Guy Crain

Rowland Stout argues that a disposition toward violence in certain circumstances counts as a virtue in Aristotle’s sense. In this paper, I will offer three reasons to reject Stout’s position. First, I will present Stout’s position. I will then argue that the plausibility of Stout’s position capitalizes on a rhetorical sleight-of-hand, what has been called the “faux anonymization of agents,” without which his position is less plausible. Next, I will argue that Stout’s own method supports conclusions which Aristotle explicitly rejects—namely, that adultery, theft, and murder could also count as virtuous. Finally, I will argue that Stout fails to account for the fact that human flourishing limits the types of environments that can be used as hypothetical tools by which to discover what counts as a virtue.

In this paper I argue that the trolley method of moral philosophy has three shortcomings not yet adequately addressed in the literature. First, trolley problems highlight high stakes ethical decisions. These decisions do not represent the majority of ethical decisions made by most people, and thus, the trolley method ignores most of moral life. Second, the trolley method operates by way of a faux-anonymization of moral agents. This process leads to descriptions of moral agents being unwittingly supplied by those to whom the problems are presented and thereby the formation of a paradigmatic moral agent which excludes a considerable number of real world moral persons. Lastly, the trolley method mischaracterizes what most moral decision-making is like by presenting a moral agent's decision as isolated, uninfluenced, and made with full self-awareness.