Virtue theories understand human beings as members of a species who flourish in distinctively communal forms of life; given the right upbringing and circumstances, individual fulfilment and communal wellbeing are mutually supporting.
However, it is central to any Aristotelian (the daddy of this view) conception of human beings that they can pervert and, at the limit, destroy their capacity to flourish; they can develop vicious character traits that remove any chance of fulfilling their own nature and threaten the social fabric which makes possible the flourishing of others.
Such people are a moral danger to themselves and those around them; by destroying their own humanity, they might plausibly be thought to have placed themselves beyond the moral pale – beyond the right to respect, or just treatment.
The problem with virtue theory
Hence, virtue theory lacks any way of grounding the thought that no human being, however evil their deeds and however foul their character, should be denied our unconditional respect or be treated as though they are vermin, having forfeited all right to justice. Conversely, it cannot make sense of the thought that people in severe and ineradicable affliction, who appear to have lost all that gives life meaning, should be fully our moral equals.
In other words, naturalistic morality is blind to the thought that every individual human being is inalienably precious – precisely the moral perspective on humanity that is centrally articulated in Western culture through its religious traditions, and their conception of human beings as having or being souls, Thiesic underpinnings are in the crevices of the walls.
However, it is central to any Aristotelian (the daddy of this view) conception of human beings that they can pervert and, at the limit, destroy their capacity to flourish; they can develop vicious character traits that remove any chance of fulfilling their own nature and threaten the social fabric which makes possible the flourishing of others.
Such people are a moral danger to themselves and those around them; by destroying their own humanity, they might plausibly be thought to have placed themselves beyond the moral pale – beyond the right to respect, or just treatment.
The problem with virtue theory
Hence, virtue theory lacks any way of grounding the thought that no human being, however evil their deeds and however foul their character, should be denied our unconditional respect or be treated as though they are vermin, having forfeited all right to justice. Conversely, it cannot make sense of the thought that people in severe and ineradicable affliction, who appear to have lost all that gives life meaning, should be fully our moral equals.
In other words, naturalistic morality is blind to the thought that every individual human being is inalienably precious – precisely the moral perspective on humanity that is centrally articulated in Western culture through its religious traditions, and their conception of human beings as having or being souls, Thiesic underpinnings are in the crevices of the walls.
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