virtue ethics essay conclusion

Aristotle and Virtue Ethics

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Virtue Ethics: Essay Introduction

The good girl movie, aristotle virtue ethics theory, application of the theory, personal reflection, virtue ethics: essay conclusion, works cited.

Aristotle holds that virtues originate from actions that human beings perform because one can either be a good or bad person based on actions. In his ethics, Aristotle asserts that whatever activities human beings do ultimately lead to a good or a bad end. Desire and passion compel human beings to pursue certain activities so that they can achieve certain ends, which determine virtue. If there were no desired ends, human beings would pursue activities in vain.

Human beings seek to achieve legitimate ends so that they can obtain happiness in life. Aristotle argues that human actions determine virtues that one achieves and subsequently influence happiness1. For example, a marriage partner who has experienced an unhappy marriage will struggle extremely hard to achieve a happy life out there with friends. Therefore, how does Aristotle’s virtue theory apply to The Good Girl movie?

The movie shows the story of a young woman, Justine, who is so troubled in her marriage because she has no children. Justine is 30 years old and has been unable to conceive because her husband, Phil, is impotent, according to the diagnosis of a doctor. Phil is sterile because he has continually abused drugs, which has permanently made him unable to make his wife conceive. Troubled by dying marriage, Justine planned to seek a man who would make her happy in life by giving her a baby.

Luckily, Justine found a young man aged 22, Holden, who was particularly attractive and mysterious2. From then, Justine and Holden continued with their secret love affair until when her workmates and friends discovered it. Discovery of their secret affair put Justine in a dilemma, as she was already pregnant and did not know what to tell Phil. Justine wanted to save her marriage and, at the same time, keep the baby by marrying Holden. However, Justine and Phil reconciled and lived happily after that with their daughter.

According to Aristotle’s ethical theory, virtues result from human actions, for the perception of the moral character of a person emanates from various activities. Human actions and activities aim at attaining excellence, which is a virtue in every aspect of life. According to Aristotle, every art and pursuit aims at attaining the good, which is a virtue that all human beings cherish3. Synchronized actions focus on achieving one objective or more objectives as ends of excellence.

The difference between plants or animals and human being is a rational principle. The rational principle gives human beings the ability to think and act. Through thoughts, a human being can coordinate actions that determine ethics because actions describe ethics. For instance, ’a good player’ and ’a bad player,’ in this case, good and bad, are descriptions of the action of playing, and they portray the virtues of players.

Actions are imperative in achieving virtues since no one can have virtues by a mere theoretical understanding of what ethics are. Thus, due to diversity and degree of actions, it is extraordinarily complicated to attribute certain actions to specified virtues, making ethics subjective.

The ethics theory further asserts that there are two types of virtues, moral and intellectual virtues; moral virtues emanate from habits, while intellectual virtue is an innate characteristic that undergoes a transformation in the course of life due to teaching and experience. Nature gives primary moral virtues, and through perfection by habitual activities, one attains given moral virtues. Since habituation is a process of achieving ethics for one to be excellent in a certain field, one should continually learn and exercise.

For example, one becomes a runner by running; likewise, people become good when they do good and bad by doing bad things. The emphasis here is that actions have a direct relation with virtues, for virtues cannot occur without actions.

Then, what actions are responsible for certain virtues? Confusingly, the same action produces both a virtue and vice. For instance, in playing as an action, we have both good and bad players. Aristotle argues that virtues exist in a continuum of excess and deficiency of actions, and thus, virtue occurs as an intermediate4. It, therefore, shows that deficiency or excess of action results in vices while intermediate actions give virtues.

Given that Aristotle’s ethics theory postulates that human actions determine their virtues, The Good Girl movie portrays a scenario where Justine’s actions led her to achieve happiness. For many years, Justine had been in a troubled marriage that was gradually dying since Phil was unable to make her conceive. In pursuit of happiness, Justine thought of the best way of achieving happiness amidst the daunting challenges of her marriage that seemed not to end unless she did something about them.

According to Aristotle, actions form the basis of virtue, for they determine goodness or badness as unique ends of actions, but since human beings aim at achieving a good end, happiness is then an end of actions5. Thus, Justine was struggling to achieve happiness in her marriage and life, as well.

The movie has termed her a ‘good’ girl because she thought of the best way of conceiving a baby so that she could achieve happiness in marriage and life. In her troubles, Justine had three options: to tolerate the hard life of marriage, to divorce her husband, or to conceive through a love affair. Relating to Aristotle’s ethical theory, deficiency and excess of action cause a vice that leads to an unhappy life.

Thus, the option of tolerating fruitless marriage life would have been a deficient action, while the option of divorce would have been an excessive action. Hence, the option of conceiving through a love affair, because her husband was sterile, enabled her to have a girl child who made their marriage happy again after reconciliation. Aristotle argues that intermediate passions and actions are the recipes to virtues that lead to happiness6. Therefore, Justine obtained happiness through intermediate passions and actions.

Aristotle’s ethical theory effectively describes how virtues occur in society. The assertion that human actions and passions aim at achieving good is a complex concept that needs elaboration since some actions ultimately lead to vice, no matter their moderation. For instance, an action such as killing has no moderation and hence lacks virtue. Moreover, since human actions are diverse, it is difficult to classify virtues according to diverse actions because it would lead to ambiguity.

Therefore, if actions only determine moral virtues according to Aristotle’s ethics theory, there could be indefinite virtues in society, proving that ethics are not only complex but also subjective. Assertions like human actions determine virtues pose a serious threat to ethical theories because it demands continued teaching of morality. If human moral values constantly change due to the influence of actions, then it is a daunting task to control moral virtues.

Regarding Aristotle concept of moderation, it is quite evident that intermediate actions yield virtues while extreme actions cause vices. The concept is particularly valuable as it shows that the moderation of human actions plays a significant role in shaping one’s morality through habituation.

In the case study of The Good Girl movie, Justine was able to moderate her actions so that she could achieve happiness in life, and she eventually became a ‘good’ girl. Thus, deficiency and excess of action cause vice, while an intermediate of an action results in virtue and happiness.

Since humans do not have stable character traits, ethical theories provide the basis for the understanding of moral virtues, but achieving the virtues demands actions. Knowing what actions give certain moral virtues enables one to pursue morality by habitually exercising them. As in the case of Justine in The Good Girl movie, one needs to know that excesses or deficiencies of actions will result in vices, and moderation of actions is vital in achieving desired virtues.

Pleasures and pains accompany the pursuit of actions because excessive pleasures result in overindulgence, which is a vice, while too much pain results in serious fear, which is also a vice. Hence, moderation of actions enables one to achieve moral virtues, though it is hard to determine what the actions are and the extent of exercising them.

Ross, William. Nicomachean Ethics: Aristotle . Kitchener: Batoche Books, 1999.

Weschler, Raymond. “The Good Girl.” Drama and Comedy , 2002: 1-23.

1 William Ross. Nicomachean Ethics: Aristotle . Kitchener: Batoche Books, 1999, 14

2, Raymond Weschler. “The Good Girl.” Drama and Comedy , 2002: 1.

3 William Ross. Nicomachean Ethics: Aristotle . Kitchener: Batoche Books, 1999.

4 William Ross. (1999): 28

5 William Ross. (1999): 10

6 William Ross. (1999): 31

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Virtue Ethics

Virtue ethics is currently one of three major approaches in normative ethics. It may, initially, be identified as the one that emphasizes the virtues, or moral character, in contrast to the approach that emphasizes duties or rules (deontology) or that emphasizes the consequences of actions (consequentialism). Suppose it is obvious that someone in need should be helped. A utilitarian will point to the fact that the consequences of doing so will maximize well-being, a deontologist to the fact that, in doing so the agent will be acting in accordance with a moral rule such as “Do unto others as you would be done by” and a virtue ethicist to the fact that helping the person would be charitable or benevolent.

This is not to say that only virtue ethicists attend to virtues, any more than it is to say that only consequentialists attend to consequences or only deontologists to rules. Each of the above-mentioned approaches can make room for virtues, consequences, and rules. Indeed, any plausible normative ethical theory will have something to say about all three. What distinguishes virtue ethics from consequentialism or deontology is the centrality of virtue within the theory (Watson 1990; Kawall 2009). Whereas consequentialists will define virtues as traits that yield good consequences and deontologists will define them as traits possessed by those who reliably fulfil their duties, virtue ethicists will resist the attempt to define virtues in terms of some other concept that is taken to be more fundamental. Rather, virtues and vices will be foundational for virtue ethical theories and other normative notions will be grounded in them.

We begin by discussing two concepts that are central to all forms of virtue ethics, namely, virtue and practical wisdom. Then we note some of the features that distinguish different virtue ethical theories from one another before turning to objections that have been raised against virtue ethics and responses offered on its behalf. We conclude with a look at some of the directions in which future research might develop.

1.2 Practical Wisdom

2.1 eudaimonist virtue ethics, 2.2 agent-based and exemplarist virtue ethics, 2.3 target-centered virtue ethics, 2.4 platonistic virtue ethics, 3. objections to virtue ethics, 4. future directions, other internet resources, related entries, 1. preliminaries.

In the West, virtue ethics’ founding fathers are Plato and Aristotle, and in the East it can be traced back to Mencius and Confucius. It persisted as the dominant approach in Western moral philosophy until at least the Enlightenment, suffered a momentary eclipse during the nineteenth century, but re-emerged in Anglo-American philosophy in the late 1950s. It was heralded by Anscombe’s famous article “Modern Moral Philosophy” (Anscombe 1958) which crystallized an increasing dissatisfaction with the forms of deontology and utilitarianism then prevailing. Neither of them, at that time, paid attention to a number of topics that had always figured in the virtue ethics tradition—virtues and vices, motives and moral character, moral education, moral wisdom or discernment, friendship and family relationships, a deep concept of happiness, the role of the emotions in our moral life and the fundamentally important questions of what sorts of persons we should be and how we should live.

Its re-emergence had an invigorating effect on the other two approaches, many of whose proponents then began to address these topics in the terms of their favoured theory. (One consequence of this has been that it is now necessary to distinguish “virtue ethics” (the third approach) from “virtue theory”, a term which includes accounts of virtue within the other approaches.) Interest in Kant’s virtue theory has redirected philosophers’ attention to Kant’s long neglected Doctrine of Virtue , and utilitarians have developed consequentialist virtue theories (Driver 2001; Hurka 2001). It has also generated virtue ethical readings of philosophers other than Plato and Aristotle, such as Martineau, Hume and Nietzsche, and thereby different forms of virtue ethics have developed (Slote 2001; Swanton 2003, 2011a).

Although modern virtue ethics does not have to take a “neo-Aristotelian” or eudaimonist form (see section 2), almost any modern version still shows that its roots are in ancient Greek philosophy by the employment of three concepts derived from it. These are arête (excellence or virtue), phronesis (practical or moral wisdom) and eudaimonia (usually translated as happiness or flourishing). (See Annas 2011 for a short, clear, and authoritative account of all three.) We discuss the first two in the remainder of this section. Eudaimonia is discussed in connection with eudaimonist versions of virtue ethics in the next.

A virtue is an excellent trait of character. It is a disposition, well entrenched in its possessor—something that, as we say, goes all the way down, unlike a habit such as being a tea-drinker—to notice, expect, value, feel, desire, choose, act, and react in certain characteristic ways. To possess a virtue is to be a certain sort of person with a certain complex mindset. A significant aspect of this mindset is the wholehearted acceptance of a distinctive range of considerations as reasons for action. An honest person cannot be identified simply as one who, for example, practices honest dealing and does not cheat. If such actions are done merely because the agent thinks that honesty is the best policy, or because they fear being caught out, rather than through recognising “To do otherwise would be dishonest” as the relevant reason, they are not the actions of an honest person. An honest person cannot be identified simply as one who, for example, tells the truth because it is the truth, for one can have the virtue of honesty without being tactless or indiscreet. The honest person recognises “That would be a lie” as a strong (though perhaps not overriding) reason for not making certain statements in certain circumstances, and gives due, but not overriding, weight to “That would be the truth” as a reason for making them.

An honest person’s reasons and choices with respect to honest and dishonest actions reflect her views about honesty, truth, and deception—but of course such views manifest themselves with respect to other actions, and to emotional reactions as well. Valuing honesty as she does, she chooses, where possible to work with honest people, to have honest friends, to bring up her children to be honest. She disapproves of, dislikes, deplores dishonesty, is not amused by certain tales of chicanery, despises or pities those who succeed through deception rather than thinking they have been clever, is unsurprised, or pleased (as appropriate) when honesty triumphs, is shocked or distressed when those near and dear to her do what is dishonest and so on. Given that a virtue is such a multi-track disposition, it would obviously be reckless to attribute one to an agent on the basis of a single observed action or even a series of similar actions, especially if you don’t know the agent’s reasons for doing as she did (Sreenivasan 2002).

Possessing a virtue is a matter of degree. To possess such a disposition fully is to possess full or perfect virtue, which is rare, and there are a number of ways of falling short of this ideal (Athanassoulis 2000). Most people who can truly be described as fairly virtuous, and certainly markedly better than those who can truly be described as dishonest, self-centred and greedy, still have their blind spots—little areas where they do not act for the reasons one would expect. So someone honest or kind in most situations, and notably so in demanding ones, may nevertheless be trivially tainted by snobbery, inclined to be disingenuous about their forebears and less than kind to strangers with the wrong accent.

Further, it is not easy to get one’s emotions in harmony with one’s rational recognition of certain reasons for action. I may be honest enough to recognise that I must own up to a mistake because it would be dishonest not to do so without my acceptance being so wholehearted that I can own up easily, with no inner conflict. Following (and adapting) Aristotle, virtue ethicists draw a distinction between full or perfect virtue and “continence”, or strength of will. The fully virtuous do what they should without a struggle against contrary desires; the continent have to control a desire or temptation to do otherwise.

Describing the continent as “falling short” of perfect virtue appears to go against the intuition that there is something particularly admirable about people who manage to act well when it is especially hard for them to do so, but the plausibility of this depends on exactly what “makes it hard” (Foot 1978: 11–14). If it is the circumstances in which the agent acts—say that she is very poor when she sees someone drop a full purse or that she is in deep grief when someone visits seeking help—then indeed it is particularly admirable of her to restore the purse or give the help when it is hard for her to do so. But if what makes it hard is an imperfection in her character—the temptation to keep what is not hers, or a callous indifference to the suffering of others—then it is not.

Another way in which one can easily fall short of full virtue is through lacking phronesis —moral or practical wisdom.

The concept of a virtue is the concept of something that makes its possessor good: a virtuous person is a morally good, excellent or admirable person who acts and feels as she should. These are commonly accepted truisms. But it is equally common, in relation to particular (putative) examples of virtues to give these truisms up. We may say of someone that he is generous or honest “to a fault”. It is commonly asserted that someone’s compassion might lead them to act wrongly, to tell a lie they should not have told, for example, in their desire to prevent someone else’s hurt feelings. It is also said that courage, in a desperado, enables him to do far more wicked things than he would have been able to do if he were timid. So it would appear that generosity, honesty, compassion and courage despite being virtues, are sometimes faults. Someone who is generous, honest, compassionate, and courageous might not be a morally good person—or, if it is still held to be a truism that they are, then morally good people may be led by what makes them morally good to act wrongly! How have we arrived at such an odd conclusion?

The answer lies in too ready an acceptance of ordinary usage, which permits a fairly wide-ranging application of many of the virtue terms, combined, perhaps, with a modern readiness to suppose that the virtuous agent is motivated by emotion or inclination, not by rational choice. If one thinks of generosity or honesty as the disposition to be moved to action by generous or honest impulses such as the desire to give or to speak the truth, if one thinks of compassion as the disposition to be moved by the sufferings of others and to act on that emotion, if one thinks of courage as mere fearlessness or the willingness to face danger, then it will indeed seem obvious that these are all dispositions that can lead to their possessor’s acting wrongly. But it is also obvious, as soon as it is stated, that these are dispositions that can be possessed by children, and although children thus endowed (bar the “courageous” disposition) would undoubtedly be very nice children, we would not say that they were morally virtuous or admirable people. The ordinary usage, or the reliance on motivation by inclination, gives us what Aristotle calls “natural virtue”—a proto version of full virtue awaiting perfection by phronesis or practical wisdom.

Aristotle makes a number of specific remarks about phronesis that are the subject of much scholarly debate, but the (related) modern concept is best understood by thinking of what the virtuous morally mature adult has that nice children, including nice adolescents, lack. Both the virtuous adult and the nice child have good intentions, but the child is much more prone to mess things up because he is ignorant of what he needs to know in order to do what he intends. A virtuous adult is not, of course, infallible and may also, on occasion, fail to do what she intended to do through lack of knowledge, but only on those occasions on which the lack of knowledge is not culpable. So, for example, children and adolescents often harm those they intend to benefit either because they do not know how to set about securing the benefit or because their understanding of what is beneficial and harmful is limited and often mistaken. Such ignorance in small children is rarely, if ever culpable. Adults, on the other hand, are culpable if they mess things up by being thoughtless, insensitive, reckless, impulsive, shortsighted, and by assuming that what suits them will suit everyone instead of taking a more objective viewpoint. They are also culpable if their understanding of what is beneficial and harmful is mistaken. It is part of practical wisdom to know how to secure real benefits effectively; those who have practical wisdom will not make the mistake of concealing the hurtful truth from the person who really needs to know it in the belief that they are benefiting him.

Quite generally, given that good intentions are intentions to act well or “do the right thing”, we may say that practical wisdom is the knowledge or understanding that enables its possessor, unlike the nice adolescents, to do just that, in any given situation. The detailed specification of what is involved in such knowledge or understanding has not yet appeared in the literature, but some aspects of it are becoming well known. Even many deontologists now stress the point that their action-guiding rules cannot, reliably, be applied without practical wisdom, because correct application requires situational appreciation—the capacity to recognise, in any particular situation, those features of it that are morally salient. This brings out two aspects of practical wisdom.

One is that it characteristically comes only with experience of life. Amongst the morally relevant features of a situation may be the likely consequences, for the people involved, of a certain action, and this is something that adolescents are notoriously clueless about precisely because they are inexperienced. It is part of practical wisdom to be wise about human beings and human life. (It should go without saying that the virtuous are mindful of the consequences of possible actions. How could they fail to be reckless, thoughtless and short-sighted if they were not?)

The second is the practically wise agent’s capacity to recognise some features of a situation as more important than others, or indeed, in that situation, as the only relevant ones. The wise do not see things in the same way as the nice adolescents who, with their under-developed virtues, still tend to see the personally disadvantageous nature of a certain action as competing in importance with its honesty or benevolence or justice.

These aspects coalesce in the description of the practically wise as those who understand what is truly worthwhile, truly important, and thereby truly advantageous in life, who know, in short, how to live well.

2. Forms of Virtue Ethics

While all forms of virtue ethics agree that virtue is central and practical wisdom required, they differ in how they combine these and other concepts to illuminate what we should do in particular contexts and how we should live our lives as a whole. In what follows we sketch four distinct forms taken by contemporary virtue ethics, namely, a) eudaimonist virtue ethics, b) agent-based and exemplarist virtue ethics, c) target-centered virtue ethics, and d) Platonistic virtue ethics.

The distinctive feature of eudaimonist versions of virtue ethics is that they define virtues in terms of their relationship to eudaimonia . A virtue is a trait that contributes to or is a constituent of eudaimonia and we ought to develop virtues, the eudaimonist claims, precisely because they contribute to eudaimonia .

The concept of eudaimonia , a key term in ancient Greek moral philosophy, is standardly translated as “happiness” or “flourishing” and occasionally as “well-being.” Each translation has its disadvantages. The trouble with “flourishing” is that animals and even plants can flourish but eudaimonia is possible only for rational beings. The trouble with “happiness” is that in ordinary conversation it connotes something subjectively determined. It is for me, not for you, to pronounce on whether I am happy. If I think I am happy then I am—it is not something I can be wrong about (barring advanced cases of self-deception). Contrast my being healthy or flourishing. Here we have no difficulty in recognizing that I might think I was healthy, either physically or psychologically, or think that I was flourishing but be wrong. In this respect, “flourishing” is a better translation than “happiness”. It is all too easy to be mistaken about whether one’s life is eudaimon (the adjective from eudaimonia ) not simply because it is easy to deceive oneself, but because it is easy to have a mistaken conception of eudaimonia , or of what it is to live well as a human being, believing it to consist largely in physical pleasure or luxury for example.

Eudaimonia is, avowedly, a moralized or value-laden concept of happiness, something like “true” or “real” happiness or “the sort of happiness worth seeking or having.” It is thereby the sort of concept about which there can be substantial disagreement between people with different views about human life that cannot be resolved by appeal to some external standard on which, despite their different views, the parties to the disagreement concur (Hursthouse 1999: 188–189).

Most versions of virtue ethics agree that living a life in accordance with virtue is necessary for eudaimonia. This supreme good is not conceived of as an independently defined state (made up of, say, a list of non-moral goods that does not include virtuous activity) which exercise of the virtues might be thought to promote. It is, within virtue ethics, already conceived of as something of which virtuous activity is at least partially constitutive (Kraut 1989). Thereby virtue ethicists claim that a human life devoted to physical pleasure or the acquisition of wealth is not eudaimon , but a wasted life.

But although all standard versions of virtue ethics insist on that conceptual link between virtue and eudaimonia , further links are matters of dispute and generate different versions. For Aristotle, virtue is necessary but not sufficient—what is also needed are external goods which are a matter of luck. For Plato and the Stoics, virtue is both necessary and sufficient for eudaimonia (Annas 1993).

According to eudaimonist virtue ethics, the good life is the eudaimon life, and the virtues are what enable a human being to be eudaimon because the virtues just are those character traits that benefit their possessor in that way, barring bad luck. So there is a link between eudaimonia and what confers virtue status on a character trait. (For a discussion of the differences between eudaimonists see Baril 2014. For recent defenses of eudaimonism see Annas 2011; LeBar 2013b; Badhwar 2014; and Bloomfield 2014.)

Rather than deriving the normativity of virtue from the value of eudaimonia , agent-based virtue ethicists argue that other forms of normativity—including the value of eudaimonia —are traced back to and ultimately explained in terms of the motivational and dispositional qualities of agents.

It is unclear how many other forms of normativity must be explained in terms of the qualities of agents in order for a theory to count as agent-based. The two best-known agent-based theorists, Michael Slote and Linda Zagzebski, trace a wide range of normative qualities back to the qualities of agents. For example, Slote defines rightness and wrongness in terms of agents’ motivations: “[A]gent-based virtue ethics … understands rightness in terms of good motivations and wrongness in terms of the having of bad (or insufficiently good) motives” (2001: 14). Similarly, he explains the goodness of an action, the value of eudaimonia , the justice of a law or social institution, and the normativity of practical rationality in terms of the motivational and dispositional qualities of agents (2001: 99–100, 154, 2000). Zagzebski likewise defines right and wrong actions by reference to the emotions, motives, and dispositions of virtuous and vicious agents. For example, “A wrong act = an act that the phronimos characteristically would not do, and he would feel guilty if he did = an act such that it is not the case that he might do it = an act that expresses a vice = an act that is against a requirement of virtue (the virtuous self)” (Zagzebski 2004: 160). Her definitions of duties, good and bad ends, and good and bad states of affairs are similarly grounded in the motivational and dispositional states of exemplary agents (1998, 2004, 2010).

However, there could also be less ambitious agent-based approaches to virtue ethics (see Slote 1997). At the very least, an agent-based approach must be committed to explaining what one should do by reference to the motivational and dispositional states of agents. But this is not yet a sufficient condition for counting as an agent-based approach, since the same condition will be met by every virtue ethical account. For a theory to count as an agent-based form of virtue ethics it must also be the case that the normative properties of motivations and dispositions cannot be explained in terms of the normative properties of something else (such as eudaimonia or states of affairs) which is taken to be more fundamental.

Beyond this basic commitment, there is room for agent-based theories to be developed in a number of different directions. The most important distinguishing factor has to do with how motivations and dispositions are taken to matter for the purposes of explaining other normative qualities. For Slote what matters are this particular agent’s actual motives and dispositions . The goodness of action A, for example, is derived from the agent’s motives when she performs A. If those motives are good then the action is good, if not then not. On Zagzebski’s account, by contrast, a good or bad, right or wrong action is defined not by this agent’s actual motives but rather by whether this is the sort of action a virtuously motivated agent would perform (Zagzebski 2004: 160). Appeal to the virtuous agent’s hypothetical motives and dispositions enables Zagzebski to distinguish between performing the right action and doing so for the right reasons (a distinction that, as Brady (2004) observes, Slote has trouble drawing).

Another point on which agent-based forms of virtue ethics might differ concerns how one identifies virtuous motivations and dispositions. According to Zagzebski’s exemplarist account, “We do not have criteria for goodness in advance of identifying the exemplars of goodness” (Zagzebski 2004: 41). As we observe the people around us, we find ourselves wanting to be like some of them (in at least some respects) and not wanting to be like others. The former provide us with positive exemplars and the latter with negative ones. Our understanding of better and worse motivations and virtuous and vicious dispositions is grounded in these primitive responses to exemplars (2004: 53). This is not to say that every time we act we stop and ask ourselves what one of our exemplars would do in this situations. Our moral concepts become more refined over time as we encounter a wider variety of exemplars and begin to draw systematic connections between them, noting what they have in common, how they differ, and which of these commonalities and differences matter, morally speaking. Recognizable motivational profiles emerge and come to be labeled as virtues or vices, and these, in turn, shape our understanding of the obligations we have and the ends we should pursue. However, even though the systematising of moral thought can travel a long way from our starting point, according to the exemplarist it never reaches a stage where reference to exemplars is replaced by the recognition of something more fundamental. At the end of the day, according to the exemplarist, our moral system still rests on our basic propensity to take a liking (or disliking) to exemplars. Nevertheless, one could be an agent-based theorist without advancing the exemplarist’s account of the origins or reference conditions for judgments of good and bad, virtuous and vicious.

The touchstone for eudaimonist virtue ethicists is a flourishing human life. For agent-based virtue ethicists it is an exemplary agent’s motivations. The target-centered view developed by Christine Swanton (2003), by contrast, begins with our existing conceptions of the virtues. We already have a passable idea of which traits are virtues and what they involve. Of course, this untutored understanding can be clarified and improved, and it is one of the tasks of the virtue ethicist to help us do precisely that. But rather than stripping things back to something as basic as the motivations we want to imitate or building it up to something as elaborate as an entire flourishing life, the target-centered view begins where most ethics students find themselves, namely, with the idea that generosity, courage, self-discipline, compassion, and the like get a tick of approval. It then examines what these traits involve.

A complete account of virtue will map out 1) its field , 2) its mode of responsiveness, 3) its basis of moral acknowledgment, and 4) its target . Different virtues are concerned with different fields . Courage, for example, is concerned with what might harm us, whereas generosity is concerned with the sharing of time, talent, and property. The basis of acknowledgment of a virtue is the feature within the virtue’s field to which it responds. To continue with our previous examples, generosity is attentive to the benefits that others might enjoy through one’s agency, and courage responds to threats to value, status, or the bonds that exist between oneself and particular others, and the fear such threats might generate. A virtue’s mode has to do with how it responds to the bases of acknowledgment within its field. Generosity promotes a good, namely, another’s benefit, whereas courage defends a value, bond, or status. Finally, a virtue’s target is that at which it is aimed. Courage aims to control fear and handle danger, while generosity aims to share time, talents, or possessions with others in ways that benefit them.

A virtue , on a target-centered account, “is a disposition to respond to, or acknowledge, items within its field or fields in an excellent or good enough way” (Swanton 2003: 19). A virtuous act is an act that hits the target of a virtue, which is to say that it succeeds in responding to items in its field in the specified way (233). Providing a target-centered definition of a right action requires us to move beyond the analysis of a single virtue and the actions that follow from it. This is because a single action context may involve a number of different, overlapping fields. Determination might lead me to persist in trying to complete a difficult task even if doing so requires a singleness of purpose. But love for my family might make a different use of my time and attention. In order to define right action a target-centered view must explain how we handle different virtues’ conflicting claims on our resources. There are at least three different ways to address this challenge. A perfectionist target-centered account would stipulate, “An act is right if and only if it is overall virtuous, and that entails that it is the, or a, best action possible in the circumstances” (239–240). A more permissive target-centered account would not identify ‘right’ with ‘best’, but would allow an action to count as right provided “it is good enough even if not the (or a) best action” (240). A minimalist target-centered account would not even require an action to be good in order to be right. On such a view, “An act is right if and only if it is not overall vicious” (240). (For further discussion of target-centered virtue ethics see Van Zyl 2014; and Smith 2016).

The fourth form a virtue ethic might adopt takes its inspiration from Plato. The Socrates of Plato’s dialogues devotes a great deal of time to asking his fellow Athenians to explain the nature of virtues like justice, courage, piety, and wisdom. So it is clear that Plato counts as a virtue theorist. But it is a matter of some debate whether he should be read as a virtue ethicist (White 2015). What is not open to debate is whether Plato has had an important influence on the contemporary revival of interest in virtue ethics. A number of those who have contributed to the revival have done so as Plato scholars (e.g., Prior 1991; Kamtekar 1998; Annas 1999; and Reshotko 2006). However, often they have ended up championing a eudaimonist version of virtue ethics (see Prior 2001 and Annas 2011), rather than a version that would warrant a separate classification. Nevertheless, there are two variants that call for distinct treatment.

Timothy Chappell takes the defining feature of Platonistic virtue ethics to be that “Good agency in the truest and fullest sense presupposes the contemplation of the Form of the Good” (2014). Chappell follows Iris Murdoch in arguing that “In the moral life the enemy is the fat relentless ego” (Murdoch 1971: 51). Constantly attending to our needs, our desires, our passions, and our thoughts skews our perspective on what the world is actually like and blinds us to the goods around us. Contemplating the goodness of something we encounter—which is to say, carefully attending to it “for its own sake, in order to understand it” (Chappell 2014: 300)—breaks this natural tendency by drawing our attention away from ourselves. Contemplating such goodness with regularity makes room for new habits of thought that focus more readily and more honestly on things other than the self. It alters the quality of our consciousness. And “anything which alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity, and realism is to be connected with virtue” (Murdoch 1971: 82). The virtues get defined, then, in terms of qualities that help one “pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is” (91). And good agency is defined by the possession and exercise of such virtues. Within Chappell’s and Murdoch’s framework, then, not all normative properties get defined in terms of virtue. Goodness, in particular, is not so defined. But the kind of goodness which is possible for creatures like us is defined by virtue, and any answer to the question of what one should do or how one should live will appeal to the virtues.

Another Platonistic variant of virtue ethics is exemplified by Robert Merrihew Adams. Unlike Murdoch and Chappell, his starting point is not a set of claims about our consciousness of goodness. Rather, he begins with an account of the metaphysics of goodness. Like Murdoch and others influenced by Platonism, Adams’s account of goodness is built around a conception of a supremely perfect good. And like Augustine, Adams takes that perfect good to be God. God is both the exemplification and the source of all goodness. Other things are good, he suggests, to the extent that they resemble God (Adams 1999).

The resemblance requirement identifies a necessary condition for being good, but it does not yet give us a sufficient condition. This is because there are ways in which finite creatures might resemble God that would not be suitable to the type of creature they are. For example, if God were all-knowing, then the belief, “I am all-knowing,” would be a suitable belief for God to have. In God, such a belief—because true—would be part of God’s perfection. However, as neither you nor I are all-knowing, the belief, “I am all-knowing,” in one of us would not be good. To rule out such cases we need to introduce another factor. That factor is the fitting response to goodness, which Adams suggests is love. Adams uses love to weed out problematic resemblances: “being excellent in the way that a finite thing can be consists in resembling God in a way that could serve God as a reason for loving the thing” (Adams 1999: 36).

Virtues come into the account as one of the ways in which some things (namely, persons) could resemble God. “[M]ost of the excellences that are most important to us, and of whose value we are most confident, are excellences of persons or of qualities or actions or works or lives or stories of persons” (1999: 42). This is one of the reasons Adams offers for conceiving of the ideal of perfection as a personal God, rather than an impersonal form of the Good. Many of the excellences of persons of which we are most confident are virtues such as love, wisdom, justice, patience, and generosity. And within many theistic traditions, including Adams’s own Christian tradition, such virtues are commonly attributed to divine agents.

A Platonistic account like the one Adams puts forward in Finite and Infinite Goods clearly does not derive all other normative properties from the virtues (for a discussion of the relationship between this view and the one he puts forward in A Theory of Virtue (2006) see Pettigrove 2014). Goodness provides the normative foundation. Virtues are not built on that foundation; rather, as one of the varieties of goodness of whose value we are most confident, virtues form part of the foundation. Obligations, by contrast, come into the account at a different level. Moral obligations, Adams argues, are determined by the expectations and demands that “arise in a relationship or system of relationships that is good or valuable” (1999: 244). Other things being equal, the more virtuous the parties to the relationship, the more binding the obligation. Thus, within Adams’s account, the good (which includes virtue) is prior to the right. However, once good relationships have given rise to obligations, those obligations take on a life of their own. Their bindingness is not traced directly to considerations of goodness. Rather, they are determined by the expectations of the parties and the demands of the relationship.

A number of objections have been raised against virtue ethics, some of which bear more directly on one form of virtue ethics than on others. In this section we consider eight objections, namely, the a) application, b) adequacy, c) relativism, d) conflict, e) self-effacement, f) justification, g) egoism, and h) situationist problems.

a) In the early days of virtue ethics’ revival, the approach was associated with an “anti-codifiability” thesis about ethics, directed against the prevailing pretensions of normative theory. At the time, utilitarians and deontologists commonly (though not universally) held that the task of ethical theory was to come up with a code consisting of universal rules or principles (possibly only one, as in the case of act-utilitarianism) which would have two significant features: i) the rule(s) would amount to a decision procedure for determining what the right action was in any particular case; ii) the rule(s) would be stated in such terms that any non-virtuous person could understand and apply it (them) correctly.

Virtue ethicists maintained, contrary to these two claims, that it was quite unrealistic to imagine that there could be such a code (see, in particular, McDowell 1979). The results of attempts to produce and employ such a code, in the heady days of the 1960s and 1970s, when medical and then bioethics boomed and bloomed, tended to support the virtue ethicists’ claim. More and more utilitarians and deontologists found themselves agreed on their general rules but on opposite sides of the controversial moral issues in contemporary discussion. It came to be recognised that moral sensitivity, perception, imagination, and judgement informed by experience— phronesis in short—is needed to apply rules or principles correctly. Hence many (though by no means all) utilitarians and deontologists have explicitly abandoned (ii) and much less emphasis is placed on (i).

Nevertheless, the complaint that virtue ethics does not produce codifiable principles is still a commonly voiced criticism of the approach, expressed as the objection that it is, in principle, unable to provide action-guidance.

Initially, the objection was based on a misunderstanding. Blinkered by slogans that described virtue ethics as “concerned with Being rather than Doing,” as addressing “What sort of person should I be?” but not “What should I do?” as being “agent-centered rather than act-centered,” its critics maintained that it was unable to provide action-guidance. Hence, rather than being a normative rival to utilitarian and deontological ethics, it could claim to be no more than a valuable supplement to them. The rather odd idea was that all virtue ethics could offer was, “Identify a moral exemplar and do what he would do,” as though the university student trying to decide whether to study music (her preference) or engineering (her parents’ preference) was supposed to ask herself, “What would Socrates study if he were in my circumstances?”

But the objection failed to take note of Anscombe’s hint that a great deal of specific action guidance could be found in rules employing the virtue and vice terms (“v-rules”) such as “Do what is honest/charitable; do not do what is dishonest/uncharitable” (Hursthouse 1999). (It is a noteworthy feature of our virtue and vice vocabulary that, although our list of generally recognised virtue terms is comparatively short, our list of vice terms is remarkably, and usefully, long, far exceeding anything that anyone who thinks in terms of standard deontological rules has ever come up with. Much invaluable action guidance comes from avoiding courses of action that would be irresponsible, feckless, lazy, inconsiderate, uncooperative, harsh, intolerant, selfish, mercenary, indiscreet, tactless, arrogant, unsympathetic, cold, incautious, unenterprising, pusillanimous, feeble, presumptuous, rude, hypocritical, self-indulgent, materialistic, grasping, short-sighted, vindictive, calculating, ungrateful, grudging, brutal, profligate, disloyal, and on and on.)

(b) A closely related objection has to do with whether virtue ethics can provide an adequate account of right action. This worry can take two forms. (i) One might think a virtue ethical account of right action is extensionally inadequate. It is possible to perform a right action without being virtuous and a virtuous person can occasionally perform the wrong action without that calling her virtue into question. If virtue is neither necessary nor sufficient for right action, one might wonder whether the relationship between rightness/wrongness and virtue/vice is close enough for the former to be identified in terms of the latter. (ii) Alternatively, even if one thought it possible to produce a virtue ethical account that picked out all (and only) right actions, one might still think that at least in some cases virtue is not what explains rightness (Adams 2006:6–8).

Some virtue ethicists respond to the adequacy objection by rejecting the assumption that virtue ethics ought to be in the business of providing an account of right action in the first place. Following in the footsteps of Anscombe (1958) and MacIntyre (1985), Talbot Brewer (2009) argues that to work with the categories of rightness and wrongness is already to get off on the wrong foot. Contemporary conceptions of right and wrong action, built as they are around a notion of moral duty that presupposes a framework of divine (or moral) law or around a conception of obligation that is defined in contrast to self-interest, carry baggage the virtue ethicist is better off without. Virtue ethics can address the questions of how one should live, what kind of person one should become, and even what one should do without that committing it to providing an account of ‘right action’. One might choose, instead, to work with aretaic concepts (defined in terms of virtues and vices) and axiological concepts (defined in terms of good and bad, better and worse) and leave out deontic notions (like right/wrong action, duty, and obligation) altogether.

Other virtue ethicists wish to retain the concept of right action but note that in the current philosophical discussion a number of distinct qualities march under that banner. In some contexts, ‘right action’ identifies the best action an agent might perform in the circumstances. In others, it designates an action that is commendable (even if not the best possible). In still others, it picks out actions that are not blameworthy (even if not commendable). A virtue ethicist might choose to define one of these—for example, the best action—in terms of virtues and vices, but appeal to other normative concepts—such as legitimate expectations—when defining other conceptions of right action.

As we observed in section 2, a virtue ethical account need not attempt to reduce all other normative concepts to virtues and vices. What is required is simply (i) that virtue is not reduced to some other normative concept that is taken to be more fundamental and (ii) that some other normative concepts are explained in terms of virtue and vice. This takes the sting out of the adequacy objection, which is most compelling against versions of virtue ethics that attempt to define all of the senses of ‘right action’ in terms of virtues. Appealing to virtues and vices makes it much easier to achieve extensional adequacy. Making room for normative concepts that are not taken to be reducible to virtue and vice concepts makes it even easier to generate a theory that is both extensionally and explanatorily adequate. Whether one needs other concepts and, if so, how many, is still a matter of debate among virtue ethicists, as is the question of whether virtue ethics even ought to be offering an account of right action. Either way virtue ethicists have resources available to them to address the adequacy objection.

Insofar as the different versions of virtue ethics all retain an emphasis on the virtues, they are open to the familiar problem of (c) the charge of cultural relativity. Is it not the case that different cultures embody different virtues, (MacIntyre 1985) and hence that the v-rules will pick out actions as right or wrong only relative to a particular culture? Different replies have been made to this charge. One—the tu quoque , or “partners in crime” response—exhibits a quite familiar pattern in virtue ethicists’ defensive strategy (Solomon 1988). They admit that, for them, cultural relativism is a challenge, but point out that it is just as much a problem for the other two approaches. The (putative) cultural variation in character traits regarded as virtues is no greater—indeed markedly less—than the cultural variation in rules of conduct, and different cultures have different ideas about what constitutes happiness or welfare. That cultural relativity should be a problem common to all three approaches is hardly surprising. It is related, after all, to the “justification problem” ( see below ) the quite general metaethical problem of justifying one’s moral beliefs to those who disagree, whether they be moral sceptics, pluralists or from another culture.

A bolder strategy involves claiming that virtue ethics has less difficulty with cultural relativity than the other two approaches. Much cultural disagreement arises, it may be claimed, from local understandings of the virtues, but the virtues themselves are not relative to culture (Nussbaum 1993).

Another objection to which the tu quoque response is partially appropriate is (d) “the conflict problem.” What does virtue ethics have to say about dilemmas—cases in which, apparently, the requirements of different virtues conflict because they point in opposed directions? Charity prompts me to kill the person who would be better off dead, but justice forbids it. Honesty points to telling the hurtful truth, kindness and compassion to remaining silent or even lying. What shall I do? Of course, the same sorts of dilemmas are generated by conflicts between deontological rules. Deontology and virtue ethics share the conflict problem (and are happy to take it on board rather than follow some of the utilitarians in their consequentialist resolutions of such dilemmas) and in fact their strategies for responding to it are parallel. Both aim to resolve a number of dilemmas by arguing that the conflict is merely apparent; a discriminating understanding of the virtues or rules in question, possessed only by those with practical wisdom, will perceive that, in this particular case, the virtues do not make opposing demands or that one rule outranks another, or has a certain exception clause built into it. Whether this is all there is to it depends on whether there are any irresolvable dilemmas. If there are, proponents of either normative approach may point out reasonably that it could only be a mistake to offer a resolution of what is, ex hypothesi , irresolvable.

Another problem arguably shared by all three approaches is (e), that of being self-effacing. An ethical theory is self-effacing if, roughly, whatever it claims justifies a particular action, or makes it right, had better not be the agent’s motive for doing it. Michael Stocker (1976) originally introduced it as a problem for deontology and consequentialism. He pointed out that the agent who, rightly, visits a friend in hospital will rather lessen the impact of his visit on her if he tells her either that he is doing it because it is his duty or because he thought it would maximize the general happiness. But as Simon Keller observes, she won’t be any better pleased if he tells her that he is visiting her because it is what a virtuous agent would do, so virtue ethics would appear to have the problem too (Keller 2007). However, virtue ethics’ defenders have argued that not all forms of virtue ethics are subject to this objection (Pettigrove 2011) and those that are are not seriously undermined by the problem (Martinez 2011).

Another problem for virtue ethics, which is shared by both utilitarianism and deontology, is (f) “the justification problem.” Abstractly conceived, this is the problem of how we justify or ground our ethical beliefs, an issue that is hotly debated at the level of metaethics. In its particular versions, for deontology there is the question of how to justify its claims that certain moral rules are the correct ones, and for utilitarianism of how to justify its claim that all that really matters morally are consequences for happiness or well-being. For virtue ethics, the problem concerns the question of which character traits are the virtues.

In the metaethical debate, there is widespread disagreement about the possibility of providing an external foundation for ethics—“external” in the sense of being external to ethical beliefs—and the same disagreement is found amongst deontologists and utilitarians. Some believe that their normative ethics can be placed on a secure basis, resistant to any form of scepticism, such as what anyone rationally desires, or would accept or agree on, regardless of their ethical outlook; others that it cannot.

Virtue ethicists have eschewed any attempt to ground virtue ethics in an external foundation while continuing to maintain that their claims can be validated. Some follow a form of Rawls’s coherentist approach (Slote 2001; Swanton 2003); neo-Aristotelians a form of ethical naturalism.

A misunderstanding of eudaimonia as an unmoralized concept leads some critics to suppose that the neo-Aristotelians are attempting to ground their claims in a scientific account of human nature and what counts, for a human being, as flourishing. Others assume that, if this is not what they are doing, they cannot be validating their claims that, for example, justice, charity, courage, and generosity are virtues. Either they are illegitimately helping themselves to Aristotle’s discredited natural teleology (Williams 1985) or producing mere rationalizations of their own personal or culturally inculcated values. But McDowell, Foot, MacIntyre and Hursthouse have all outlined versions of a third way between these two extremes. Eudaimonia in virtue ethics, is indeed a moralized concept, but it is not only that. Claims about what constitutes flourishing for human beings no more float free of scientific facts about what human beings are like than ethological claims about what constitutes flourishing for elephants. In both cases, the truth of the claims depends in part on what kind of animal they are and what capacities, desires and interests the humans or elephants have.

The best available science today (including evolutionary theory and psychology) supports rather than undermines the ancient Greek assumption that we are social animals, like elephants and wolves and unlike polar bears. No rationalizing explanation in terms of anything like a social contract is needed to explain why we choose to live together, subjugating our egoistic desires in order to secure the advantages of co-operation. Like other social animals, our natural impulses are not solely directed towards our own pleasures and preservation, but include altruistic and cooperative ones.

This basic fact about us should make more comprehensible the claim that the virtues are at least partially constitutive of human flourishing and also undercut the objection that virtue ethics is, in some sense, egoistic.

(g) The egoism objection has a number of sources. One is a simple confusion. Once it is understood that the fully virtuous agent characteristically does what she should without inner conflict, it is triumphantly asserted that “she is only doing what she wants to do and hence is being selfish.” So when the generous person gives gladly, as the generous are wont to do, it turns out she is not generous and unselfish after all, or at least not as generous as the one who greedily wants to hang on to everything she has but forces herself to give because she thinks she should! A related version ascribes bizarre reasons to the virtuous agent, unjustifiably assuming that she acts as she does because she believes that acting thus on this occasion will help her to achieve eudaimonia. But “the virtuous agent” is just “the agent with the virtues” and it is part of our ordinary understanding of the virtue terms that each carries with it its own typical range of reasons for acting. The virtuous agent acts as she does because she believes that someone’s suffering will be averted, or someone benefited, or the truth established, or a debt repaid, or … thereby.

It is the exercise of the virtues during one’s life that is held to be at least partially constitutive of eudaimonia , and this is consistent with recognising that bad luck may land the virtuous agent in circumstances that require her to give up her life. Given the sorts of considerations that courageous, honest, loyal, charitable people wholeheartedly recognise as reasons for action, they may find themselves compelled to face danger for a worthwhile end, to speak out in someone’s defence, or refuse to reveal the names of their comrades, even when they know that this will inevitably lead to their execution, to share their last crust and face starvation. On the view that the exercise of the virtues is necessary but not sufficient for eudaimonia , such cases are described as those in which the virtuous agent sees that, as things have unfortunately turned out, eudaimonia is not possible for them (Foot 2001, 95). On the Stoical view that it is both necessary and sufficient, a eudaimon life is a life that has been successfully lived (where “success” of course is not to be understood in a materialistic way) and such people die knowing not only that they have made a success of their lives but that they have also brought their lives to a markedly successful completion. Either way, such heroic acts can hardly be regarded as egoistic.

A lingering suggestion of egoism may be found in the misconceived distinction between so-called “self-regarding” and “other-regarding” virtues. Those who have been insulated from the ancient tradition tend to regard justice and benevolence as real virtues, which benefit others but not their possessor, and prudence, fortitude and providence (the virtue whose opposite is “improvidence” or being a spendthrift) as not real virtues at all because they benefit only their possessor. This is a mistake on two counts. Firstly, justice and benevolence do, in general, benefit their possessors, since without them eudaimonia is not possible. Secondly, given that we live together, as social animals, the “self-regarding” virtues do benefit others—those who lack them are a great drain on, and sometimes grief to, those who are close to them (as parents with improvident or imprudent adult offspring know only too well).

The most recent objection (h) to virtue ethics claims that work in “situationist” social psychology shows that there are no such things as character traits and thereby no such things as virtues for virtue ethics to be about (Doris 1998; Harman 1999). In reply, some virtue ethicists have argued that the social psychologists’ studies are irrelevant to the multi-track disposition (see above) that a virtue is supposed to be (Sreenivasan 2002; Kamtekar 2004). Mindful of just how multi-track it is, they agree that it would be reckless in the extreme to ascribe a demanding virtue such as charity to people of whom they know no more than that they have exhibited conventional decency; this would indeed be “a fundamental attribution error.” Others have worked to develop alternative, empirically grounded conceptions of character traits (Snow 2010; Miller 2013 and 2014; however see Upton 2016 for objections to Miller). There have been other responses as well (summarized helpfully in Prinz 2009 and Miller 2014). Notable among these is a response by Adams (2006, echoing Merritt 2000) who steers a middle road between “no character traits at all” and the exacting standard of the Aristotelian conception of virtue which, because of its emphasis on phronesis, requires a high level of character integration. On his conception, character traits may be “frail and fragmentary” but still virtues, and not uncommon. But giving up the idea that practical wisdom is the heart of all the virtues, as Adams has to do, is a substantial sacrifice, as Russell (2009) and Kamtekar (2010) argue.

Even though the “situationist challenge” has left traditional virtue ethicists unmoved, it has generated a healthy engagement with empirical psychological literature, which has also been fuelled by the growing literature on Foot’s Natural Goodness and, quite independently, an upsurge of interest in character education (see below).

Over the past thirty-five years most of those contributing to the revival of virtue ethics have worked within a neo-Aristotelian, eudaimonist framework. However, as noted in section 2, other forms of virtue ethics have begun to emerge. Theorists have begun to turn to philosophers like Hutcheson, Hume, Nietzsche, Martineau, and Heidegger for resources they might use to develop alternatives (see Russell 2006; Swanton 2013 and 2015; Taylor 2015; and Harcourt 2015). Others have turned their attention eastward, exploring Confucian, Buddhist, and Hindu traditions (Yu 2007; Slingerland 2011; Finnigan and Tanaka 2011; McRae 2012; Angle and Slote 2013; Davis 2014; Flanagan 2015; Perrett and Pettigrove 2015; and Sim 2015). These explorations promise to open up new avenues for the development of virtue ethics.

Although virtue ethics has grown remarkably in the last thirty-five years, it is still very much in the minority, particularly in the area of applied ethics. Many editors of big textbook collections on “moral problems” or “applied ethics” now try to include articles representative of each of the three normative approaches but are often unable to find a virtue ethics article addressing a particular issue. This is sometimes, no doubt, because “the” issue has been set up as a deontologicial/utilitarian debate, but it is often simply because no virtue ethicist has yet written on the topic. However, the last decade has seen an increase in the amount of attention applied virtue ethics has received (Walker and Ivanhoe 2007; Hartman 2013; Austin 2014; Van Hooft 2014; and Annas 2015). This area can certainly be expected to grow in the future, and it looks as though applying virtue ethics in the field of environmental ethics may prove particularly fruitful (Sandler 2007; Hursthouse 2007, 2011; Zwolinski and Schmidtz 2013; Cafaro 2015).

Whether virtue ethics can be expected to grow into “virtue politics”—i.e. to extend from moral philosophy into political philosophy—is not so clear. Gisela Striker (2006) has argued that Aristotle’s ethics cannot be understood adequately without attending to its place in his politics. That suggests that at least those virtue ethicists who take their inspiration from Aristotle should have resources to offer for the development of virtue politics. But, while Plato and Aristotle can be great inspirations as far as virtue ethics is concerned, neither, on the face of it, are attractive sources of insight where politics is concerned. However, recent work suggests that Aristotelian ideas can, after all, generate a satisfyingly liberal political philosophy (Nussbaum 2006; LeBar 2013a). Moreover, as noted above, virtue ethics does not have to be neo-Aristotelian. It may be that the virtue ethics of Hutcheson and Hume can be naturally extended into a modern political philosophy (Hursthouse 1990–91; Slote 1993).

Following Plato and Aristotle, modern virtue ethics has always emphasised the importance of moral education, not as the inculcation of rules but as the training of character. There is now a growing movement towards virtues education, amongst both academics (Carr 1999; Athanassoulis 2014; Curren 2015) and teachers in the classroom. One exciting thing about research in this area is its engagement with other academic disciplines, including psychology, educational theory, and theology (see Cline 2015; and Snow 2015).

Finally, one of the more productive developments of virtue ethics has come through the study of particular virtues and vices. There are now a number of careful studies of the cardinal virtues and capital vices (Pieper 1966; Taylor 2006; Curzer 2012; Timpe and Boyd 2014). Others have explored less widely discussed virtues or vices, such as civility, decency, truthfulness, ambition, and meekness (Calhoun 2000; Kekes 2002; Williams 2002; and Pettigrove 2007 and 2012). One of the questions these studies raise is “How many virtues are there?” A second is, “How are these virtues related to one another?” Some virtue ethicists have been happy to work on the assumption that there is no principled reason for limiting the number of virtues and plenty of reason for positing a plurality of them (Swanton 2003; Battaly 2015). Others have been concerned that such an open-handed approach to the virtues will make it difficult for virtue ethicists to come up with an adequate account of right action or deal with the conflict problem discussed above. Dan Russell has proposed cardinality and a version of the unity thesis as a solution to what he calls “the enumeration problem” (the problem of too many virtues). The apparent proliferation of virtues can be significantly reduced if we group virtues together with some being cardinal and others subordinate extensions of those cardinal virtues. Possible conflicts between the remaining virtues can then be managed if they are tied together in some way as part of a unified whole (Russell 2009). This highlights two important avenues for future research, one of which explores individual virtues and the other of which analyses how they might be related to one another.

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Aristotle | character, moral | character, moral: empirical approaches | consequentialism | ethics: deontological | moral dilemmas

Acknowledgments

Parts of the introductory material above repeat what was said in the Introduction and first chapter of On Virtue Ethics (Hursthouse 1999).

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Home — Essay Samples — Philosophy — Ethics and Moral Philosophy — Virtue Ethics

Essays on Virtue Ethics

Virtue ethics essay topics for college students.

As a college student, choosing the right essay topic is crucial to your success. It's not just about fulfilling an assignment; it's an opportunity to explore your interests, exercise critical thinking, and showcase your creativity. Here, we provide you with a comprehensive list of Virtue Ethics essay topics to inspire and guide you in your writing endeavors.

Essay Types and Topics

Argumentative essay.

• The Role of Virtue Ethics in Modern Society
• Challenges in Applying Virtue Ethics to Business Practices
• The Relationship Between Virtue Ethics and Personal Happiness

Example Paragraph:

In today's fast-paced world, the concept of virtue ethics has become increasingly relevant. As individuals and businesses navigate ethical dilemmas, the role of virtue ethics in shaping our decisions cannot be overlooked. This essay will explore the challenges and opportunities of applying virtue ethics in modern society, shedding light on its impact on personal and professional lives.

By examining the challenges and opportunities of applying virtue ethics in modern society, it becomes evident that this ethical framework offers valuable insights into our decision-making processes. As we strive for personal and professional growth, embracing virtue ethics can lead to a more fulfilling and purposeful life.

Compare and Contrast Essay

• Virtue Ethics vs. Utilitarianism: A Comparative Analysis
• The Role of Virtue Ethics in Eastern vs. Western Philosophies
• Applying Virtue Ethics to Personal vs. Professional Decision Making

Descriptive Essay

• The Virtuous Life: A Personal Reflection
• An Exploration of Virtue Ethics in Literature and Art
• The Ethical Landscape: A Descriptive Analysis of Virtue Ethics in Contemporary Society

Persuasive Essay

• Why Virtue Ethics Should Be Integrated into Business Education
• The Ethical Imperative: Convincing Others to Embrace Virtue Ethics
• Advocating for a Virtue Ethics Approach in Political Decision Making

Narrative Essay

• A Personal Experience That Shaped My Understanding of Virtue Ethics
• The Journey to Virtue: A Narrative Exploration of Moral Development
• Discovering Virtue: A Narrative Reflection on Ethical Transformation

Engagement and Creativity

As you explore these essay topics, we encourage you to engage with the concepts of virtue ethics in a creative and thoughtful manner. Consider how you can infuse your unique perspective and experiences into your writing, making your essays both informative and personally meaningful.

Educational Value

Each essay type offers unique opportunities for learning and skill development. An argumentative essay allows you to hone your analytical thinking and persuasive writing skills, while a descriptive essay provides a platform for honing your descriptive abilities. A narrative essay, on the other hand, enables you to practice storytelling and narrative techniques, fostering a deeper understanding of virtue ethics through personal experiences.

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Critical Analysis of Aristotle’s Theory of Moral Responsibility Presented in Nicomachean Ethics

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Understanding Moral Action

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How Should One Live? Essays on the Virtues

Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy

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Contains 14 specially commissioned papers on aspects of virtue ethics, and a substantial introduction that also serves as an introduction to virtue ethics. Topics covered include the practical application of the theory, ancient views, partiality, Kant, utilitarianism, human nature, natural and artificial virtues, virtues and the good, vices, emotions, politics, feminism and moral education, and community.

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Ethics Explainer: Virtue Ethics

Explainer relationships, by the ethics centre 16 feb 2016, virtue ethics is arguably the oldest ethical theory in the world, with origins in ancient greece..

It defines good actions as ones that display embody virtuous character traits, like courage, loyalty, or wisdom. A virtue itself is a disposition to act, think and feel in certain ways. Bad actions display the opposite and are informed by vices, such as cowardice, treachery, and ignorance.

For Aristotle , ethics was a key element of human flourishing because it taught people how to differentiate between virtues and vices. By encouraging examination, more people could live a life dedicated to developing virtues.

It’s one thing to know what’s right, but it’s another to actually do it. How did Aristotle advise us to live our virtues?

By acting as though we already have them.

Excellence as habit

Aristotle explained that both virtues and vices are acquired by repetition. If we routinely overindulge a sweet tooth, we develop a vice — gluttony. If we repeatedly allow others to serve themselves dinner before us, we develop a virtue – selflessness.

Virtue ethics suggests treating our character as a lifelong project, one that has the capacity to truly change who we are. The goal is not to form virtues that mean we act ethically without thinking, but to form virtues that help us see the world clearly and make better judgments as a result.

In a pinch, remember: vices distort, virtues examine.

A quote most of the internet attributes to Aristotle succinctly reads: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit”.

Though he didn’t actually say this, it’s a good indication of what virtue ethics stands for. We can thank American philosopher, Will Durant, for the neat summary.

Aim for in between

There are two practical principles that virtue ethics encourages us to use in ethical dilemmas. The first is called The Golden Mean. When we’re trying to work out what the virtuous thing to do in a particular situation is, look to what lies in the middle between two extreme forms of behaviour. The mean will be the virtue, and the extremes at either end, vices.

Here’s an example. Imagine your friend is wearing a horrendous outfit and asks you how they look. What are the extreme responses you could take? You could a) burst out laughing or b) tell them they look wonderful when they don’t.

These two extremes are vices – the first response is malicious, the second is dishonest. The virtuous response is between these two. In this case, that would be gently — but honestly — telling your friend you think they’d look nicer in another outfit.

Imagination

The second is to use our imagination. What would we do if we were  already  a virtuous person? By imagining the kind of person we’d like to be and how we would want to respond we can start to close the gap between our aspirational identity and who we are at the moment.

Virtue ethics can remind us of the importance of role models. If you want someone to learn ethics, show them an ethical person.

Some argue virtue ethics is overly vague in guiding actions. They say its principles aren’t specific enough to help us overcome difficult ethical conundrums. “Be virtuous” is hard to conceptualise. Others have expressed concern that virtues or vices aren’t agreed on by everybody. Stoicism or sexual openness can be a virtue to some, a vice to others.

Finally, some people think virtue ethics breeds ‘moral narcissism’, where we are so obsessed with our own ethical character that we value it above anyone or anything else.

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Cultivating Virtue: Perspectives from Philosophy, Theology, and Psychology

Nancy E. Snow (ed.),  Cultivating Virtue: Perspectives from Philosophy, Theology, and Psychology , Oxford University Press, 2015, 349pp., $35.00 (pbk), ISBN 9780199967445.

Reviewed by Erica Lucast Stonestreet, College of St. Benedict and St. John's University

The motivation for this volume is to call attention to the development and cultivation of virtue, and to stimulate further work on this relatively neglected aspect of virtue ethics. To this end, Nancy Snow has collected work from philosophical, theological, and psychological angles, representing some non-Western as well as major Western traditions. The result is a set of essays that gives a sense of historical and current understandings of virtue development, raises worthwhile questions, and points out directions for future research. Some of the pieces should prove extremely important in these respects. Three of the most important themes that emerge are probably (1) the importance of early upbringing for the future development of virtue, (2) the central place of action in learning virtue, and (3) the indispensability of community for both cultivating and maintaining virtue, which is an ongoing activity.

Many of the essays have large expository components, but the significance of the exposition varies. A few seem mainly to be rescuing an important figure from a bad reputation: Julia Driver aims to show how Mill was centrally concerned with virtue despite the reputation of consequentialism as entirely about action; Adam Cureton and Thomas Hill point out how standard understandings of Kant overlook the rich account of virtue he actually had.

While these accounts are interesting in their own right and also because they indirectly recognize virtue as an important aspect of morality, they are less interesting than others in the volume that connect exposition to broader implications. Elizabeth Bucar's account of how Ibn Miskawayh's understanding of virtue illuminates the Muslim practice of veiling goes a long way toward better understanding modern debates about that practice, as well as making more general points about how virtue can be cultivated. Owen Flanagan's description of Buddhist ethics and metaphysics suggests how these are intertwined, which in turn suggests the general point that people can become motivated toward virtue if they cultivate a world view that connects them with the world in particular ways. Jennifer Herdt's account of Christian practices designed to shape character shows a view of virtue as deeply embodied, practical, and communal, despite the church's historical objections to the concept. Edward Slingerland's argument that the Confucian view of moral development provides a strong rebuttal to the situationist critique of virtue ethics is convincing.

Not all the essays are so expository, and I will organize the rest of my review around the themes identified above. Many pieces discuss the importance of early childhood for the later development of virtue, but the three that contribute most to this theme are Michael Slote's, Darcia Narvaez's, and Ross Thompson's. Slote begins by observing that discussions of moral development and methods of teaching children to be moral tend to assume that the children have been loved, with (usually tacit) acknowledgment that children who aren't loved may not respond to the methods in question. He points out that unloved children often have psychopathic tendencies, and if this is the result of their being unloved, then love in very early childhood is a condition for moral development. The question is why: how does love lay this foundation for later moral development?

Slote traces the following route from early love to moral development. When we are loved, we "empathically 'take in'" our parents' love, which amounts to taking in "the sympathetic attitude or motive that is focused in our direction" (74). Our empathy with our caregivers' sympathy causes us to feel sympathy. This is essentially what gratitude amounts to, Slote argues: our empathically gained sympathy is directed primarily toward its immediate cause, and we wish to reciprocate to our benefactor the good done to us -- that is, we are grateful. The key to moral development, then, is that this sympathy can spill over onto others (the way anger at a specific target can spill into anger at others). Receiving love in our earliest years thus exercises our inborn capacities for empathy that form the basis of morality later in life. Good moral education will make use of both empathy and sympathy, for instance by asking a child to imagine how a victim of hitting must feel about being hit, which aims to motivate making reparations and refraining from future hitting.

Slote's argument is yet another reason to understand love as an indispensable moral attitude, which to my mind is an important contribution. His essay also helps to show just how deep the roots of care ethics may go. But the piece could benefit from deeper engagement with psychological literature; fortunately, this volume contains two pieces by psychologists that fit very nicely with Slote's themes.

Narvaez's contribution has a lot of resonance with the others. She indirectly provides scientific backing for Slote's claim that being loved in early childhood is essential to later moral development, though her account ranges beyond the parent-child relationship that Slote concentrates on. Narvaez approaches moral development by looking at what kinds of development humans evolved to need, identifying elements of the "evolved developmental niche" (EDN), most of which center around responsive parenting -- love. Children who grow up in environments with these particular manifestations of love thrive in the sense of being physically and socially healthy, empathic, emotionally intelligent, engaged with others and the world, and communally oriented. Children who lack elements of the EDN display detachment, an individualistic, self-protective "safety" orientation, and lives in which fear and anger are prominent motivators.

Narvaez frequently contrasts modern Western upbringings with those of indigenous peoples, holding up the latter as examples of societies in which children are raised in the EDN and indicting modern societies for their detachment from that EDN, with resulting moral, social, and environmental degradation. The piece raises many questions about how to use the knowledge Narvaez presents and to reconcile it with other values and goods that have come out of modern civilization. She is implicitly deriving an "ought" from an "is," though perhaps this isn't all bad -- just as knowing what it takes for a plant to flourish requires knowing its nature, knowing what it takes for humans to flourish requires knowledge of our nature. I am sympathetic to her project, but visions of the good life for humans are contested, and there are a host of issues in this vicinity. To take up any implicit recommendations, we will need the EDN described in more detail to understand whether modern life necessarily precludes the kind of nurture that humans need, or whether our drift away from it is only a contingent historical development -- tasks I understand Narvaez to undertake in other work. The primary focus in this short piece is to make the case that virtue develops implicitly and deeply given the right conditions. Her evidence about virtue development could easily be seen to support the ideas and recommendations of most of the other essays and might do quite a bit of good if it were publicized widely and taken seriously in both private and public life.

Thompson presents studies on childhood premoral sensibilities to argue that early childhood development is important to the cultivation of virtue, in the sense that (at the very least) "complex competencies at any age emerge from earlier skills that are progenitors to those that come later" (298). His piece thus complements Narvaez's in that he fills in some details, and it supports Slote's piece in particular, and the rest of them more generally.

Thompson presents work that shows that children as young as 18 months can display shared intentionality, that two-to-three year olds display behavior associated with conscience, and that children are developing a moral sense of themselves before age 5. The research he presents on conscience and moral self emphasizes the role parents play in eliciting and shaping these tendencies, thus reinforcing what Narvaez and Slote claim about the power of love in early childhood to serve as a foundation for later moral development. Thompson points out that none of the tendencies and capabilities discovered in early childhood amount to full-blown virtue, but he highlights the factors that influence their development, thus implicitly indicating what can go wrong. He notes that the research here is limited and leaves us with many open questions, but that what we do know offers clear direction for further study. He also explains why our impressions of young children as egocentric have a foundation: while they have these nascent sensitivities to the feelings, needs and intentions of others, their poor executive function, inability to help effectively, and easy distractibility can probably account for the appearance of ego-centeredness. Without actually making policy recommendations, he points out that all of this research has enormous implications for how we should help those who do not grow up in the environments conducive to the development of these early, premoral sensitivities.

The book's second major theme highlights the role of action in learning virtue. I'll begin with Christine Swanton's piece. Swanton proposes that we look carefully at a virtue of moral self-improvement, given that virtue ethics enjoins us to live lives of virtue (i.e. take virtuous action), which requires learning to be virtuous and then maintaining that state. Studying the virtue of moral self-improvement, she claims, promises to resolve two problems that have plagued virtue ethics: the self-centeredness problem, and the problem of how to account for the rightness of acts by learners that actual virtuous people would never perform.

I may be misunderstanding her, but it looks to me as though Swanton gives an effective response to these problems without needing to appeal to a further virtue of self-improvement. Her solution comes from the persuasive suggestion that what the agent aims at is leading a virtuous life, not cultivating virtue. That would mean that the paradigm of right action is not whatever a virtuous person would do, as many eudaimonist models suggest. Rather, the aim is to hit the targets of virtues, and although she may not be fully virtuous in doing so because she fails to get the right attitude, right time, right amount, etc., her actions are not self-centered, nor is there any problem praising her for hitting the target even if she doesn't achieve full virtue. This solution seems to be enough; it highlights the importance of doing virtuous actions as the first step toward virtue, with the hope that (through feedback and reflection) the other things required for full virtue will follow. Adding a separate virtue thus seems like an epicycle, a philosopher's answer to a philosopher's problem.

Furthermore, the virtue flirts with self-centeredness, given that "One important good to be attained" by the virtue of moral self-improvement "is that of improving an agent's own virtue" (121). If we aim at improving ourselves, how will this result in any actual improvement, if what we need to do is stop thinking about ourselves? The idea that virtues aim at a target is supposed to counteract this; what we do in trying to act virtuously is hit that target, not think about ourselves. If that's right (and I think it is), then we must understand the target of self-improvement to be hitting the targets of other virtues, lest we risk self-centeredness. This might work, but it seems self-effacing, which Swanton thinks is a problem with the eudaimonist's solution to self-centeredness.

Several other essays touch on the theme of action as the first step toward virtue. Bucar uses the conception of virtue in Islamic thinker Ibn Miskawayh's work to illuminate how the physical practice of veiling helps cultivate a virtue of modesty in both women and men. Daniel Russell highlights the parallels between virtue and skill in Aristotle to show how practicing virtuous action (and then reflecting on feedback) helps to develop virtue, thus assimilating virtue to many other domains of psychology that we know a great deal about, and revealing directions for further study. Dan McAdams's piece highlights (among other things) the way "social action precedes motivated intention" (312) -- that is, habits developed from social pressures come to be guided by practical reason -- to show that virtue can develop from less sophisticated motivations for action.

The third theme, community's role in cultivating and maintaining virtue, runs through many essays, particularly Narvaez's and Flanagan's, but is strongest in Herdt and Bucar. Herdt shows how physical, communal Christian rituals have been used to shape character in an ongoing way and in light of human frailty. She argues that repeated exposure to Christian ritual and practice may help build stable character traits and create common subjective meaning for disparate objective circumstances. Having a community to answer to helps us reflect on and improve our own behaviors. It also helps us to control circumstances in ways that are conducive to virtue.

Bucar, in addition to making important points about the physical practice of virtue, draws our attention to the social nature of the Islamic conception of virtue in Ibn Miskawayh's thought. This has four aspects. First, becoming virtuous requires the support of others. Second, because the interpersonal sphere is where most of our actions take place, we need interactions with others in order to put virtue into action and make it actual rather than potential. Third, observing others' success and failure helps us to reflect on our own virtue and become better. Fourth, individual virtue cultivation allows us to form virtuous societies.

A fourth theme may emerge in Slingerland's essay: shaping and controlling the environment should be understood as part of cultivating virtue. (Once identified, it is possible to see this theme in several places, particularly in the theological pieces.) Slingerland's primary purpose is to use the Confucian model of moral development to respond to situationist critiques of virtue ethics, but what we can take from his essay goes well beyond this. He begins with a survey of the current state of psychological work on personality traits, pointing out some empirical and conceptual flaws in the situationists' use of the empirical research. These alone are a striking rebuttal to the situationist claim. Nevertheless, Slingerland says, virtue ethics tends to suggest that a truly virtuous person will have an extremely high degree of consistency in their virtuous behavior -- much more than the empirical evidence suggests we can achieve. He uses the Confucian model of virtue cultivation to suggest that this level of virtue can indeed be achieved, and that as a theory, virtue ethics may be more psychologically realistic than consequentialism or deontology.

Slingerland suggests that the Confucian strategy is two-pronged: structured training incorporating study, action and reflection gives the Confucian learner a better metaphorical jump, while careful awareness and control of the physical, conceptual, and social environment lowers the virtue bar to a height that gives her a better chance of clearing it. The picture that results paints cultivating virtue as a slow and ongoing process that is heavily dependent on interaction with others as well as on mindfulness about oneself. (There is resonance here with Herdt's account of virtue in Christianity.) I find this piece not only illuminating, but also strong in its ability to suggest concrete strategies we can take to develop virtue, as well as indicating areas for further research.

Through all of this, we can see how learning virtue involves performing actions, taking the perspective of others, and eventually, shaping attitudes. This requires reflecting on the strengths and weaknesses of our performances (an activity often done with others), and though this point is never made explicitly enough to rise to the level of a theme, reflection -- as part of the learning process -- underwrites the development of virtue in all of the pieces, including the psychologists'.

As a whole, the book doesn't hang together in a thematically satisfying way. It could have benefited from a more unifying central question or perhaps from the authors' having access to one another's contributions before finalizing their pieces; this might have enhanced inter-essay points of contact. It might also have benefited from a methodological piece, a discussion of how thinkers in different fields can and should respond to and incorporate one another's work. How should we develop our philosophical and theological accounts of virtue in light of current research? How can philosophy and theology, in turn, suggest interpretations of current psychological research and directions for future empirical research? There is some such discussion here and there, but I found myself wishing for more; for instance, the thematic connections between Slote's, Narvaez's and Thompson's pieces are strong but undeveloped. Perhaps the lesson to take away is that we are merely at the beginning of understanding how virtue develops and how it can be cultivated, and as psychology continues to recover from its situationist days, we still have a great deal to learn despite a long history of philosophical reflection on the subject. Interdisciplinary dialogue would no doubt enhance the conversation.

I have not been able to point out everything worth discussing in this collection. Some of the pieces are written extremely well and deserve wide circulation. Those by Narvaez, Slingerland, Slote, Flanagan, Thompson, Bucar, and Russell are highlights. But there is something worth reading in each piece, and the volume as a whole promises to achieve its goal of stimulating further work on virtue development.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I would like to thank my colleague Charles Wright for valuable conversation about the essays and his comments on a draft of this review.

98 Virtue Ethics Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best virtue ethics topic ideas & essay examples, 📌 most interesting virtue ethics topics to write about, 👍 good research topics about virtue ethics, ❓ virtue ethics essay questions.

• Abortion and Virtue Ethics Those who support the right of a woman to an abortion even after the final trimester makes the assertion that the Constitution does not provide any legal rights for a child that is still within […]
• Consequentialist, Deontological, and Virtue Ethics: Ethical Theories Ethical principles are rooted in the ethical theories, and ethicists, when trying to explain a particular action, usually refer to the principles, rather than theories. We will write a custom essay specifically for you by our professional experts 808 writers online Learn More
• Act Utilitarianism and Virtue Ethics: Pros and Cons Therefore, act utilitarianism is better than virtue ethics since it is clear, concise, and focuses on the majority. Virtue ethics’ strengths can be utilized to enhance the act-utilitarianism theory.
• Confidential Data Access: Kantian and Virtue Ethics Governmental agencies reassured the public that all the information is encrypted, but the authors of the article state that there was a place to use confidential documents.
• Utilitarian, Libertarian, Deontological, and Virtue Ethics Perspectives In deontology, morality is judged through examining the nature of the actions and the will of the individuals to do the right thing.
• Ethics, Prosperity, and Society: Virtue Ethics and Utilitarianism First, due to the heated argument of the superior on duty, they might take out their anger on the trainee, in which case the trainee might be told to either resolve the issue personally or […]
• Virtue Ethics and Private Morality It can tentatively be characterized as an approach that emphasizes virtues and moral character, as opposed to approaches that emphasize the importance of duties and rules or the consequences of actions.
• Natural Law Theory and Virtue Ethics Theory The second step in virtue ethics theory is to look at the agent of the action. Under virtue ethics theory, the action is wrong because it falls to the extreme of excess, and Jones indulges […]
• The Concept of Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics The essence of Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean is that virtue lies in between two extremes, none of which is virtuous on its own.
• Global Economic Justice: The Natural Law and Virtue Ethics Theories The concept of global economic justice presupposes distribution of recourses on account of people’s needs, allowing to avoid the situation when the most significant part of the planet’s resources is concentrated in the hands of […]
• Virtue Ethics in Institutional Review Boards Virtue ethics is of the view that resolution of the challenges is dependent on the character of the people making the decisions.
• Act Utilitarianism and Virtue Ethics The theory greatly neglects and ignores the happiness of individual because everyone is on the run to be accepted morally to the society and tend to make individuals do what tends to make them happy.
• Virtue Ethics: One Way to Resolve an Ethical Dilemma Other members of the usability team argue that although there was a clear loophole that the external members can choose to exploit so that they can be released from the work that they need to […]
• Virtue Ethics: Kantianism and Utilitarianism Despite the strengths and theoretical significance of both approaches, the theories of Aristotle and Aquinas suggest more flexibility and breadth in ethics interpretation as compared to rule-based theories.
• Aristotle’s – The Ethics of Virtue Ethics is not a theory of discipline since our inquiry as to what is good for human beings is not just gathering knowledge, but to be able to achieve a unique state of fulfillment in […]
• Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics Analysis When faced with the option of an apple of a muffin, a good person would choose the apple, because the part of the soul that desired the muffin would be controlled by self-control, the part […]
• Virtue Ethics for Dilemmas in Nursing Using this approach in the context of the dilemma in question gives a possibility to analyze the ability of the nurse to reason morally and to exercise the virtue of telling the truth.
• “Virtue Ethics and Adultery” by Raja Halwani In my opinion, that in the context of marriage and adultery, there is a connection between love and sex. According to Halwani, adultery is permissible in situations where the partner does not demonstrate fidelity, including […]
• Noble Cause Corruption and Virtue Ethics The answer lies in the purpose and the implied public image of the police. The role of the policeman is to uphold the law dictated by the government and the constitution of the country.
• Utilitarianism, Kantianism, Virtue Ethics, Egoism Quote: The amanagers of a corporation must take responsibility to fulfil their duties to their stockholders and to the public’. According to this normative theory, the utility can be described as anything that is related […]
• Ethical Naturalism in Hursthouse’s “On Virtue Ethics” Thus, Hursthouse’s approach to discussing the ethically relevant aspects in the life of human beings with the focus on ethical naturalism is convincing because the philosopher assumes the difference in people who can be good […]
• Virtue Ethics, Utilitarianism, and Deontology Utilitarianism relates to the concept of value in that the quality of something which is good is measured by the value attached to it.
• Virtue Ethics and Moral Goods for Society This essay focuses on strengths and or, weaknesses of trying to propose moral goods for a society based on human rights, universal natural law, and claims of Christian faith.
• Is Virtue Ethics Dead in Modern Organizations? In fact, the environment of the global economy often contributes to the evolution of the phenomenon of CSR and the adoption of new responsibilities by the staff due to the cultures fusion.
• Consequentialistic and Virtue Ethics Wang & Zhang notes that, “the textile industries in the Eastern countries and specifically in China have raised a lot of disputes with the Western countries”. Secondly, the production of cheap textiles by industries in […]
• Examining “The Golden Rule” and Virtue Ethics The ethical issue in this particular case is whether or not Alice should report the apparent mistake in Mark’s nutritional report to the company or whether she should tell Mark that she looked through the […]
• Ethical Egoism and Virtue Ethics Philosophy
• Catholic Social Teachings and Virtue Ethics
• Analyzing Preference for Virtue Ethics Theory
• Iron Man and Virtue Ethics
• Virtue Ethics and Contractarianism: Towards a Reconciliation
• Virtue Ethics and Natural Law Responses to Human Rights Quandaries in Business
• Corporate Character: Modern Virtue Ethics and the Virtuous Corporation
• Virtue Ethics and Integration in Evidence-Based Practice in Psychology
• Leader Governance Understand Virtue Ethics
• Free Gay Marriage: Virtue Ethics and Utilitarianism
• Positive Psychology and Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics Converge
• Virtue Ethics Strengths and Weaknesses
• Free Virtue Ethics: Aristotle and Al-Ghazali
• Businesses Are Completely Incompatible With Virtue Ethics
• Virtue Ethics and Its Effect on the Greatest Number of People
• Organ Trafficking: Utilitarian, Consequentialist, Kantian and Virtue Ethics Perspectives
• Applied Ethics and Sustainability: Virtue Ethics
• The Most Influential Moral Theories: Virtue Ethics
• Does Virtue Ethics Give Adequate Action Guidance?
• Virtue Ethics, Care Ethics and Natural Law Theories
• Virtue Ethics vs. Rule-Consequentialism: A Reply to Brad Hooker
• Utilitarism, Deontology and Virtue Ethics
• The Parental Virtue Ethics and Ethical Issues
• Human Cloning and Virtue Ethics
• Gender and Equality: A Care Ethics and Virtue Ethics Approach
• The Strengths and Weaknesses of Virtue Ethics
• Consequentialism, Non- Consequentialism, Virtue Ethics and Care Ethics
• The Philosophical and Moral Component of Virtue Ethics
• Workplace Examples for Virtue Ethics
• Cultural Relativism Theory and Virtue Ethics
• Virtue Ethics and Its Understanding of Moral Life
• Virtue Ethics and the Great Role Model of Folklore and Language
• How Aristotle Understands the Human Being Through Virtue Ethics
• Significant Contribution of Virtue Ethics to Moral Theory
• The Natural Link Between Virtue Ethics and Political Virtue: The Morality of the Market
• Ethical Dilemma Analysis: Consequentialist, Deontological, and Virtue Ethics Approach
• Virtue Ethics and the Natural Law Theory
• Reclaiming Virtue Ethics for Economics
• Understanding Virtue Ethics and Aristotle’s Theory
• Monkeying With Motives: Agent-Basing Virtue Ethics
• Vocational Virtue Ethics: Prospects for a Virtue Ethic Approach to Business
• How Virtue Ethics Informs Medical Professionalism
• Why Are Virtue Ethics Important?
• What Is Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics All About?
• What Are the Disadvantages of Virtue Ethics?
• Why Is Virtue Ethics So Popular Among Catholics?
• What Are Some Good, Original Arguments Against Virtue Ethics?
• What Is the Main Idea of Virtue Ethics?
• Why Did Virtue Ethics Fall Out of Favor in the West?
• What Is the Difference Between Virtue Ethics and Care Ethics?
• What Is the Meaning of Virtue Ethics?
• Why Would Virtue Ethics Have More Appeal Than Utilitarianism and Deontology?
• Why Did Interest in Virtue Ethics Decline and Then Rise Again After Postmodernism?
• In Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics, What Makes His Theories Important?
• What Are the Similarities Between Virtue Ethics and Utilitarianism?
• How Can Virtue Ethics Relate to the Government?
• Does Virtue Ethics Demand Too Much? Why or Why Not?
• Does the Virtue Ethics Theory Have Something to Do With a Person’s Reputation?
• Where Does Utilitarianism Contradict With Virtue Ethics and Duty Ethics?
• What Are the Best Resources for Learning About Christian Virtue Ethics?
• What Is the Difference Between Virtue Ethics and Principle-Based Ethics?
• Is Virtue Ethics Important in Making Decisions About Morality?
• In What Circumstance Would Lying Be Okay According to Virtue Ethics?
• Is Virtue Ethics More Consistent With Human Nature?
• Who Are the Most Important Figures in the Recent Virtue Ethics Revival?
• What Actions Are Morally Good According to Virtue Ethics?
• How Have Virtue Ethics Changed in the 21st Century?
• What Makes Virtue Ethics an Alternative to Religious Ethics?
• What Are the Benefits of Virtue Ethics Compared to Deontology?
• What Is the Difference Between Virtue Ethics and Formalism?
• Is Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics Morally Desirable or Not?
• Is There Any Way in Virtue Ethics for It to Be All Right to Kill?
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