. Deciding what the virtues are is the next step. Understanding how to live in accordance with the appropriate virtues is another aspect to develop. However, within a society, I reckon these can be largely agreed upon, and provide a much better launchpad for real moral debates, rather than the formulas (both simplistic and complex) proposed to deal with a hypothetical dilemma-based ethics.

There are many critiques of MacIntyre's ethics that I would generally agree with, however as for his argument for a return to 'virtue ethics' - (which Elizabeth Anscombe and others have done too, I should point out) - I am thoroughly in favour.