ABSTRACT

One charge against virtue ethics is that it is unable to provide solutions to practical moral issues, and hence can hardly be a normative rival to utilitarianism and deontology. As one critic remarks, “People have always expected ethical theory to tell them something about what they ought to do, and it seems to me that virtue ethics is structurally unable to say much of anything about this issue” (Louden 1997: 205). This charge is hardly new, for even long before the contemporary revival of virtue ethics, H. A. Prichard claimed that an appropriate moral philosophy should address the issue of what one ought to do, yet Aristotle's ethics is not up to that task and is therefore disappointing. 1 In response to this charge, the defenders of virtue ethics insist that normative virtue ethics exists and can guide actions by telling us what one should do. Virtue ethics can come up with a large number of rules, “not only does each virtue generate a prescription—act honestly, charitably, unjustly, but each vice is a prohibition—do not act dishonestly, uncharitably, unjustly” (Hursthouse 1996: 25). It should also be noted that one reason for the revival of virtue revive is precisely because of the limits, conflicts, and application of the action-guiding rules.