Abstract
The Before Virtue of Sanford’s title is a play on the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, and alludes to an Aristotelian past and benchmark, before the proliferation and degeneration of virtue theories in the past 50 years. Sanford takes his lead from the critique of G. E. M. Anscombe (1958) that ‘modern moral philosophy’ rests on the mistaken idea that, without God, moral theories can have an adequate foundation; as well as from the complaint of Alasdair MacIntyre (1981) that the incoherence of modern moral discourse owes to its loss of a unitary view of the good.
Sanford’s thesis is that while a pluralistic family of virtue theories takes Anscombe as their point of departure, none achieves an authentically Aristotelian ethics, the necessary remedy for the disarray. The problem that these theories are most prominently said to share is the abandonment of ethical absolutes in favour of consequentialism (pp. 112–13). On the contrary, argues Sanford, Aristotle ‘stands firm on absolute prohibitions against certain sorts of actions no matter what the circumstances’ (p. 153). Sanford footnotes Aristotle’s assertion in the Nicomachean Ethics that adultery, theft and murder are always wrong. Yet in addition to the fact that wisdom, common sense and the example of the ‘wise man’ are on balance much stronger guides in Aristotle’s works than norms, few moral philosophers, modern or otherwise, defend adultery, murder and theft. The debated question, instead, is what is to count in each category: Is the death penalty murder? Is remarriage after civil divorce adultery? Is failure to pay workers a living wage theft? While Anscombe argued the physical act of contraception should be prohibited in all circumstances, Aristotle’s ‘absolute norms’ regard actions (sex, taking money, killing) for which additional wrong-making circumstances are necessary to constitute their negative moral character, thus opening the door to debate about what those are. Aristotle’s absolute norms are not of the same derivation or function as Anscombe’s, and few would easily set them aside for consequentialist reasons.
A more important set of contentions in the book, on the larger landscape of moral philosophy, concerns the definition of virtue as activity that is teleologically responsive to human ends and goods, as discerned and realized by practical reason, with the support of the interconnected virtues (pp. 158–9, 164, 212–13). In other words, virtue theory belongs within a theory of natural law (pp. 231–3) (although more so for Aquinas than Aristotle, whose espousal of such a theory has long been debated). The important point, however, is that virtues are not merely character traits, states of being or personal excellences, much less relativistic embodiments of community values. They are active dispositions that direct humans as social beings to goods and relationships – to fellow humans, to other creatures, to the common good and in religious perspective to God – whose moral quality can be objectively assessed. Sanford rightly faults virtue theorists who lack interest in social justice (p. 153). The book’s argument would draw a wider hearing (for example, among advocates of gender equality, economic equality, and environmental conservation) were it not so tied to Anscombe’s brand of norms-protection, and so determined to demolish potential ‘modern’ conversation partners.