Help! Virtue Profiles and Horses for Courses

ABSTRACT

Glen Pettigrove addresses the proportionality principle in ethics, the principle that ‘our actions, attitudes, or emotions should be proportional to the degree of value present in the object or events to which they are responding’. He argues this is inconsistent with some familiar features of common-sense morality. In response, he brings virtuous character into the picture, a move we support but wish to modify. We show that certain helping actions should be guided by whether one has the virtue profile most suited to the situation from among a surrounding network of people.

KEYWORDS:

• Pettigrove, Glen
• virtue theory
• virtue profiles
• help
• need

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank an anonymous referee and Matheson Russell for constructive feedback, and we are grateful to the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute for providing Joseph with the time, space, and financial support to complete this project.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We are not necessarily imagining how someone who endorses the proportionality principle may address the moral dilemma of Sophie’s Choice [Styron 1979]. That kind of scenario where a parent would be placed in the desperate situation of having to choose which one of her two children will live and which will die surely cannot be addressed by such a simplistic principle. No matter how the parent chooses, we do not see how the choice would be proportional, though the situation on the surface may seem like a candidate for the principle to resolve.

2 We are reminded here of discussions that followed Peter Singer’s [1972] famous article, ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality’, on the question of our moral obligation to help those who are in need even if they are very distant from us. See also contributions in Chatterjee [2004].

3 We are grateful to Matheson Russell, who brought this point to our attention.

4 This character is expressed through their own inner sense as explained by Van Zyl [2019: 21] in connection with Aristotelian virtue ethics.

5 We believe that the view we offer here is consistent with that of Anscombe [1958].

6 For a critical examination of these studies, see Kamtekar [2004] or Miller [2014].