Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics: Complementary Anti-theoretical Ethical Trajectories?

A/Prof. Jack Reynolds (La Trobe University)

Abstract. Some philosophers like Charles Taylor and Hubert Dreyfus have explicitly drawn connections between phenomenological forms of reasoning and the kinds of reasoning that takes place in their versions of virtue ethics and, to some extent, more generally in virtue ethical and communitarian thought. Far from this being merely a contingent connection, their implied suggestion is that any decent moral theory must include a sophisticated phenomenology of moral experience, which is more than merely a plausible moral psychology, since on their view it must also obey certain methodological strictures that take seriously some of those that well-known phenomenologists have adduced. The aim of this paper is to develop and more systematically extend some of Dreyfus and Taylor’s insights regarding this surprising methodological proximity.