aristotle s virtue ethics problem essay
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Like Aristotle’s virtue-based values, utilitarians assume that happiness may be the ultimate target of individual life and therefore of virtually any ethical system that can be devised. Also like Aristotle, they recognized that being virtuous required society; becoming virtuous the moment completely alone is impossible, as there is absolutely no one to become un-virtuous toward. This does mean that individual happiness cannot be the only consideration in utilitarian integrity, but which the happiness or perhaps pleasure of the society has to be measured to ascertain an act’s ethical quality. Those acts which elevated pleasure, or utility, had been good; those that diminished power, bad.
In this way, the practical view of achieving pleasure departed extensively from Aristotle’s. For him, happiness was obviously a matter of personal fulfillment through the cultivation of virtues – internal personal characteristics, not the action itself or perhaps its effects, were the determiners of ethical behavior. In this way, Aristotle’s system of advantage ethics was actually more similar to the ethics created by Immanuel Kant.
Just like Aristotle, Kant was more worried about with the purposes behind an action than with the consequences of those actions. The utilitarians were interested only inside the effect of an action – whether it improved or decreased utility. This method is mostly perceptive – one can see whether a task increased or decreased delight, and so determine if it was moral. Both Aristotle and Margen relied more on reason behind their ethical systems. Aristotle reasoned forward, and developed his concept of the highest very good, eudaemonia. Kant, however , switched the same fundamental reasoning in the opposite course, and made the decision that there may be only one very good motive, which will he called the good will certainly. In many ways, Kant’s concept of the excellent will is the converse of Aristotle’s eudaimonia. While Aristotle sees almost all goals since leading to a great ultimate objective, Kant views almost no activities as stemming from a pure great will – he also perceives that everything includes a goal, and determines that anything that provides a goal outdoors o by itself cannot be genuinely ethical, as it is not being completed for the sake of obligation alone. This duty-based integrity contrasts with Aristotle’s virtue-based ethics not really in its make use of reason, which usually both make use of, nor inside the general approach of the moral system, both of which observe ethics because an internal matter of motivation rather than one of exterior effect, but rather in the approach to that aim. Aristotle perceives attaining ultimate goodness as being a matter of improvement and building up of virtues; Kant reasons that it must come from a diminishing of private desires.
Virtually all ethical systems attempt to define good and bad in such a system that a person is convinced towards the good. Whether by way of reason or perception, and whether or not each system is best or horribly flawed, this kind of aim must itself be regarded as good.
