In a sense, Shafer-Landau is right about adding sensitivity and emotional intelligence to moral rules. Unlike Aristotle, who tells us about the continent, incontinent, vicious, or virtuous person without necessarily considering the inner elements of what (good reasons) would make this person act in a virtuous manner, Shafer-Landau stresses the importance of ‘having good reasons to act.
Shafer-Landau is saying that it is not sufficient to be a virtuous person without character. The police officer who does the bare minimum and does not do harm to people, but only by fear or repression does not have a good character in his view. His actions are arbitrary since he does not have good reasons to act, even if the results of not harming innocent citizens reveal to be good. This makes sense even from a Biblical perspective. Scriptures stress the importance of having the right motive behind our actions by highlighting that God is interested in both our outward actions and why we do them. “Every way of a man is right in his own eyes, but the Lord weighs the heart,” Proverbs 21:2 tells us. That verse echoes Shafer’s view that it is not because someone performs the right actions that he is virtuous, but actions are right because virtuous people perform them.
On the other hand, Aristotle tells us that someone becomes virtuous just by doing just actions, temperate by doing temperate actions, and brave by doing brave actions and so forth. However, Aristotle also talks about “virtuous actions versus virtuous character.” In his view, both virtues of thought and character result from teaching and habit. In Aristotle’s view, one becomes virtuous by habituation and not naturally.
On the other hand, Shafer-Landau would argue that one knows that he/she is generous, for example, not by identifying what a generous person is per se, but by recognizing the duty-bound to be generous to others. Again, the priority problem surfaces when comparing Shafer-Landau’s moral realism versus Aristotle’s virtue ethics: Is this person generous because he performs generous actions, or are this person’s actions right because a generous person performs them? Shafer-Landau argues in favor of the first option, while Aristotle takes the second. It seems to me that the priority problem precludes Aristotle from submitting plausible responses to Shafer-Landau here.
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