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- Title
LAW IN VIRTUE ETHICS.
- Authors
Slote, Michael
- Abstract
This article discusses the relations between law and ethics from a virtue ethicist point of view. The author argues that because virtue ethics is supposed to concentrate more on the inner life of the individual than either consequentialism or deontology, one can easily wonder whether the former is really capable of doing justice to law or to any sort of objective or real constraint upon human action. This article begins by addressing this issue. Next, it sketches a picture of the place and justification of laws within one possible form of virtue ethics. The model of rules or laws has been the basis for certain deontological understandings of ethics; but a virtue ethics of the inner life can be shown to allow for the distinction between just and unjust laws and to interpret that distinction in an interesting light. This article shows that the place and justification of law can be made understandable within an agent-based virtue ethics that treats issues of social justice and the justice of particular institutions, in fairly uniform fashion, as depending upon questions of motivational self-sufficiency. The author notes that virtue ethics has a notorious history of siding with antidemocratic tendencies and values, but the approach taken in this article deploys and expands Stoic ideas in order to give a fairly general justification of liberal democratic values.
- Subjects
LAW &; ethics; ETHICISTS; VALUES (Ethics); DUTY; SOCIAL justice
- Publication
Law & Philosophy, 1995, Vol 14, Issue 1, p91
- ISSN
0167-5249
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/BF01000526