Aristotelian Virtue Ethics and the Self-Absorption Objection

Abstract

Aristotelian eudaimonism – as Daniel Russell puts it – is understood as two things at once: it is the final end for practical reasoning, and it is a good human life for the one living it. This understanding of Aristotelian eudaimonism, on which one’s ultimate reason for doing all that one does is one’s own eudaimonia, has given rise to what I call the “self-absorption objection.” Roughly, proponents of this objection state that the main problem with neo-Aristotelian accounts of moral motivation is that they prescribe that our ultimate reason for acting virtuously is the fact that doing so is good for us. In an attempt to adequately address this objection, I break with those contemporary neo-Aristotelian accounts of moral motivation that insist that the virtuous agent ought to be understood as performing virtuous actions ultimately for the sake of her own eudaimonia (enlarged, no doubt, to include the eudaimonia of others). On the alternative neo-Aristotelian account of moral motivation I go on to defend – what I call the altruistic account of motivation – the virtuous agent’s ultimate reason for acting virtuously is based on a desire to act in accordance with her particular conception of the good life, where what makes such a conception good is not that it is good for her, but rather good, qua human goodness. More specifically, on the altruistic account of motivation I advance, the virtuous agent may be understood as being motivated by human goodness, valuing objects and persons only insofar as they participate in human goodness, and where all of the virtuous agent’s reasons, values, motivations, and justifications are cashed out in terms of human goodness – as they say – “all the way down.”