Introduction

Thanks to pioneering work in the mid to late twentieth century by the likes of Elizabeth Anscombe, Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Slote, Philippa Foot, and Rosalind Hursthouse, virtue ethics has established itself as a respectable and vibrant approach within contemporary moral philosophy. Nonetheless, a burden of proof is still felt to fall on advocates of virtue ethics to establish its credentials and its, well, virtues as an approach. Glen Pettigrove’s [2022] essay, ‘What Virtue Adds to Value’, presents a novel line of argument in its favour.

Pettigrove’s argument is presented as a critique of the proportionality principle: the assumption that attitudes, emotions, and actions ought to respond to their object in proportion to the object’s value or disvalue. In many cases, the proportionality principle seems defensible, even morally required. Yet, in other cases, we esteem agents for actions and attitudes that appear to have no basis in the proportionality principle: the parent’s love is not (and should not be) raised or lowered in proportion to the ‘loveliness’ of the child; the person who forgives another does so not in proportion to the wrongdoer’s desert but in spite of it; one’s choice of vocation need not be judged more valuable relative to other possible vocations in order for one’s choice to be justified. Virtue ethics, the argument goes, can make sense of our commonplace evaluations of emotions, attitudes, and actions in such cases. Indeed, Pettigrove leverages these cases to motivate a distinctive account of what makes traits ‘virtues’, which he calls the ‘modus operandi’ account.

The commentators in this special issue offer a range of responses to Pettigrove’s argument. Bridget Clarke, Andrew Pinsent, and Nancy Snow are largely convinced by Pettigrove’s critique of the proportionality principle but find his positive account inadequate. Rebecca Stangl and Joe Ulatowski and David Lumsden aim to revise and nuance Pettigrove’s positive account. Kristján Kristjánsson and Simon Burgess argue, in different ways, in favour of reconnecting the discussion of virtues’ value to consequentialist considerations. Garrett Cullity and Jörg Löschke, by contrast, are fundamentally unconvinced by the critique of the proportionality principle and offer defences of it. In his response, Pettigrove develops further his ‘modus operandi’ account in a way that is intended to answer some of the objections raised.

This publication has been delayed by over three years due to a variety of factors, not least the Covid-19 pandemic. I am most grateful to both the contributing authors and the journal for their patience, and their faith that the issue would eventually see the light of day. I would also like to thank Bronwyn Finnigan, Liezl van Zyl, and Luke Russell for their assistance in reviewing submissions.