An Axiological Approach to Virtue Ethics

The resurgence of interest in virtue ethics can be traced to the late 1950s and to the work of Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot. On Anscombe's view, both deontologism and consequentialism are guilty of judging the " rightness " or " wrongness " of actions on the model of rendering a verdict based on one's understanding of the law and of an agent's obligations under the law. The fundamental problem for this view, according to Anscombe, lies in its legalistic claim that the rightness or wrongness of actions is judged by whether those actions conform to law. This claim, in order to preserve the distinction between moral obligation and legal or political obligation, presupposes a non-political lawgiver, i.e., a divine legislator, whose promulgations demand obedience. However, since modern moral philosophy rejects both divine command theories and religiously grounded natural law theories, the notion of universal, moral laws obligating us has, according to Anscombe, lost the only context that could make it intelligible. Moreover, it is simply incoherent, on Anscombe's view, to say that an agent can be self-legislating. An agent cannot legislate for herself in a manner that commands the agent. Although Anscombe rejects the cognitivist accounts of practical reasoning associated with the two major normative positions of the day, she does not conclude to the truth of the major meta-ethical alternative then available. She does not, that is, accept the non-cognitivist claims of emotivism or prescriptivism as an adequate meta-ethics. The cognitivist appeal to legalistic forms of reasoning is instead the symptom, for Anscombe, of the lack of an adequate moral