COMM 2273 Lecture Notes - Lecture 48: Strake Jesuit College Preparatory, Virtue Ethics, Double Bind
10 Feb 2020
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At virtue ethics: the natural virtues of persons are always subjective, and merely collapse into relativism. Naturalism collapses into relativism in the following way. Perhaps we shall say that the statement is true if and only if wives obeying their husbands would contribute to the stability of society. Now it may be that in a given society it is generally accepted that one ought to do what would contribute to the stability of society. That, perhaps, is one of the moral principles that the society believes in. But this is a principle which could be rejected by feminists. It says to do what the virtuous agent would do but such an account begs the question of what a virtuous agent would do. This is a problem for the theory because it cannot guide us, and especially in debate because it probably cannot give a characteristic answer to the resolution: virtues may conflict and there is no way to reconcile them.
