When I was reading the chapter I began to wonder what Hurka would think about Gabrielle Taylor’s virtue-ethical theory. Taylor’s account can be categorized into Hurka’s definition of a substantive flourishing account. According to Hurka a flourishing account “defines virtue as those traits a person needs to flourish or live well and the vices as traits destructive of flourishing.” He separates the flourishing account into two versions, one being the substantive one which uses “one fundamental good F to explain simultaneously what unifies the virtues”. Taylor’s theory uses the fundamental good of the self to unify the virtues.
Hurka than mentions the obstacles facing this account and there were three main ones; virtuous actions must provide evidence of the self as having that aim, the account must have plausible judgements about the degrees of virtues and it must justify the priority it gives virtue over other elements of flourishing by “showing [the self] is not instantiated by other states of persons.” It seems that Taylor certainly did not do the second. I don’t remember anywhere in her book where she clearly defines the degrees of virtues or vices. In fact it seems that she focused mostly on the extremely vicious actions and never mention any degree and the relation to harming of the self. And it also seems that the last obstacle was not overcome by Taylors theory either, for it seems there are other things that provide evidence of the self aside from just virtue.
Because she does not “pass” the later two obstacles, it seems that Hurka would see Taylor’s theory as incomplete and flawed.
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Your main point against Taylor's theory is that "the account must have plausible judgements about the degrees of virtues", and we can replace virtues with vices since Taylor deals specifically with vices. If you recall she set up hierarchies both when discussing individual virtues, and between the virtues themselves. With each particular virtue Taylor often listed different ways it could manifest itself, and then which one was the worst amongst them. Usually the worst case of a vice would one that was the most self-deceiving in nature and would detach one from interacting with the real world. This implied the premise that on any account of a life considered flourishing, you want to view the world as it really exists (and not through false, subjective constructs) so you can interact with things in the world properly. An example of this was arrogance: those who were arrogant to the point that they wouldn’t consider other peoples’ opinions at all were the most viciously arrogant. This showed a huge amount of self-deception that is virtually impossible to fix because you would never listen to someone telling you about your arrogance -because- of your arrogance!
Moving on to degrees of viciousness between the vices, the idea of capital vices is a prime example of gauging which vices are worse to have than others. If a vice is wont to lead to other vices then it is obviously more self-destructive a vice than other vices.
These two distinctions should satisfy the objection you think Hurka might have raised. The third part of the qualifiers might be moot for Taylor since she’s talking only about vice and not virtue, but maybe someone else can talk about how Taylor would deal with this objection.
I'm not sure that Taylor's notion of capital vices serves as a sufficient response to Hurka's claim that accounts like Hursthouse's and Taylor's lack "plausible judgements about the degrees of virtue."
To say whether a vice is "capital" or not is by no means a statement about the severity/degree to which that vice is held. "Capital" is an attribute of a given vice, not a description of its magnitude.
Gary seems to be implying, though, that extreme vices will be more likely to lead the agent to other vices--that there is a direct correlation between degree of vice and whether or not the vice is capital. It's hard to disprove such a correlation; I am merely saying that even if the two are related (which Taylor doesn't prove, or even state), they are not equal.
Whether or not a vice is capital or not seems to depend more on the degree of the agent’s desire for a certain end than on the extent of their vice (Taylor 110). We would not say, for instance, “Her vice is so extreme that she will do anything….” Instead, it makes sense to say “Her desire for that end is so extreme that she will do anything….” Likewise, when determining whether avice is capital or not, the reader is encouraged to inspect the dispositions that vice inspires, not the actions (Taylor 111). And of course there then arises the difficult question of whether those dispositions are new vices for which the primary vice is responsible or whether they are separate.
Clearly the question of whether a vice is capital cannot be answered by merely describing its degree.
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