This January, “The Metaethics of Virtue Ethics: On Nature and Normativity,” a new book written by Mount St. Mary’s University Professor of Philosophy Jessy Jordan, Ph.D., will be released.
The book introduces readers to natural normativity, the philosophical framework behind virtue ethics. This approach holds that when we evaluate individual living things—tomato plants, owls, humans—we can do so in light of the standard set by that thing’s life form or nature. Just as we can say that an owl without night vision is objectively defective or bad, so we can say that a human lacking the virtues is objectively bad.
“Philippa Foot once made the provocative claim that when doing moral philosophy, we should begin with plants. What she meant to do by saying this is to draw attention to a certain type of evaluation that we make about non-human living things like plants and animals, and then to suggest that we think about moral evaluations of humans in the same way. These evaluations are called natural goodness and defect evaluations, and the defender of natural normativity wants to earn the philosophical right to say things like, ‘A vicious human is morally defective; ‘Racism is objectively wrong;’ and ‘Antisemitism is objectively evil,’” explained Jordan.
The book contributes to a millennia-long debate between philosophers, not only on the question of virtue ethics, but on whether or not the natural world can be considered normative and used to make conclusion about morality and human goodness. Famously, problems with natural normativity, championed by Aristotle, were raised by Immanuel Kant in the 18th century.
“If one wants to be a defender of virtue ethics on the other side of Kant, it might have to take a different shape than the one that it took in, say, Thomas Aquinas. And so, the way we defend whether and how nature is normative, and some specific moral conclusions, might look a lot different than they did for someone like Aquinas in the Middle Ages,” said Jordan.
“It turns out that it takes a lot of philosophy to defend a view like natural normativity, but it's a view that is an interesting, and exciting one.”
Ultimately, Jordan hopes to provide a reliable and readable guide to help his audience understand natural normativity and its significance in contemporary moral philosophy.
“We have a fairly impoverished imagination when it comes to speaking of objective moral facts. Our popular scientific imagination has a keenly developed sense of objectivity, yet when it comes to how we might think of objective moral truths, we are often at a loss. And so I want to help people begin to see how we can think about the objectivity of moral claims and virtue.”
“The Metaethics of Virtue Ethics: On Nature and Normativity,” is being published by Bloomsbury Press, and will be available January 22.