Examine the approach taken to moral decision making by Aristotelian Virtue Ethics. You must illustrate your answer with reference to the issue of abortion. 10 marks Flashcards
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Examine the approach taken to moral decision making by Aristotelian Virtue Ethics. You must illustrate your answer with reference to the issue of abortion. 10 marks
For Aristotle, every action aims at some good. Eudaimonia, the good, is an activity of the soul in accord with virtue, and where several virtues are involved, in accord with the best one. Moral virtues are formed by habit and by imitating virtuous people, acting with a thorough knowledge of the situation. Virtues lie in a mean between the vices of excess and deficiency. The mean is relative to the natural disposition of the individual agent. Virtues include: courage, generosity, high-mindedness, right ambition and truthfulness. Applied to abortion, Aristotle takes account of special cases and general ethical principles. For Aristotle, the virtue of justice has no excess or deficiency, so aborting a malformed foetus would be a just act to save a child from a life of pain, and enable the parents to show the practical wisdom and courage to allow an abortion. Aristotle believed that abortion would also be the action of a virtuous character living in a community threatened with a population explosion. For Aristotle, a general principle might be to reject abortion after the third month, because by then the foetus is animate. Some might include arguments that are Aristotelian in the wider sense; for example, Hursthouse argues that answers to the question, ‘Which acts are virtuous?’ depend on a sense of duty. Abortion is not a question of women’s rights: rights do not guarantee virtuous actions. Nor is it about what constitutes a person, which is too difficult to answer. What is important is how the mother lives her life well, so any virtuous reason for an abortion has to be important, and has to include emotional factors such as love for a child.
‘Situation Ethics cannot solve the moral issue of “designer” babies.’
It is an important religious belief that human life is created in the image of God. Producing ‘designer’ babies involves the alteration or removal of genes, so changes God’s design for humans, therefore Situation Ethics cannot claim that this is the most loving act. However, Situation Ethics can argue that love is pragmatic, positivist and personal, so where genetics provides the technology to remove genes that cause damaging genetic diseases in people, pursuing that technology can be the most loving act. ‘Designed’ babies are likely to be more intelligent, better-looking and stronger, but those without genetic selection could be discarded or seen as second-rate humans. Situation Ethics cannot solve this problem because it is human nature to choose what benefits the individual rather than to do what is agapeic. However, Fletcher argues that Situation Ethics can solve this because it adapts to new technologies, whereas legalistic ethics might ban them because they contradict pre-scientific beliefs about the nature of the body. Arguably, the most controversial aspect of ‘designer’ babies is the genetic editing of germ cells, cells of the egg or sperm. Unpredicted changes to these cells can be passed on to future generations, and the results could be catastrophic. Situation Ethics never knows which germline changes will be beneficial and which will be the reverse. However, Situation Ethics can solve this problem by arguing that agape is relativistic: it avoids words like ‘never’ and ‘always’, so genetic research should proceed, albeit with great caution.
