Virtue Ethics: An Introduction (Prometheus Lecture Series)

Rating:
Summary: A philosopher of Taylor's stature can do better
Review: Richard Taylor is, in my view, one of the most clear, engaging, and philosophically rigorous writers of the last 35 years. This is why I found this book such a disappointment. While Taylor's prose sparkles (as always), his argumentation through much of the book is feeble or worse. To be sure, the book contains many valuable insights concerning the virtuous life, but these are embedded within a tangled nest of confused reasoning and bare assertion.

Taylor's aim is to repudiate "the debilitating egalitarianism of modern ethics in favor of the ideals of the ancient pagan moralists." That is, he defends an ethics of individual excellence in which modern notions of right, duty, and equality play no part. After introducing his subject matter in the first two chapters, Taylor spends the next two developing an "imaginative reconstruction" of the origins of civilization featuring two imaginary peoples, the Suekil and the Rehto. This story is supposed to show three things: 1) social norms are purely conventional, 2) the concepts of right and wrong were invented to give divine sanction to social norms, and 3) without such sanction, the concepts of right and wrong are incoherent.

These chapters have several problems. First, they are corny: For example, the names of the tribes are "like us" and "other" spelled backwards. Second, they are unoriginal: Nietzsche employed the same strategy as Taylor, but with far more subtely and insight, in _On the Geneology of Morals_. Third, these chapters are utterly devoid of argumentation. Taylor baldly asserts 1, 2, 3, and offers nothing in their defense but an elaborate just-so story. And where he does bother to give occasional arguments, in chapters 5-9, these almost always commit the ad hominem fallacy, the genetic fallacy, or both.

If the book ended here, I would give it only one star. However, the remaining chapters, 10-16, give an interesting and often compelling interpretation of Aristotelian virtue ethics. His treatment of Aristotle's "golden mean" is controversial and his potshots at religion are uncharitable. Nevertheless, these final chapters are very much worth reading. Any student or teacher of ethics would do well to read Taylor's account of intellectual virtue, the virtue of pride, and true and false happiness. Perhaps the best thing about this book is its unqualified, unapologetic defense of individual excellence; a clearer statement of this ideal would be hard to find.