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Reviewed by:
  • Virtue Ethics Old and New
  • Pamela M. Hall
Stephen M. Gardiner, editor. Virtue Ethics Old and New. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. Pp. 236. Paper, $23.00.

Anyone paying the least attention to philosophy in the last four decades cannot fail to have noticed the revival of virtue ethics in Anglo-American moral philosophy. This revival, with its roots in post-war Oxford and Cambridge, has sought to reconnect ethics with the vocabulary and concepts of the ancient Greeks. By recourse to its vocabulary of virtue, moral theorists have sought a richer and deeper moral psychology as well as consideration of nature and teleology. The movement has bred some of the most interesting and powerful work in recent Anglo-American ethics by thinkers as diverse as Iris Murdoch, Martha Nussbaum, and Alasdair MacIntyre, and interest in the virtues continues unabated. It has indeed spread beyond the academy into the political and cultural scene.

Drawn from a conference of the same name held at the University of Canterbury (Christchurch, New Zealand) in 2002, this volume of ten essays gives readers a good sense of the direction(s) of much contemporary virtue ethics. Some of the work offered in the volume is historical (on conceptions of the virtues in Aristotle, Aquinas, Seneca, Hume, and even Nietzsche); some is problem-oriented (on the relationship between virtue as an ethical standard and rules, on virtues and moral conflict); whereas other work concerns specific virtues and their definitions (erotic love as a virtue, self-respect, and the virtues of children). Of course, these concerns inter-depend, and almost all of the essays reward study for several reasons. Essays this reviewer found of special interest include Stephen Gardiner’s carefully argued and imaginative discussion of Seneca on the relationships between virtues, rules, and the “sage,” Julia Annas’s essay on the naturalism of virtue ethics, an elegant essay on self-respect’s status as a virtue by Daniel Russell, and Christine Swanton’s resourceful argument for Nietzsche as a virtue ethicist. Kathleen Higgins offers to Western readers an all-too-rare introduction to forms of Asian philosophy and their conceptions of the virtues. The editor organizes the essays according to their central concerns, as well as providing a lucid introduction.

The volume would have been even more useful with an essay or two on the fate of recent virtue ethics as a philosophical movement. While interest has broadened in reflection on the virtues, this movement has also, I would argue, been assimilated into mainstream Anglo-American ethics, for good and for ill. It has received credibility and influence, but in part by (too often) becoming more narrow and technical in its questions and modes of inquiry. Conference participants here discuss a range of thinkers, old and new, but there is no mention of perhaps the three most powerful recent philosophers of the virtues, Murdoch, Nussbaum, and MacIntyre (or virtually none—Murdoch receives one footnote). This need not be a fault, but it raises an interesting question about how virtue ethics continues to develop and how it understands itself as well as its possible futures. I would welcome new forms of virtue ethics that would re-engage with literature in substantial ways, deepen its willingness to cross borders, and swords, with other philosophical perspectives (beyond the inevitable Kant and Mill), and pursue reflectively the question of its role in public political discourse. [End Page 332]

Pamela M. Hall
Emory University
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