The Cambridge Companion to Virtue Ethics is an anthology of fourteen articles which cover central aspects of virtue ethics (VE): concepts, historical approaches and contemporary developments, and the applications of virtue ethics as a contemporary moral theory.

The volume starts with a key conceptual framework laid out by the editor, including the definition of virtue and its relation to happiness. The last chapter of the book, which is fairly similar to the first one in content, offers equally valuable fine-grained distinctions and remarkable conceptual precision. While chapter one is a great starting point to someone with little knowledge of ethics, chapter fourteen requires more philosophical training and finesse as it builds on the knowledge the reader has acquired from the previous chapters.

Chapters two through seven present historical accounts of virtues. The path begins with Greek philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle to the Stoics and Epicureans, and the first accounts of phronesis (practical wisdom) in chapter two, by Rachana Kamtekar, and continues with the fourth chapter’s description of virtue ethics in the middle ages, introducing the distinction between theological virtues (faith, hope, and charity) and cardinal virtues (justice, temperance, fortitude, and prudence). In this latter chapter, Jean Porter covers a lot of ground, historically speaking, and actually describes virtue ethics from late antiquity to the late 13^th century, focusing mostly on Aquinas (as is to be expected) and covering up to Duns Scot, but surprisingly stopping short of discussing Ockham or Buridan, for instance. In between these two chapters, Philip J. Ivanhoe offers us a very interesting view of Confucian virtue ethics, which compares thinkers of two different periods: Mengzi and Wang Yangming, and introduces a thought-provoking distinction between a virtue ethics of flourishing and a virtue ethics of sentiments, fashioned in a way that is very accessible to readers with no previous knowledge of Chinese philosophy.

In chapter 5, Paul Russell focuses on Hume’s account of human nature and its relation to virtue ethics, and this is the only chapter of this volume dedicated to one specific author, which I find it quite remarkable, especially when we consider that most of the other essays build up on an Aristotelian VE model. Hume’s virtue ethics stands out not only for not being strictly Aristotelian, but mostly for seeing some character traits, such as humility, as vices rather than virtues. The equivalence between virtue and vice and pleasurable and painful qualities of the mind, respectively, highlights his distancing himself from the religious traditions described by Porter in chapter four.

While, in chapter six, Dorothea Frede follows MacIntyre to give a great description of the transition from virtue as the main approach to ethics to its replacement by new types of theory in moral philosophy, culminating in a Kant-inspired ethics of duty at first, chapter seven addresses the revival of virtue ethics in the 20^th century, focusing on Anscombe and Foot, but without neglecting the various historical aspects which culminated in their 1958 and 1978 papers, respectively. From my point of view, it is no coincidence that this chapter by Timothy Chappell is literally a central one in the book: it is exactly because of this revival of virtue ethics that this volume is so necessary and pertinent.

Chapter eight is a nice transition to the more recent debate, with Liezl Van Zyl laying out variations of virtue ethics which were developed lately following Anscombe, Foot and MacIntyre: we have Hursthouse’s qualified-agent virtue ethics, Slote’s agent-based virtue ethics, and Swanton’s target centered account.

Chapters nine to thirteen describe how virtue ethics relates or can be applied to different domains: in bioethics, as Justin Oakley presents it, the issues covered are mostly those related to health-care ethics: euthanasia, abortion, prebirth testing. What stands out about this chapter is that Oakley manages to shy away from the more pedestrian bioethics we find in textbooks and, after glancing at some of the ways in which Foot, Anscombe and MacIntyre have dealt with the canonical applied ethics questions, he turns to very recent scholarship, which takes into account the latest scientific developments and offers us a more robust view of how virtue ethics can be a significant contribution to this kind of bioethical debate.

Matt Zwolinski and David Schmidtz begin chapter ten with a standard strategy: laying out the two main kinds of normative ethical approaches to what makes an action right (consequentialism and deontology), offer virtue ethics as an alternative account, and then show why the latter makes for a better account than the former two through examples that are centered around environmental issues. While this is not your standard chapter on environmental ethics, it also helps dispel the simplistic view according to which environmental ethics is just another branch of bioethics. Instead, it approaches environmental questions as being as broad as the range of application of virtue ethics, including metaphysical and metaethical debates.

As Edwin Hartman rightfully points out in the beginning of chapter eleven, MacIntyre definitely does not agree with him in that there can be virtue in business, nor that business ethics is not an oxymoron. Nevertheless, Hartman follows MacIntyre and Robert Solomon to build his approach to virtue ethics in business. Although MacIntyre’s critique, laid out by Hartman, is quite convincing indeed, the latter also makes quite a compelling case for replacing a simple cost-benefit analysis in business, which bears strong resemblance to some utilitarian theories, with a virtue perspective, which takes into account the skills, teachings and experiences acquired by the businessperson and which qualifies her for optimal decision-making.

Mark Lebar’s strategy for his chapter on virtue and politics is to narrow the scope of his study down to the justification of political authority and to whether a liberal conception of political authority is compatible with virtue ethics. For this, he draws on authors we have seen in previous chapters, such as Slote, Nussbaum, Hursthouse, and Swanton, but also introduces scholarship which specifically pertains to the issues being dealt with here (Rasmussen, Den Uyl, and Rawls), focusing on how rights and pluralism, taken within a virtue ethics approach, may work with justificatory liberalism.

Chapter thirteen, on the situationist critique of virtue ethics, deals with the alleged empirical inadequacy of virtue ethics, especially in what concerns psychology. Gopal Sreenivasan shows how critics of VE challenge the idea of character traits and point out problems concerning the acquisition of virtue, and tries to sketch out a defense of virtue theory against these criticisms.

The final chapter, by Christine Swanton, reviews, as has been mentioned above, some of the main concepts presented in the preceding thirteen chapters and serves as a neat recapitulative conclusion to the volume.

In collections of essays such as these, it is inevitable that we find recurrent ideas across its chapters, but unless one is reading the whole book in one breath, the repetition will not be that striking, and may actually be helpful to the neophyte, serving as a reminder of key conceptual or historical aspects of virtue ethics.

Although I would mostly recommend this book to upper-division undergraduates or beginning graduate students, some of the essays in specific areas or traditions may be of interest even to advanced scholars, due to their approach which includes areas less discussed in more traditional accounts, such as Chinese philosophy, or business virtue ethics. Moreover, its focus on contemporary research on virtue ethics makes this book a particularly valuable resource to ethics scholars with different levels of expertise.

© 2015 Aline Medeiros Ramos

 

Aline Medeiros Ramos, PhD candidate in Philosophy at Université du Québec à Montréal, (Canada). https://sites.google.com/site/alinemramos/