Aristotle's Virtue Ethics the Question Essay

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Like Aristotle's virtue-based ethics, utilitarians believe that happiness is the ultimate goal of human life and therefore of any ethical system that can be devised. Also like Aristotle, they perceived that to be virtuous required society; being virtuous when completely alone is impossible, as there is no one to be un-virtuous towards. This also means that individual happiness cannot be the only consideration in utilitarian ethics, but that the happiness or pleasure of the society must be measured to determine an act's ethical quality. Those acts which increased pleasure, or utility, were good; those which diminished utility, bad.

In this way, the utilitarian view of achieving happiness departed widely from Aristotle's. For him, happiness was a matter of personal fulfillment through the cultivation of virtues -- internal personal characteristics, not the act itself or its consequences, were the determiners of ethical behavior. In this way, Aristotle's system of virtue ethics was actually more similar to the ethics devised by Immanuel Kant.

Like Aristotle, Kant was more concerned with the motives behind an action than with the consequences of those actions. The utilitarians were interested only in the effect of an action -- whether it increased or decreased utility. This approach is primarily perceptive -- one can perceive whether an action increased or decreased happiness, and so determine if it was ethical. Both Aristotle and Kant relied more on reason for their ethical systems. Aristotle reasoned forward, and developed his idea of the highest good, eudaemonia.

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Kant, however, turned the same basic reasoning in the opposite direction, and decided that there could be only one good motive, which he termed the good will. In many ways, Kant's concept of the good will is the converse of Aristotle's eudaemonia. While Aristotle sees all goals as leading to an ultimate goal, Kant sees almost no actions as stemming from a pure good will -- he too perceives that everything has a goal, and determines that anything that has a goal outside o itself cannot be truly ethical, as it is not being done for the sake of duty alone. This duty-based ethics contrasts with Aristotle's virtue-based ethics not in its use of reason, which both employ, nor in the general approach of the ethical system, both of which see ethics as an internal matter of motivation rather than one of external effect, but rather in the approach to that goal. Aristotle sees attaining ultimate goodness as a matter of progress and building up of virtues; Kant reasons that it must come from a diminishing of personal desires.

Almost all ethical systems attempt to define good and bad n such a way that a person is tempted towards the good. Whether via reason or perception, and whether or not each system is perfect or horribly flawed, this aim must itself be considered good......

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