Robert Louden 'The Vices of Virtue Ethics'
Hi everyone, I am analysing a piece of text for an ethics presentation. Its based on the work of Robert Louden who offers a critique of virtue ethics and its role in ethical decision making. His conclusion is as follows:
"It is important to see the ethics of virtue and the ethics of rules as adding up, rather than cancelling each other out. We need to begin efforts to coordinate irreducible or strong notions of virtue along with irreducible or strong conceptions of the various act notions into our conceptual scheme of morality".
So Louden basically wants to combine a rule based ethical theory with the virtue ethics approach of looking at our character and doing what the virtuous person would do. He believes this is the best approach to moral decision making. Obviously Louden's suggestion seems a great one but I wonder how we would actually go about achieving this. Surely, if this were possible and would give us all the answers why has this approach not been done already?
What do you guys think?
"It is important to see the ethics of virtue and the ethics of rules as adding up, rather than cancelling each other out. We need to begin efforts to coordinate irreducible or strong notions of virtue along with irreducible or strong conceptions of the various act notions into our conceptual scheme of morality".
So Louden basically wants to combine a rule based ethical theory with the virtue ethics approach of looking at our character and doing what the virtuous person would do. He believes this is the best approach to moral decision making. Obviously Louden's suggestion seems a great one but I wonder how we would actually go about achieving this. Surely, if this were possible and would give us all the answers why has this approach not been done already?
What do you guys think?
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