Virtue Ethics: Deontology And Utilitarianism

Virtue ethics has been faced obstacles with competing with the deontology and utilitarianism. Moreover, social psychology’s situationalist argues against virtue ethics from the fact that moral character is not consistent to all the situations that a person has. Virtue ethics is a normative ethics that focuses on virtues to guide a situation. In contrast, situationist psychology considers this to be committing the fundamental attribution error. In this essay, I will be discussing the objections that ‘situationist’ psychology has on virtue ethics, in addition, I will argue that virtue ethics cannot survive these objections. Normative ethics consists of deontology, utilitarianism, and virtue ethics. Both deontology and utilitarianism are considered …show more content…
Moreover, the situation influences the behaviours and actions of the individual. Harman claims that people feel committed into acting consistently because of the personal identities that people have (Harman 1999, 321). This still holds individuals to be influenced by external factors and not their intentions of acting on good character. Christian Miller, however, defends virtue ethics with that account of local character traits. In Social Psychology and Virtue Ethics, Miller discusses that these character traits are widely seen with different people, and states that situation does not dictate action but, “rather the ways in which we selectively focus on and categorize various aspects of them given our relatively fixed personality structures” (Miller 2003, 384). Rather than keeping a consistent account of virtues, Miller states that given circumstances allow people to consider specific traits in which a virtuous person would choose to act on the certain circumstance (Miller 2003, 382). Yet, this is still not seen in the social psychology as there has not been any empirical evidence about the existence of character traits (Miller 2003, 389). This is can be seen in the Milgram study (1963) where Stanley Milgram ran in experiment in which to test obedience and the individuals own conscience. The experiment resulted into many of the participants to obey the commands of the authority figures. In case of moral character in the study, it would have been discounted as many of the participants acted on obedience and not on their moral character. Though is the obedience a good action in this experiment? The participants listened to the authority figure, but to the participant’s action of harming someone. Though this can be argued that only a virtuous agent will characteristically do the right action (Hursthouse 2001). If one of the virtue of a participant is loyalty than the act of