The following are my thoughts on Chapter 5 from Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggles.

Some people use teleology to justify living without virtue. To these people, the ends justify the means. All actions’ functions are defined by a single, highest good that all lower actions must, to be done with virtue, strive towards. However, the agent cannot see any way of achieving such a good without modifying or redefining the virtues, to make them unsavory, and often to the admission of the agent. What follows is a “break a few eggs to make an omelet” sort of situation, where if these actions were truly in line with the highest good, they would completely corrupt it.

And look! My strawman has come to life. There are a lot of issues I have with this piece. Tessman, for one, quotes so many different sources verbatim that she obfuscates her own argument. Back and forth she goes, specifically on the issue of whether or not violence is a necessary part of liberatory struggle, only to say, well, she can’t say for sure who’s right, but she’s pretty sure that the militant approach is most effective so she’s going to look at that . She then goes on to almost adopt it as her own. Surely, she could have had a She writes a lot about anger, something she translates into “righteous” rage and fury. Surely some rage is righteous; however, this piece turns rage into a conflicted virtue (a corruption, to be sure). Is that not the second step in the paragraph above? Rage and fury are strong words, and fury has connotations of retribution. It’s unsettling.