Criterion of right action

The criterion of action is its contribution to pleasure understood as freedom from disturbance: one must weigh by reckoning (the calculus of pleasures and pains) the good and ill each choice brings. This consequentialist, hedonist structure nonetheless grants a place to prudence (phronesis) as the cardinal virtue, hence a share of virtue ethics: one cannot live pleasantly without living prudently, honourably and justly.

Letter to Menoeceus, 129-132 (the calculus of pleasures; prudence, the source of the virtues) · Principal Doctrines, V (living pleasantly, prudently, honourably and justly)

The criterion of action remains that of Epicurus: the contribution to pleasure understood as freedom from disturbance, measured by the reckoning of the good and ill each choice brings. Lucretius scarcely theorizes ethics for its own sake, but the whole of his poetic morality aims at this outcome, ataraxia, and makes of prudence enlightened by knowledge of nature the virtue that leads to it. The structure is hedonist and consequentialist, with a place for practical wisdom.

On the Nature of Things, II, 7-19 (the true good: a body free of pain, a mind free of fear)

Epicurean ethics weighs actions by their balance of pleasure and pain: one may choose a pain when it yields a greater pleasure, this hedonistic consequentialist calculus being the ultimate criterion. Yet prudence, held to be the greatest good and the source of all the virtues, also gives this morality a strong cast of practical virtue, hence a split between consequentialism and virtue ethics.

Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, 129-132 · Epicurus, Principal Doctrines, V

Pragmatism holds morality to be experimental: no fixed end or a priori law, but an intelligence that, in situation, evaluates conduct by its effects on experience and growth. Dewey joins to this the formation of dispositions and habits (a share of virtue) and the concern for social consequences. The right is decided in the testing, like a hypothesis to be verified.

Dewey, Theory of the Moral Life · Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy

Locke conceives a natural law, accessible to reason and grounded in God's will, which prescribes duties (not to harm another in life, liberty or possessions): a morality of obligation, close to deontologism. He nonetheless mixes in the consideration of rewards and punishments, and so of consequences, which motivate obedience, hence a secondary consequentialist weight.

Essays on the Law of Nature (1664); Two Treatises of Government, II, ch. 2 (the law of nature)

Vedanta's ethics is rooted in dharma, the duty proper to each according to one's order and station, to be fulfilled for its own sake. The Bhagavad Gita gives its formula, disinterested action (nishkama karma): to act without attachment to the fruits, from duty and not from calculation. To which is added the cultivation of detachment and self-knowledge, a virtue leading to liberation.

Bhagavad Gita, II-III · Shankara

Seneca's ethics is regulated by virtue and the character of the sage, not by a reckoning of consequences nor by an imperative rule. To live according to nature and reason, cultivating courage, temperance and justice: this is a virtue ethics, where the good is the excellence of the soul.

Letters to Lucilius, LXXVI and CXX (virtue, the only good and the end of life) · On the Happy Life, VIII-IX (virtue suffices for happiness)

No law and no calculation can stand in for an upright character: what makes the good is the acquired disposition from which the right act springs naturally, not an external rule one applies. Hence the primacy of self-cultivation (xiushen) over prescription: the moral life is the gradual acquisition of virtues, chief among them ren 仁 (humaneness), whose accomplished figure is the junzi (the person of noble character). This is why Confucianism distrusts solutions by decree, whether the universal love decreed by the Mohists or the order imposed by the penal law of the Legalists: only the transformation of the heart yields a reliable agent.

Confucius, Analects (Lunyu) · Mencius (Mengzi), 2A6

Stoic ethics is a virtue ethics par excellence: moral good lies in excellence of character and rightness of intention, not in consequences nor in obedience to an external rule. Virtue, one and indivisible, is the only good and suffices for happiness, and it is virtue that qualifies the agent as wise.

Cicero, On Moral Ends, book III · Diogenes Laertius, Lives, VII

Because morality can neither be codified into rules nor reduced to a reckoning of outcomes, what must be formed is a person, their character and their situated discernment. Hence the shift of appraisal from the act to the agent: the measure of the good is the junzi 君子 (person of noble character) animated by ren 仁 (humaneness), and this virtue cannot be decreed, it is won through long self-cultivation and the imitation of exemplars. Virtue is not obedience to a law but an inner disposition made stable by habit, which anchors the foundation on the side of virtue ethics. A deontological share remains in fidelity to the li 禮 (rites), and a share of care in the primacy of familial affection.

Analects (Lunyu), XII, 1-2 (ren and self-mastery through the rites) · Analects, IV, 5 and VI, 30 (the junzi never departs from humaneness)

The criterion of the right lies for Thomas in virtue, a stable disposition that perfects the agent: he takes up Aristotle's four cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, courage, temperance) and orders them to the final end. But virtue ethics is articulated with the natural law, which supplies the objective rule that prudence applies to the singular case, hence a deontological strand: the virtuous agent is the one whose dispositions agree with the rational order of ends. At the summit, the virtues acquired by habit are crowned by the theological virtues, faith, hope and charity, infused by grace, which orient the human being toward an end that surpasses his nature.

Summa Theologiae, Ia-IIae, q. 55-67; IIa-IIae

If God is dead and no value falls from any heaven, the foundation of morality can only be freedom itself, the one thing that posits itself as unconditionally desirable in choosing itself. But a freedom cannot coherently will itself without also willing the other freedoms that give a world and a meaning to its project: this is Beauvoir's reply to the charge of nihilism levelled at existentialism. She nonetheless refuses any universal rule fixed in advance, for the good is decided each time within the thickness of a singular situation, hence an ethics of engagement and responsibility toward others, with no recipe and no alibi.

The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), "Freedom and Liberation"

Laozi distrusts proclaimed codes and duties: "when the great Dao is lost, benevolence and righteousness arise," a sign of a virtue already fallen into artifice. Right action is neither obedience to a rule nor the calculation of an outcome, but the expression of an inner state attuned to the Dao, the virtue (de) that acts without parading itself as virtuous. It is, for want of any alternative, a virtue ethics, but a spontaneous virtue that denies itself as a code the moment it is named.

Dao De Jing, ch. 18, 19 and 38

Zhuangzi mocks the "benevolence" and "righteousness" of the Confucians as paraded virtues that maim the natural, like the duck whose legs are stretched. Good conduct is neither obedience to a rule nor a reckoning of consequences, but the expression of an inner state attuned to the Dao, a spontaneous excellence (de) that does not know itself virtuous. For want of any alternative, it is a virtue ethics, but of a virtue that denies itself as a code and holds every proclaimed morality to be a falling-off.

Zhuangzi, ch. 8 and 9

Beyond his critique of "morality", Nietzsche's positive ethics prizes traits of character, strength, nobility, the generosity of the strong, rather than rules or consequences. His master morality reads as a virtue ethics of power, inferred from his praise of accomplished types.

Beyond Good and Evil, §260 · On the Genealogy of Morality, I, §10

For Cynicism, virtue is the only good and suffices for happiness: it is not taught in theory but acquired through exercise (askesis), as an art of living in accordance with nature. The whole of ethics lies in the formation of a free, self-sufficient character, indifferent to conventions, with neither rule nor calculation of consequences.

Diogenes Laertius, Lives, VI

For Socrates the criterion of action is neither the reckoning of consequences nor obedience to a law, but the state of the soul the act proceeds from: to act well is to act from an excellent soul. By making virtue the whole of morality and the object of self-care, he opens the tradition of virtue ethics later carried on by Aristotle and then the Stoics.

Plato, Apology, 30a-b; Crito, 47e-48a (the good soul, the only true good)

Virtue coincides with power, the capacity to act under the guidance of reason and according to the laws of one's own nature: to act from virtue is to persevere in being by seeking what increases it. This naturalistic virtue ethics, centered on the conatus and the flourishing of the power to act, is governed neither by duty nor by the mere reckoning of consequences.

Ethics, IV, def. 8 and prop. 20 (virtue, the power to act according to one's nature) · Ethics, IV, prop. 24 (to act from virtue is to act under the guidance of reason)

Platonic ethics is a virtue ethics (a morality centred on the agent's character and excellence rather than on the rule or the consequence): to act well is to realize justice within oneself, understood as the harmony of the tripartite soul, each part performing its proper function under the rule of reason. Virtue is ultimately reducible to knowledge of the Good.

Plato, Republic, book IV, 441c-444e, the justice of the soul · Plato, Meno, 87c-89a, virtue as knowledge

Taoism is wary of explicit moral rules, which it takes as the sign of an already-lost virtue: to Confucian codification it opposes the spontaneous virtue (te) of one who accords with the Tao. The good life obeys neither principles nor a calculation, it flows from a character cultivated in simplicity and naturalness, hence a virtue ethics of a paradoxical, effortless kind.

Laozi, Tao Te Ching, ch. 38 · Zhuangzi

The rationalists converge on an intellectualized virtue ethics: the good lies in the perfection and power of the rational soul. Descartes' generosity, Spinoza's active blessedness, Leibniz's wisdom make moral life the flourishing of a character enlightened by reason, more than obedience to a law or the calculation of effects.

Spinoza, Ethics, IV-V · Descartes, The Passions of the Soul

The morality of duty alone, in Kant, is an empty formalism: from the mere form of law, non-contradictory universalizability, no determinate duty follows, and one can make it hold that "there ought to be property" as well as the contrary. The good has content only in concrete ethical life, the mores and institutions in which the individual is formed, not in abstract moral conscience (Moralität).

Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §135 Remark (the empty formalism) · Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §142 ff. (Sittlichkeit)

The morality of The Passions of the Soul rests on a master virtue, generosity: to know that nothing truly belongs to us but the free disposal of our will, and to feel within ourselves a firm resolution to use it well. The right is decided less by rule or consequence than by the quality of the one who acts: generosity is like the key to all the other virtues and the general remedy against the disorders of the passions, which anchors Descartes in a virtue ethics, with a share of duty in the firmness of judgment.

The Passions of the Soul, arts. 153-156 and 161 · Letter to Princess Elisabeth, 18 May 1645

Sartre rejects any morality of a priori rules: to the young man torn between staying with his mother and joining the Resistance, no doctrine, neither Christian love nor Kantian duty, dictates the answer: no general ethics can show what is to be done. What remains is the primacy of the agent who makes himself through his acts, close to a virtue ethics refounded on freedom and authenticity, without a table of values or a reckoning of utility.

Existentialism Is a Humanism (the example of the young man, moral invention)

Romanticism opposes to the Kantian rule and the utilitarian calculus a morality of the heart: value is born of feeling, of sympathy and of the beauty of the soul, not of an abstract principle. To be good is to be true to oneself and attuned to others through empathy, an ethics of sensible virtue and of care where the authenticity of feeling is what counts.

Rousseau, Emile (conscience) · Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man

Existentialism refuses any pre-given morality: with no values inscribed in things, the good life lies in authenticity, assuming one's freedom and responsibility without bad faith. Beauvoir draws from this a demand of care: to will one's own freedom is to will that of others. An ethics of virtue (authenticity) and of care (the freedom of others), more than of rule or calculation.

Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism · Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

Buddhist ethics cultivates right conduct (sila) and wholesome states of mind: generosity, loving-kindness (metta) and compassion (karuna) toward all beings. It is an ethics of virtue and care, where the agent's inner transformation matters, joined to an attention to the karmic fruits of acts, intention bearing the moral weight of the action.

Metta Sutta · Dhammapada

Leibniz's ethics lies in caritas sapientis, the charity of the wise: justice is love regulated by wisdom, willing the good of others within the order of universal perfection. This concern for others guided by knowledge unites a virtue ethics (the perfection of the soul) with a share of care (benevolence) and of duty (the rational order of the just).

Meditation on the Common Concept of Justice · Codex iuris gentium, Preface

The foundation of morality is neither the calculation of consequences nor an abstract rule, but two natural movements of the heart: well-ordered self-love and pity, the immediate feeling that makes us suffer at another's harm. Conscience, the instinct for the good, precedes reason. This is close to an ethics of virtue and of care, where feeling, rather than law, grounds obligation.

Rousseau, Emile, Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar · Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

Buddhism grounds morality on the cultivation of virtue (sila) and on compassion (karuna) and loving-kindness toward all sentient beings, down to animals. Merit lies in the quality of intention and the transformation of the mind more than in obedience to a law; consequences count through the karmic fruits they carry.

Dhammapada · Metta Sutta

Camus's ethics is born of revolt: from the refusal of the absurd arises a value, human solidarity, and a measure. I revolt, therefore we are: in rising up, the rebel affirms a common dignity and limits not to be crossed, even within revolt. Neither a calculation of consequences nor an abstract law, but a virtuous fidelity to the human and a concern for others.

The Rebel

His ethics describes rather than prescribes: from compassion flow the two cardinal virtues, justice, harm no one, and loving-kindness, help others as much as you can, embodied in characters more than in rules. By its affective, relational grounding, this ethics of compassion anticipates the ethics of care; by its psychology of innate characters, it keeps a family resemblance to virtue ethics; deontological formalism is expressly rejected.

On the Basis of Morality, §§16-22

Nagarjuna's Mahayana places at the summit the ideal of the bodhisattva, who renounces his own extinction until all beings are delivered: universal compassion, inseparable from the wisdom of emptiness, becomes the spring of the whole of ethics. A boundless concern for others, borne by virtue, prevails over any rule or calculation.

Precious Garland (Ratnāvalī) · Shantideva, Bodhicaryāvatāra