Immanuel Kant and Virtue Ethics

In 2010, Cambridge University Press published KANT'S THEORY OF VIRTUE, by Anne Margaret Baxley, of Washington University, St. Louis.

Kant of course is generally considered the foremost exponent in the western canon of deontological ethics, the view that good and bad are subordinate to right and wrong, and hat right/wrong are defined by duties, imperatives, things human beings as rational creatures must or cannot do, damning the consequences.

Baxley says, though, that Kantian thinking goes beyond that. Kant has a worked-out view of human character, or virtue, logically separate from his well-known view of duty,

We generally associate "virtue ethics" with Aristotle, just as we associate deontology with Kant and consequentialism with Bentham. If one were going to teach a very abbreviated ethics course, one might focus it on those three, and then if allowed time for a fourth, throw in John Stuart Mill and his differences with Bentham to show that consequentialisms are plural.

But Baxley is challenging that freshman-textbook typology.

In the words of the publicity material for the book, she "explores the rich moral psychology in Kant's later and less widely read works on ethics....Although certain aspects of Kant's theory bear comparison to more familiar Aristotelian claims about virtue, Baxley contends that its most important aspects combine to produce something different -- a distinctively modern, egalitarian conception of virtue which is an important and overlooked alternative to the more traditional Greek views which have dominated contemporary virtue ethics."

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