Cards (4)

  • In modern contexts, the key virtue referred to by virtue ethicists is that of compassion, since compassion operates in a wide range of contexts such as medical ethics and animal ethics, where empathy and understanding for the plight of others are particularly important. As with situation ethics, compassion is likely to focus on people whose well-being is destroyed by disease rather than on a collection of cells in a petri dish.
  • With trans-humans, individuals might be bred for specific character traits, such as excessive aggression in a soldier.
    · In other words, the dispositions required of potential human beings in the future may not match Aristotle’s understanding of the mean.
    · A cloned soldier might operate at the extreme of uncontrolled aggression, anger and malice.
  • Virtue ethicists might argue that stem cell research and therapeutic cloning offer the opportunity to increase human well-being and to develop the virtues of courage and vision through the removal of some or all of the diseases that afflict human beings. It would be right to control unnecessary suffering. The failure to use PGD where it could prevent suffering makes parents / medics / society responsible for the suffering that follows.
  • The effect of that will be that the teleological aspect of Aristotle’s virtue ethics will be lost: there will be no common set of virtues and no set of dispositions or character traits that will produce a person of practical wisdom.