What does virtue ethics (Tugendethik / Gesinnungsethik) evaluate, and what is its central weakness?
It evaluates the actor's disposition — the intention to do good — and its weakness is that good intentions do not discharge responsibility for what actually happens.
Gesinnung (disposition, mindset) means the individual's subjective volition: the motivation or inner disposition out of which one acts. On this view, what is moral is to will the good, and what decides the evaluation of an action is the actor's subjective knowledge and wanting — their intention to do what is right.
The characteristic move of virtue ethics is to answer ethical questions by asking what a virtuous person would do in this situation. It starts from the acting person rather than from the act, and asks which "characteristics, attitudes and abilities" a person should possess in order to act well. Virtue can be defined as the ideal of (self-)education towards a humanly excellent personality.
That framing has a direct consequence, and it cuts both ways:
- It offers no rules. Virtue ethics deliberately provides no principles you could apply mechanically to an ethical problem. There is no lookup table, which is honest about how moral judgement actually works — and useless when you need to justify a decision to someone who disagrees.
- Appeal to good intentions does not release you from responsibility for consequences. This is the standard objection, and the German proverb makes it sharper than any argument: Das Gegenteil von gut ist gut gemeint — the opposite of good is well-intentioned.
In general we do treat "he meant well" as a valid excuse. The question virtue ethics has to answer is how much work that excuse can be made to do — and the fleeing-woman scenes above are the case that shows it cannot do all of it.
Go deeper:
Stanford Encyclopedia: Virtue Ethics — the modern theory in full, including how it answers the »it gives no rules« objection.- Internet Encyclopedia: Virtue Ethics — a gentler first pass than the SEP entry, with the historical development.
- Wikipedia: Virtue ethics — the overview and the list of virtues different traditions actually name.