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Virtue ethics as a distinct moral theory rooted in friendship and community

In

Richard Y Chappell

and

Daniel Muñoz

’s recent debate between deontology and consequentialism, they both noted that they struggled to understand virtue ethics as a distinct third theory that doesn't reduce down to either consequentialism or deontology. In this post I'll share how I understand virtue ethics, based primarily on Aristotle’s ‘Nicomachean Ethics’ and MacIntyre’s ‘After Virtue’, and building on what I wrote in a recent note:

Virtue Ethics as Ethics of Friendship

Virtue ethics is often presented as morality that is centred around the concept of virtue (after all, it is in the name). But this leads to understandable confusion, since it leaves out what constitutes a virtue and how to weigh them. Instead, I would argue that virtue ethics is all about friendship/community: building friendships, strengthening them, and maintaining them.

For this post, friendship and community are understood in a very broad sense, as being joined in cooperation towards certain shared goals. The difference between the two is that friendship is generally deeper and involves fewer persons, whereas community may be broader and less personal. But the two exist on a spectrum, and we might consider every community as a friendship and every friendship as a community.

The highest forms of friendship involve the deepest cooperation and the deepest sharing of goals, where each friend fully shares the others' goals and pursues them as their own. Weaker forms of friendship involve less cooperation and less sharing of goals. For example, you may have a work friendship where you help each other enjoy the work day and get your work done, but no more. Or going weaker still, you may be a member of a gardening club, where you cooperate to help each other garden effectively and improve one's gardening skills.

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Inherent in each friendship and community are certain goals and expectations. The goals are what define the friendship, and then certain expectations follow from that shared goal, which may be crystallised into explicit rules. For example,

• Citizens share a goal of having a good society to live in and raise future generations in. From this, there arise expectations that we will not harm each other and will contribute to the common good. And further, we establish set rules: laws, regulations, taxes, etc. Those who harm society or break its rules are bad citizens, and may be punished. Those who best promote the good of society (eg by volunteering or donating to good causes) are good citizens.

• Members of a study group share a goal of getting good grades. This brings expectations that they support and not disrupt each others' studying. Those who undermine the group's goals are bad study group members, and may be kicked out. Those who support its goals (eg by bringing snacks and helping others) are good members.

• Close friends have the shared goal of each others' general good. They are therefore expected to help each other out where they can, and to not harm one another. If a friend neglects their friend's good or harms them, they are not being a good friend, and may damage or even destroy the friendship. If they consistently help their friend pursue their good, they are a good friend.

Each friendship/community comes with its own standard of what it means to be “good”. It is these standards that, when taken together, constitute being a “good person”. It is not anything apart from being a good spouse, parent, child, friend, colleague, citizen, employer, student etc. It is the totality of one’s life and relationships.

[Aside: it’s interesting to note that the deeper the friendship, the less explicit the expectations tend to be. We don't have explicit rules for our closest friends, but we might lay out some vague rules for a small club, some stricter rules for a business, and extremely precise laws at the level of the state. This makes sense: deeper friendships need fewer rules because the goals are more shared.]

Virtue

In this context, the virtues are understood as those personal qualities or habits that make a good friend/community member. Things like courage, good judgment, fairness, temperance, generosity, honesty, discretion etc.

You might be wondering, why make virtue central to virtue ethics? Why focus on character instead of choices, like deontology and consequentialism tend to? The answer is that friendship and community are long-term things, and so we need to apply a long-term lens. We need to look at the thousands of tiny decisions that add up to form our relationships, not just the few big ones that appear most significant. The impact of each separate decision is often impossible to discern, but when taken together they add up and are often what make the difference.

Learning and applying the virtues is not easy. Not because they are complicated, but because life and ethics are an art, not a science. It requires subtlety and skill, and cannot be learned simply by reading a rule book or applying a formula. The virtuous man/woman is more like a skilled cook than like a scientist: it involves good judgment¹, knowing what's needed, when, and how much.

So how do we learn or teach virtue? Through telling stories, playing games, and through lived experience. We have to learn how to live by living (although living vicariously through stories and games helps). This is why, when faced with an ethical conundrum, we don't turn to moral philosophers but to those we look up to with more life experience. They are the expert cooks who can save our wrong-looking cake.

Non-social virtues and self love

In a discussion under my above note,

Corsaren

rightly pointed out that there are certain traditional virtues/vices that are not entirely social in character. How can I reconcile this with my characterisation of virtue ethics as centred around friendship/community?

These virtues can be seen as involving a kind of friendship with oneself, or with nature, or perhaps even with God. So gluttony, for example, may be considered a vice because it involves a bad relationship with one’s body and with food. The body is not being viewed as a partner to cooperate with, but as something to be used or abused for pleasure.

This concept of friendship with oneself is not my invention, but can be found in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. There he points out that, for the good man, he is his own best friend: he is at one with himself, sharing his own goals without inner conflict; he enjoys his own company; he desires his own existence; he works towards his goals; he feels his pains and joys. These are the ways that a good friend relates to their friend. As he put it, “a friend is another self”.

Rights, obligations, and rules

There are some parallels to Kant's moral reasoning here. Friendship and community do require viewing each other as ends, not means. And we can derive good communal norms via something like his universalizability test, except in a more limited form: in each community, act only according to that maxim whereby you can will that it should become a communal law. It is treating your friends or community members as your equals, and understanding that you cannot reasonably expect more from others than you are willing to provide yourself. That kind of inequality rapidly breeds resentment and destroys friendships and communities.

If we view all of humanity as part of a single human community (which is desirable), then Kant's logic does (at least roughly) follow. The issue is that we cannot simply view all of humanity as a single community, because there are those who reject and undermine that community. There are those who are not working with the rest of humanity, but are actively working against us. We might be gracious and still consider them as “suspended” members of the human community with some minimal remaining rights, but we should not treat them as our friends to the same extent that we treat the innocent as our friends. This is why we may, for example, imprison criminals, or lie to Nazis. Our obligations to our friends require it, and as they are not our friends we do not have the same obligations to them.

Friendship, happiness and utilitarianism

I don't imagine any utilitarians would deny the value of community and friendship or that they are pretty much essential to human happiness. The question is, which is more fundamental to ethics, friendship, or happiness?

I would suggest that friendship is happiness in social form, and happiness is friendship in its most general form. In a previous post on the nature of happiness, I wrote,

there is a distinct structure to my experience of happiness. Particularly, it seems to have an essential “outwardness” and “openness”, while sadness is turned inwards and closed off. Happiness is affirmative, it is a Yes! to the world.

Happiness is a sense of friendship and being at one with oneself and with the world. It is found in that feeling of flow when everything within and between yourself and the world around you are aligned and cooperating towards a shared goal.²

Photo by Joseph Pearson on Unsplash

Even if you don't accept friendship and happiness being equated in this way, I think it is clear that the greatest joys of life are derived via some form of friendship. A human being working on their own is likely to struggle and suffer greatly. It's via cooperation that we are able to achieve incredible things and vastly improve our wellbeing.

Virtue ethics is in any case explicitly centred around the pursuit of happiness. Or rather “eudaimonia”, a Greek word with a much richer meaning, sometimes translated as “flourishing”. It is, however, focused on pursuing such happiness for the individual (and by extension their friends and community), rather than the greatest net happiness for all beings. Equating friendship and happiness again, virtue ethics doesn't necessarily care for increasing the net friendship in the world, but for improving and increasing my friendships.

It might be that it somehow works out that focusing on one's own friendships is necessarily optimal for net worldwide friendship too. This doesn't seem entirely implausible to me. It certainly seems right that the primary way to increase net friendship in the world would be by simply being a good friend.

Conclusion

Virtue ethics is often seen as being vague and poorly defined. But if we properly understand it as centred around friendship and community, and what it means to be “good” within such relationships, we see that virtue ethics offers a grounded, intuitive, and deeply human account of morality.

Morality is not about rational principles or finding the inflection point in a utility calculus: the real morality is the friends we made along the way.

What do you think?

• Does virtue ethics deserve to be taken seriously?

• Is friendship/community a sufficient basis for morality?

• Is my attempted reconciliation of virtue ethics, deontology, and utilitarianism plausible?

• Can you think of some ethical conundrums that might stump virtue ethics?

Let me know in the comments!

1. in Aristotle's terminology “phronesis”

2. This understanding of happiness fits nicely with the free energy principle, which (very roughly) says that living organisms create and impose expectations on their world, in order to find harmony between themselves and the world. This is arguably the most fundamental biological imperative of all. We may then understand the expectations of various friendships and communities as examples of this dynamic, seeking ultimately to realise that goal of perfect harmony.