Is Kindness a Virtue?

Abstract

This article swims against the stream of academic discourse by answer the title question in the negative. This contrarian answer is not meant to undermine the view that kindness is a good thing; neither is it, however, an example of a mere philosophical predilection for word play. I argue that understanding kindness as a virtue obscures rather than enlightens, for the reason that it glosses over various distinctions helping us make sense of moral language and achieving “virtue literacy”. I survey some of the relevant psychological literature before moving on to philosophical sources. I subsequently delineate the alternative ways in which coherent virtue ethicists can say everything that they want to say about kindness by using much better entrenched and less bland terms. I offer a view of kindness as a cluster concept in the same sense as the Wittgensteinian concept of a game. Finally, I elicit some implications of this view for practical efforts at character education.

Keywords

• virtue ethics
• Aristotle
• kindness
• moral virtue
• umbrella concept
• cluster concept