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<p>This article pursues two central aims. First, it reconstructs the Virtue Perspective (VP) as a comprehensive framework that integrates descriptive accounts of how virtues and vices develop with normative claims about their cultivation, deformation, and stabilization. While VP has traditionally emphasized the growth of desirable traits, this article highlights its equal relevance for understanding the emergence and persistence of undesirable dispositions - an area underexplored in contemporary virtue-centered scholarship. Second, the article tests the applicability and limits of VP in the legal domain by analyzing the phenomenon of legislative placebo: the deliberate enactment of laws that legislators themselves expect to be ineffective. The analysis adopts a conceptual, vice-centered approach to VP and juxtaposes it with the structural conditions that make placebo legislation possible and, in many cases, strategically attractive. These include electoral cycles, media dynamics, fragmented and contested knowledge, and the temporal gap between legislative action and observable outcomes. Together, these elements create incentives for symbolic legislation oriented toward shaping public perception rather than producing substantive legal effects. The article addresses four key questions: (1) To what extent do lawmakers’ stable dispositions constrain or facilitate legislative placebo practices? (2) Does repeated engagement in such practices reinforce durable traits such as cynicism, short-termism, and strategic insincerity? (3) Why are aretaic considerations systematically marginalized within modern legislative architectures that prioritize procedural safeguards over personal excellence? (4) What institutional reforms might create space for aretaic elements without relying on unrealistic expectations of individual virtue—such as differentiating between expert legislative drafting and representative political decision-making? By linking VP to a concrete class of defective lawmaking practices, the article expands both the conceptual boundaries of VP and the analytical vocabulary for assessing placebo legislation. It concludes that although VP offers valuable insight into the character-related consequences of defective legislation, contemporary democratic structures significantly limit the influence of virtue, underscoring the need for context-sensitive institutional redesign.</p>

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Virtues/Vices-Centered Perspective Meets Placebo Legislation

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年3月2日

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  • Mateusz Stępień

摘要

This article pursues two central aims. First, it reconstructs the Virtue Perspective (VP) as a comprehensive framework that integrates descriptive accounts of how virtues and vices develop with normative claims about their cultivation, deformation, and stabilization. While VP has traditionally emphasized the growth of desirable traits, this article highlights its equal relevance for understanding the emergence and persistence of undesirable dispositions - an area underexplored in contemporary virtue-centered scholarship. Second, the article tests the applicability and limits of VP in the legal domain by analyzing the phenomenon of legislative placebo: the deliberate enactment of laws that legislators themselves expect to be ineffective. The analysis adopts a conceptual, vice-centered approach to VP and juxtaposes it with the structural conditions that make placebo legislation possible and, in many cases, strategically attractive. These include electoral cycles, media dynamics, fragmented and contested knowledge, and the temporal gap between legislative action and observable outcomes. Together, these elements create incentives for symbolic legislation oriented toward shaping public perception rather than producing substantive legal effects. The article addresses four key questions: (1) To what extent do lawmakers’ stable dispositions constrain or facilitate legislative placebo practices? (2) Does repeated engagement in such practices reinforce durable traits such as cynicism, short-termism, and strategic insincerity? (3) Why are aretaic considerations systematically marginalized within modern legislative architectures that prioritize procedural safeguards over personal excellence? (4) What institutional reforms might create space for aretaic elements without relying on unrealistic expectations of individual virtue—such as differentiating between expert legislative drafting and representative political decision-making? By linking VP to a concrete class of defective lawmaking practices, the article expands both the conceptual boundaries of VP and the analytical vocabulary for assessing placebo legislation. It concludes that although VP offers valuable insight into the character-related consequences of defective legislation, contemporary democratic structures significantly limit the influence of virtue, underscoring the need for context-sensitive institutional redesign.