A Principled Sensibility: Rules and the Life of Virtue

One of the defining features of a virtue-theoretic approach to ethics, it is often thought, is that it is particularistic rather than universalistic. Recent defenses of particularism, however, should make a virtue theorist wary of being too closely identified with it. According to Jonathan Dancy, and other radical particularists, not only can we not codify any natural features of a situation that will always count in favor of an action being the right or wrong thing to do, the fact that someone acts out of a virtuous disposition also need provide no reason in favor of thinking that they thereby act rightly. These claims are not only in tension with traditional defenses of virtue ethics, but seem to many implausible on their own grounds. And yet, virtue theorists rightly insist that their take on morality is not merely a pale imitation of an ethic of rules.

Sustaining this position, neither radically particularistic nor reductively rule-based, is the aim of this dissertation. I begin by distinguishing the more radical ontological version of particularism defended by Dancy from an epistemic version, arguing that the virtue theorist's emphasis on the primacy of virtues over rules requires only the former. What is more, there are positive reasons for rejecting the latter; neither a satisfactory account of the role of generalities in moral discourse nor of moral motivation can be given if it is true.

Turning to the constructive task of giving a virtue-theoretic account of moral rules, I propose a novel analysis of non-trivial absolute moral prohibitions which articulates their importance without reducing the virtuous agent's moral deliberations to a mechanical application of rules. Particularists are right, however, that most of the moral generalities to which the virtuous agent appeals are defeasible generalizations. But such generalities, if they are to be justified, must be grounded in reflection on the place they play in a complete human life, lived within a concrete community. Ethical reflection in general, and about the role of moral rules in particular, not only begins, but also ends, with the aim of making sense of my life as whole.