LEGALISM VERSUS ANTINOMIANISM, GENERALISM VERSUS PARTICULARISM

For virtue ethicists and their allies to inveigh against “algorithmic” or “mechanical” rule-based procedures in ethics is one of the best-known rhetorical tropes in contemporary philosophy. Anyone whose ethics depends on moral rules must (so the trope goes) be some sort of primitive: an insensitive and inhumane legalist, a humourless rule-fetishist, a grim robotic puritan, a self-righteous Pharisee. Sophisticated ethicists will have little or no place in their moral thinking for rules; virtue ethics especially, being an “agent-centred” rather than an “act-centred” ethics, will say that the virtuous agent does the right thing effortlessly, without the slightest even-mental recourse to the Look-It-Up Book of Doing Right.