Aristotle's account of eudaimonia and the function argument, virtue as a disposition of character, the doctrine of the mean, the role of habituation, practical wisdom (phronesis) and voluntary action, and objections including circularity, guidance, conflicting virtues and cultural relativity.

What this dot point is asking

AQA wants you to explain Aristotle's virtue ethics as an account of how to become a good person: the goal of eudaimonia and the function argument, virtues as stable character traits acquired by habituation, the doctrine of the mean, the role of practical wisdom and voluntary action, and the objections of circularity, lack of action-guidance, conflicting virtues and cultural relativity.

Eudaimonia and the function argument

Virtue, the mean and habituation

We are not born virtuous: virtues of character are acquired through habituation, by repeatedly performing virtuous acts until acting well becomes second nature, just as we become builders by building.

Practical wisdom and voluntary action

• Practical wisdom (phronesis). An intellectual virtue: the developed capacity to perceive what the situation demands and to deliberate well about how to hit the mean. Without phronesis the virtues of character cannot be exercised correctly.
• Voluntary, involuntary and non-voluntary action. Moral responsibility, and so praise and blame, attaches only to voluntary action, where the origin is in the agent and they know the relevant particulars. Actions done through force or out of unavoidable ignorance are involuntary.

Objections

• The guidance problem. Virtue ethics tells us to act as the virtuous person would, but this gives little concrete direction in hard cases compared with a rule or a calculation.
• Circularity. A right action is what a virtuous person does, and a virtuous person is one who does right actions; the account can seem to go in a circle.
• Clashing virtues. Honesty and kindness can pull in opposite directions, and the theory may not say which wins.
• Cultural relativity. What counts as a virtue, or as the mean, appears to vary between cultures, threatening the objectivity of the account.

The objections developed

The guidance and circularity objections are the ones examiners most reward developing carefully, because they go to whether virtue ethics is a usable moral theory at all. The guidance objection says that "do what the virtuous person would do" is unhelpful when I am trying to decide what to do, since I am precisely the person who does not yet know. The standard reply (developed by modern virtue ethicists such as Rosalind Hursthouse) is that the theory does generate action guidance through the v-rules, prescriptions of the form "do what is honest, do what is courageous, do not do what is cruel", which are no more empty than a deontologist's rules and which a learner can apply while developing the perception of the wise person. The circularity objection presses harder: a right action is defined as what a virtuous person does, and a virtuous person as one who does right actions. The reply is to break the circle by anchoring both in eudaimonia, so the virtues are the traits a human being needs to flourish, and right action is what flourishing requires, with neither defined simply in terms of the other.

The clashing virtues and relativity objections probe the theory's determinacy and objectivity. When honesty and kindness pull apart, the theory does not give an algorithm, but its defender argues that this reflects a genuine feature of moral life that rule-based theories paper over, and that practical wisdom is exactly the capacity to weigh competing considerations in the particular case. The relativity worry, that different cultures count different traits as virtues, can be met by tying the virtues to objective facts about human nature and flourishing, so that what counts as the mean may vary in expression while the underlying virtue (the trait that serves flourishing) is constant. A strong evaluation acknowledges that this naturalistic grounding is itself contested, since it appears to derive an "ought" (the virtues) from an "is" (human nature).