How Do We Get Things Wrong? Let Us Count The Ways
understanding our moral failures should be central to any virtue ethics
One central aspect to virtue ethics that gets less discussion or examination than it deserves involves examining and exploring our own failures. This isn’t often taught explicitly in ethics courses, even if virtue ethics is. It also seems rarely touched upon in substantive ways by popular virtue ethics-based sites, videos, courses, and the like.
I’ve given a few talks myself recently on failure in relation to Stoic virtue ethics, for example these two:
But for the most part, you don’t see this topic explored anywhere near enough. What we really need to do, over and over, is to determine what ways, to what degrees, and for what reasons we have gone wrong, done wrong, morally failed.
All too often, we confine ourselves to thinking in terms of the virtues and the vices. To be sure, this emphasis indeed something good. Virtue ethics provides a better approach, one more adequate to the complexities of human beings and moral life, than those oriented by other moral theories that tend to confine evaluation to motives, actions, consequences, or social…
