Virtue ethics, to date, has not taken seriously enough the fact that humans are inherently limited creatures. It is all well and good to paint a picture of the ideal human being, filled with virtue and living the good life, but unless we understand how this picture is supposed to apply to those of us who still lack the virtues, it will be of little use to us. If virtue ethics is to succeed, it needs to become more realistic. It needs to recognize that we are epistemically limited beings who are largely incapable of becoming fully virtuous. Several things follow from this basic insight: virtue ethicists should focus on the subjective rather than the objective sense of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, they should embrace both realistic and ideal conceptions of virtue, and they should transition toward an approval-based theory of right action.
Once all of this is taken into account, the plausibility of virtue ethics is quite striking. There is a clear and important connection between the virtues and actions that are subjectively-right. Since subjective rightness is the kind we care about most, it is natural to try to construct a theory of right action on the basis of the virtues. Once we get clear about what it means to be virtuous, we see that there are two different standards, ideal and realistic virtue, and that each of these standards plays a different role in our moral theorizing. We ought to strive toward the development of realistic virtues, by performing actions that would be approved of by ideally virtuous observers, for only they have the required insight to see the right way forward in every case. Nevertheless, these virtuous observers needn’t be overly idealized, because they will still need to exercise vigilance in certain circumstances and they don’t require full-information in order to see what the subjectively-right actions are in each situation. For this reason, we can expect realistically virtuous people to closely approximate ideally virtuous ones in most cases and this will not only provide us with a satisfying moral epistemology, it might help virtue ethicists provide an answer to Anscombe’s claim that there can be no moral ‘ought’ without a divine law.