Rosalind Hursthouse: Neo-Aristotelian Virtue Ethics

Biography

Rosalind Hursthouse was born in 1943 in New Zealand and moved to England, where she pursued her career in academic philosophy. She studied at the University of Oxford, where she became a student and later a colleague of Philippa Foot, the philosopher who revived virtue ethics in the twentieth century and whose naturalistic approach Hursthouse would develop and systematize. Hursthouse held a long association with the Open University in the United Kingdom, where she taught philosophy for many years, and she has also held positions at other institutions including the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Her most important work is On Virtue Ethics (1999), which remains the most comprehensive and systematic defense of neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics in the contemporary literature. She has also written Beginning Lives (1987), a study of abortion and infanticide from a virtue-theoretic perspective, and Ethics, Humans and Other Animals (2000), which extends the framework to our treatment of animals. She is known for the clarity and rigor with which she defends the Aristotelian claim that the virtues are grounded in human nature and human flourishing, and for her insistence that virtue ethics is a complete moral theory — one that can answer the question "what should I do?" as well as the question "what kind of person should I be?"

Historical Background

Hursthouse belongs to the generation of philosophers who revived virtue ethics in the second half of the twentieth century. The revival began with Elizabeth Anscombe's landmark 1958 essay "Modern Moral Philosophy," which argued that the moral philosophy of the time, dominated by deontology and consequentialism, had lost the concepts of virtue, vice, and moral character that the ancient Greeks had treated as fundamental. Philippa Foot and Alasdair MacIntyre carried the project forward, MacIntyre's After Virtue (1981) arguing that the Enlightenment project of grounding morality in reason alone had failed and that we need to recover the Aristotelian tradition of the virtues. Hursthouse's contribution was to show that virtue ethics could be developed into a rigorous, systematic, and competitive moral theory rather than remaining a series of critiques of its rivals. Her On Virtue Ethics is explicitly neo-Aristotelian: it returns to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics for its central concepts — eudaimonia, the virtues, practical wisdom, and the doctrine of the mean — while responding to the objections raised against Aristotle's account in the intervening centuries.

Core Ideas

The center of Hursthouse's philosophy is a eudaimonistic form of virtue ethics. The virtues are character traits that are needed for eudaimonia — the flourishing or well-being that is the ultimate end of human life. Her naturalism, developed from Foot, holds that the standard of human goodness is analogous to the standard of goodness in plants and animals: just as a good oak is one that flourishes as an oak, so a good human being is one who flourishes as a human being, and the virtues are the traits that make such flourishing possible. This gives virtue ethics a distinctive structure: it is teleological, because it defines the right in terms of the good; naturalistic, because it grounds the good in human nature; and agent-centered, because it evaluates actions by reference to the character of the agent. Hursthouse's account of right action is that an action is right if and only if it is what a fully virtuous agent would characteristically do in the circumstances, and she defends this criterion against the charge that it is unhelpfully circular. She also restores practical wisdom to its Aristotelian centrality: the fully virtuous agent possesses phronesis, the perceptual and deliberative capacity to discern what the situation calls for, and it is this that unifies the virtues. Her work on applied ethics shows the framework in action: she argues that abortion, euthanasia, and our treatment of animals are best evaluated not by calculating consequences or applying rules but by considering what a virtuous agent would do, which virtues and vices the action expresses, and how the action bears on human flourishing.

Major Works

On Virtue Ethics (1999) is Hursthouse's masterwork and the definitive statement of neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics. Beginning Lives (1987) applies the approach to the ethics of abortion and infanticide, and is notable for arguing that the abortion debate is best framed not in terms of the status of the fetus alone but in terms of the virtues of parenthood and the moral character of the decision. Ethics, Humans and Other Animals (2000) extends the framework to our moral relations with animals, arguing that the virtues of compassion, benevolence, and justice require us to treat animals with moral consideration. Her articles, including the widely anthologized "Virtue Ethics and Abortion" (1991) and "Environmental Virtue Ethics" (2007), have shaped two generations of work in applied virtue ethics.

Philosophical Influence

Hursthouse's work transformed the philosophical status of virtue ethics. Before On Virtue Ethics, critics charged that virtue ethics was an interesting but incomplete approach that could not provide action guidance; after it, the charge lost its force, because Hursthouse showed that a fully developed virtue ethics can answer the question of what to do while retaining its distinctive emphasis on character and flourishing. Her naturalism has generated a large literature, both sympathetic and critical, on whether moral goodness can be grounded in human nature. Her defense of the virtues against the charge of egoism, her account of right action in terms of the virtuous agent, and her application of the framework to contested moral problems have made her one of the most cited moral philosophers of her generation, and her work remains a standard reference point in every contemporary debate in virtue ethics.

Related Concepts

Hursthouse's philosophy is built around eudaimonia, the flourishing that is the end of the virtues; practical wisdom, the intellectual virtue that guides action; moral character, the dispositional foundation of virtue; and integrity, the wholeness that the fully virtuous life exemplifies. Her work connects directly to the questions of what virtue is, how the virtues are unified, and what moral education must aim at.

Further Learning

See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry "Virtue Ethics" for a survey of her position, and read On Virtue Ethics for the full argument. Her "Virtue Ethics and Abortion" is the classic example of applying the framework to a concrete moral problem. Philippa Foot's Natural Goodness and Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue provide the immediate context for her project.