Rosalind Hursthouse

Rosalind Hursthouse took her undergraduate degree in New Zealand and her B. Phil. and D. Phil. at Oxford. She taught in Oxford for six years before joining the Open University in 1975. As part of her work for the O.U. she has published Beginning Lives (Blackwell, 1987) on the morality of abortion; this generated Virtue theory and abortion, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1991) which has already been reprinted five times. She has published numerous other articles on virtue ethics, the most recent of which is virtue ethics and the emotions, in: Virtue Ethics, A Critical Reader, Daniel Statman (ed.) Edinburgh University Press, 1997.

What motivates the benevolent or charitable agent is regard for another’s good or well-being, but talk about regard for others’ good or well- being is simply talk about benevolence or charity in different terms. Yet Hume clearly holds that the regard for another’s good is a motive to produce benevolent acts that is distinct from a sense of their benevolence. So what is the difference? ‘Well’, one might say, ‘intuitively, rights are very different from wellbeing.’ Yes indeed. And that, I shall contend, is Hume’s point. My general contention is that Hume’s discussion of justice is in fact an attack on that concept of rights we think of as having motivated the American and French revolutions, a concept that is still (deplorably in my view) prevalent. I think the very fact that it is so prevalent and so sanctified by its position in the American Constitution has blinded most readers to the power and plausibility of Hume’s attack, which I shall try to defend.

This essay treats the development of Foot’s efforts to produce a naturalistic theory of moral judgement from her early “Moral Beliefs” to her 2001 book Natural Goodness. Although she consistently attempts to isolate and defend a notion of goodness that is grounded in goodness in living things, she is not attempting to get ethics out of biology, especially not evolutionary biology: “species/life-form” in her and Thompson is the everyday concept not the specialised evolutionary theory one. She is just making a claim about the conceptual structure, or grammar, of our moral evaluations of ourselves being the same as the structure of our evaluations of other living things. How then does she cope with the is-ought gap? She rethinks our practical reason just as a faculty like our sight and hearing, which can be, or fail to be, in good working order in a good, or defective, human being. Viewed this way, discriminating recognition of pleasure/the satisfaction of desire as a reason and recognition of self-interest as a reason, and following each when appropriate, are both involved in the faculty’s being in good working order. And so is the discriminating recognition and following of the reasons that pertain to the virtues. She is claiming and not denying that we are a very special sort of living thing. We are human rational agents and when we evaluate ourselves as such, which we do in moral judgements, everything undergoes a “sea change.” So she is espousing the sort of naturalism that McDowell describes as “the radical and satisfying alternative to subjectivism and supernaturalism,” not his other “natural-scientific” sort.

The proponents of neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism (henceforth “Aristotelian naturalism” for short) include Foot (2001), Geach (1956, 1977), Hursthouse (1999), McDowell (1995), MacIntyre (1999), Nussbaum (1993, 1995), and Thompson (1995); and also Anscombe because her work has influenced so many others. (Gaut [1997, 2002] should also be known as a significant contributor.) Their views are so unlike those of other proponents of ethical naturalism (see Naturalism, Ethical), and they occupy such an unfamiliar position in philosophy, that they are simultaneously criticized on at least two quite different bases. Some say they are not trying to offer naturalism at all, because they avowedly employ a moralized conception of human nature; some say they are trying to offer naturalism insofar as they offer a biological foundation for ethics, but that either this has counterintuitive upshots or the biology is Aristotle's and thereby pre-Darwinian and not a proper naturalistic foundation at all.

The sort of ethical theory derived from Aristotle, variously described as virtue ethics, virtue-based ethics, or neo-Aristotelianism, is becoming better known, and is now quite widely recognized as at least a possible rival to deontological and utilitarian theories. With recognition has come criticism, of varying quality. In this article I shall discuss nine separate criticisms that I have frequently encountered, most of which seem to me to betray an inadequate grasp either of the structure of virtue theory or of what would be involved in thinking about a real moral issue in its terms. In the first half I aim particularly to secure an understanding that will reveal that many of these criticisms are simply misplaced, and to articulate what I take to be the major criticism of virtue theory. I reject this criticism, but do not claim that it is necessarily misplaced. In the second half I aim to deepen that understanding and highlight the issues raised by the criticisms by illustrating what the theory looks like when it is applied to a particular issue, in this case, abortion.

The sort of ethical theory derived from Aristotle, variously described as virtue ethics, virtue-based ethics, or neo-Aristotelianism, is becoming better known, and is now quite widely recognized as at least a possible rival to deontological and utilitarian theories. With recognition has come criticism, of varying quality. In this article I shall discuss nine separate criticisms that I have frequently encountered, most of which seem to me to betray an inadequate grasp either of the structure of virtue theory or of what would be involved in thinking about a real moral issue in its terms. In the first half I aim particularly to secure an understanding that will reveal that many of these criticisms are simply misplaced, and to articulate what I take to be the major criticism of virtue theory. I reject this criticism, but do not claim that it is necessarily misplaced. In the second half I aim to deepen that understanding and highlight the issues raised by the criticisms by illustrating what the theory looks like when it is applied to a particular issue, in this case, abortion.

In recent years virtue theory, which is derived from Aristotle’s moral philosophy, has become increasingly popular as an alternative both to deontological theories such as Kant’s and to consequentialism such as Mill’s utilitarianism. Here Rosalind Hursthouse (1943– ) sketches the main features of such virtue theory or neo-Aristotelianism, bringing out its distinctive approach. Neo-Aristotelians are interested not just in particular actions, but in the flourishing of individuals over a lifetime; they are concerned with character traits rather than duties. The essential question for a neo-Aristotelian is not ‘Which actions are right or wrong?’ but rather ‘How am I to live well?’ (From Rosalind Hursthouse, Beginning Lives, 1987)

Philippa Foot (1920–2010) is widely regarded as one of the foremost Anglo-American moral philosophers of the twentieth century. Her published work, spanning 50 years, consisted entirely of essays until its culmination in her only monograph, Natural Goodness (2001). Although her work forms, by and large, a coherent whole, subsets of the essays relate to different areas of ethics, in each of which she made a substantial contribution. In applied ethics, most of the essays are on abortion (1967, 1970, 1985). In the first one she famously introduced the trolley problem, one of many examples employed in a subtle discussion of the moral relevance of foreseen consequences involving the death of the innocent. The discussion involves the distinction between killing and letting die – a key feature in all the abortion essays, and also in “Euthanasia” (Foot 1977).

Aristotle (384–322 BC) was born in Stagira, Macedonia. He went to Athens and entered Plato's Academy when he was eighteen. He remained there until Plato's death in about 347 BC, when he left Athens to spend the next five years at Assos in Asia Minor and at Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, working on philosophy and biology. In 343 he was invited to return to Macedonia to tutor the son of Philip II of Macedonia, the future Alexander the Great. This lasted three or four years. After a further period at Stagira, Aristotle returned to Athens where he opened a philosophical school at the Lyceum or Peripatos. On the death of Alexander in 323 there was anti-Macedonian feeling in Athens, and to avoid the same fate as Socrates, Aristotle took refuge in Chalcis on the island of Euboea, leaving the school in the charge of his pupil Theophrastus. He died the following year.