Michael Slote: Care Ethics and Motive-Based Virtue Ethics

Biography

Michael Slote was born in 1941 in the United States. He studied at Harvard University, where he earned his doctorate, and he has spent most of his career as a professor of philosophy at the University of Miami, where he holds the Ustinov Chair. Slote has been one of the most prolific and systematic moral philosophers of his generation, producing a steady stream of books that move across the full range of ethics: Goods and Virtues (1983), From Morality to Virtue (1992), Morals from Motives (2001), The Ethics of Care and Empathy (2007), A Sentimentalist Theory of the Mind (2014), and Human Development and Human Life (2016). His central project has been to develop a version of virtue ethics that is radical in a specific sense: instead of evaluating actions by their consequences or by conformity to rules, it evaluates them by the inner motives of the agent. This "agent-based" approach makes Slote's virtue ethics distinct from the "agent-centered" Aristotelianism of Philippa Foot and Rosalind Hursthouse, which focuses on the flourishing of the agent, and from "agent-prior" versions that give virtues independent normative weight. Slote has also been one of the leading philosophical defenders of care ethics, arguing that the ethics of care is not a corrective supplement to justice-based ethics but a complete moral theory in its own right.

Historical Background

Slote works in the analytic tradition, but his philosophy draws on two older strands that analytic moral philosophy had long neglected. The first is the virtue ethics of Aristotle, which Slote inherits and transforms: he accepts the Aristotelian claim that ethics should be built around character and the virtues, but he rejects Aristotle's eudaimonism, arguing that the virtues should not be defined by reference to the agent's own flourishing. The second is the moral sentimentalism of Hume, which grounds morality in the sentiments rather than in reason. In the eighteenth century, Hume and Adam Smith argued that moral distinctions are the product of the human capacity for sympathy; in the twentieth century this tradition was largely displaced by Kantian rationalism, utilitarianism, and non-cognitivism. Slote's distinctive achievement is to revive sentimentalism in a contemporary form: he argues that the morally good agent is one whose motives express caring concern, empathy, and warmth, and that rightness is grounded in such motives. This places Slote in direct opposition to Kant, and much of his work is an extended argument that the Kantian identification of morality with duty and universal law distorts the moral life, which is fundamentally a matter of caring about others.

Core Ideas

The core of Slote's ethics is agent-based virtue ethics. In Morals from Motives, he argues that the moral quality of actions is derivative from the moral quality of the motives from which they are performed: an action is right just in case it expresses or exhibits a good or virtuous motive, and an act is wrong just in case it expresses or exhibits a bad or vicious motive. This inverts the usual direction of explanation — instead of defining the virtuous motive by reference to right action, he defines right action by reference to virtuous motives. The fundamental motive is care: the morally good life is one of caring concern for others, and the specific virtues — benevolence, honesty, gratitude, kindness, justice — are forms that caring takes. Slote argues that care ethics, understood in this way, is a complete moral theory: it can account for the full range of moral phenomena, including the demands of justice, once we understand justice as a form of caring about fairness and about the vulnerable. His later work extends the framework into the emotions: A Sentimentalist Theory of the Mind defends a sentimentalist account of the mind as a whole, and his writings on moral education emphasize the role of empathy — modeled by parents and teachers and developed through practice — as the foundation of moral development. Warmth, receptivity, and empathy are, for Slote, not merely supporting emotions but the very substance of moral goodness.

Major Works

From Morality to Virtue (1992) develops Slote's critique of commonsense and rule-based moral theories and his first systematic statement of agent-based virtue ethics. Morals from Motives (2001) is his most important book, presenting the full theory of right action grounded in motives. The Ethics of Care and Empathy (2007) extends the framework into care ethics and moral education, arguing for empathy-based care as the foundation of both personal and political morality. A Sentimentalist Theory of the Mind (2014) generalizes his sentimentalism into a philosophy of mind and emotion, and Human Development and Human Life (2016) connects his ethics to developmental psychology. His shorter essays on caring, empathy, and the virtues have been widely anthologized in every contemporary reader on virtue ethics.

Philosophical Influence

Slote's agent-based approach defined one of the three main families of contemporary virtue ethics — alongside the eudaimonistic naturalism of Hursthouse and the pluralism of other contemporary theorists — and it remains the standard reference point for any attempt to ground ethics in motives rather than actions or consequences. His defense of care ethics as a complete moral theory gave philosophical respectability to a movement that had largely developed in feminist ethics, and his revival of moral sentimentalism has influenced the recent surge of interest in the role of emotion and empathy in morality. His work on empathy and moral education connects virtue ethics to developmental psychology and educational practice, and it has been influential in debates about the cultivation of empathy in children and in professional life.

Related Concepts

Slote's philosophy centers on care, empathy, and the virtues, and connects directly to the ethics of care tradition, to moral sentimentalism, and to the virtue ethics revival. It bears on the questions of what virtue is, how moral education works, how compassion and kindness are cultivated, and whether reason or sentiment is the foundation of morality.

Further Learning

See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry "Virtue Ethics" for the taxonomy of agent-based approaches, and read Morals from Motives for the full theory. The Ethics of Care and Empathy is the best introduction to his care ethics, and the IEP entry "Care Ethics" situates his position within the broader care ethics literature.