Diacritica 25-2_Filosofia.indb - cehum - Universidade do Minho

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than character traits instrumental for goodness: “my account”, she maintains,
“simply holds that a trait that is good-producing – however acquired
– is a ethical virtue” (Driver, 2001: 109). By this move, Driver indeed avoids
VEE. For provided that anyone’s ethical worth could be measured against
the consequentialist principle – the good is to be promoted – then anyone
capable of measuring that good could see who counts as practically
wise. Since at one place Driver identifi es the good with “alleviating interaction
problems among people” (Driver, 2001: 74), seeing of anyone’s ethical
worth would be possible to virtually all due to subjectivity of the standard
of the worth. Any person whom one perceives to greatly alleviate her interaction
problems with others would be virtuous.
I suspect, however, that Driver goes further than it is needed: she
achieves the dissolution of VEE at high cost, by replacing it with the metaethical
problems of consequentialism. For example, why just the alleviation
of interaction problems counts as the good out of all possible candidates?
What should never count as conducive to the good, for surely anything
could not count as conducive to the good? [12] Could systematic malice with
a view of preventing the full realisation of the good count as virtue, if it
would still make some contribution to it? [13] What about the fact that many
sensible people (at least I hope so) think that some acts, such as torturing
the innocent, are vicious regardless of consequences? [14] Etc. Since non-consequentialist
VE can avoid all these and many other meta-ethical problems
to which Driver’s virtue theory needs to provide answers so as to not to
beg a question, I believe it would be better, if VE could either show that
our anti-elitist intuitions are mistaken or alternatively escape VEE without
abandoning the view that virtue is the source of ethical value. Let us fi rst
focus on the former possibility.
12 Cf. Driver 2001 pp. 55-56, in which she accepts that even beating children for the sake of pleasure
would be virtuous in the case it would promote good. However, if we want to exclude the
possibility that the torturer’s sadistic pleasure would count as good, as Driver seems to do on
p. 56, there must be some suffi ciently rigid defi nition for what is good or at least what is not
good. Driver’s defi nition that the good, which virtue promotes is the social good “conducive to
alleviation of ”…”interaction problems among people,” is not a suffi cient defi nition, because it
does not exclude the possibility of subjective pleasure to ever count as good.
13 According to Bradley 2005, pp. 284-5, this kind of case poses a problem to Driver’s theory,
because in its present form that theory has to affi rm that such malice is virtuous.
14 Anscombe 1981, p. 17, captures this intuition well: “if someone really thinks, in advance, that it
is open to question whether such an action as procuring the judicial execution of the innocent
should be quite excluded from consideration—I do not want to argue with him; he shows a
corrupt mind.”
Diacritica 25-2_Filosofia.indb 86 05-01-2012 09:38:22