Engineering virtue: constructionist virtue ethics

ABSTRACT

Virtue ethics is traditionally a conservative project. It analyses the virtues that humanity has been relying on since antiquity. This conservatism unduly limits the potential of virtue ethics to contribute to moral progress. Instead, we should pay more attention to constructionist virtue ethics with the help of conceptual engineering. I will argue that revising and ameliorating the virtue concepts which a community uses directly and indirectly leads to a change of the virtues that exist in this community. By revising and innovating virtue concepts, we can re-make and improve the virtues that we have.

KEYWORDS:

• Virtue theory
• concepts
• metaphilosophy
• conceptual engineering

Acknowledgements:

I would like to thank Steffen Koch and the anonymous referees for their feedback on this paper. This paper was written with support from the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation and the German Ministry for Research and Education.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The question here is what kind of concepts folk morality gives rise to: An epistemicist would argue that unknown but precise concepts flow from folk morality. But you may also argue that the concepts of folk morality are vague or unstable due to the contradictory intuitions underwriting them. I would like to thank Steffen Koch for raising this issue.

2 The situationist challenge (Doris 2002; Alfano 2013) also concerns virtue engineers, as a constraint on the kind of concepts that they can design. A successful concept will be one that is actually instantiated.

3 Compare this to accounts of how the introduction of the term ‘sexual harassment’ only ever made the phenomenon tractable (Fricker 2007, 150–151).

4 Eve Kitsik is currently developing an account of participative conceptual engineering.

5 I want to thank an anonymous referee for raising this point.

6 If the natural kind concept periodic element was constructed and the same can be done with moral kind concepts of virtues, then this would imply an error theory about virtues just as we had an error theory about the elements.

7 For example, virtue reliabilism (Greco 1999).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung: [Grant Number DEU 1225691 FLF-P].