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The universality of virtue ethics — I — Buddhism
Aspects of virtue ethics are found in all major Eastern philosophical traditions
Virtue ethics is one of the three major approaches to ethics developed within Western philosophy, the other two being Kantian-style deontology and Bentham and Miller-style utilitarianism. I think the latter two are good examples of wrong turns in philosophical inquiry, as they are both decidedly less useful (in my opinion) than virtue ethics.
Both deontology and utilitarianism seek to establish a universal, agent-independent criterion for the moral evaluation of human actions. In the case of Kantian deontology, an action is moral if it accords with the famous categorical imperative: “Act as if the maxims of your action were to become through your will a universal law of nature,” Kant says in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.
In the case of utilitarianism, an action is moral if it increases the overall amount of happiness in the population: “By the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever according to the tendency it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question: or, what is the same thing in other words to promote or to oppose that happiness” (Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation).
This is not the place to get into an in-depth discussion of why I think these two approaches are misguided. Suffices to say that I think ethics is better understood as pertinent to specific (not universal) situations and criteria for action, and — more importantly — as concerned with the growth of the individual, not with impersonal rules or quantities to be maximized, let alone with allegedly objective judgments of “moral” or “immoral.”
Interestingly, there is good empirical evidence that the concept of virtue is universal across human cultures, despite local variation in the list and definitions of the various virtues. It is therefore reasonable to ask whether virtue ethics itself, that is an approach to ethics concerned with the cultivation of character, has been developed outside of the Greco-Roman (and, later on, Christian) tradition. I am therefore beginning a series of…
