Virtue Ethics
aretaic ethics · character ethics
An approach centered on character traits (virtues) rather than rules or outcomes — rooted in Aristotle, revived by Anscombe and MacIntyre.
In practice
A manager decides whether to report a colleague's error. Virtue ethics asks which choice a just and honest person would make, and treats the reluctance to look closely as part of what is being assessed.
The common mistake
Assuming virtue ethics has no answers in hard cases. It supplies a different kind of answer — the judgment of a person with practical wisdom — and denies that a rule could do better.
Virtue ethics evaluates character rather than acts. It asks what kind of person you are becoming, on the view that a good life follows from good dispositions rather than from a procedure applied to each decision.
Aristotle's structure
The Nicomachean Ethics (c. 340 BC) starts from the observation that every activity aims at some good, and asks what is pursued for its own sake alone. The answer is eudaimonia — flourishing, or living well — which is activity of the soul in accordance with excellence over a complete life.
Virtue is a disposition acquired by practice, sitting between excess and deficiency. Phronesis, practical wisdom, is the capacity to perceive what a particular situation calls for. It cannot be reduced to rules, because the cases are too various, and it is developed by acting under the guidance of people who already have it.
The contrast
Deontology asks whether an act conforms to duty. Utilitarianism asks what the act produces. Both take the act as the unit of assessment and aim to supply a procedure. Virtue ethics takes the agent as the unit and holds that a person of good character will see what to do without a formula.
The practical difference shows in what each theory asks you to attend to. Faced with a colleague in trouble, the first two ask what is owed or what maximizes good. Virtue ethics asks what a generous and just person would notice and do here — which includes noticing at all.
The revival and its critics
G. E. M. Anscombe's 1958 essay argued that modern moral philosophy retained the concept of obligation while discarding the framework that made it intelligible, and recommended a return to character. Alasdair MacIntyre developed the historical case in After Virtue (1981), arguing that moral language is a set of fragments from traditions that no longer cohere.
Critics object that the theory is uninformative in hard cases and that the virtues vary across cultures. Defenders reply that flourishing is constrained by facts about human beings, and that the absence of a decision procedure is honest rather than defective.
Concept web
Open the full webQuestions
What is virtue ethics?
An approach to ethics that evaluates character rather than individual acts. It asks what dispositions make for a good life, holding that a person of good character will act well without applying a formula.
How does virtue ethics differ from deontology and utilitarianism?
Deontology judges acts against duties and utilitarianism judges them by consequences. Virtue ethics judges the agent, asking what traits a person is developing and what a person of good character would do.
What is eudaimonia?
Usually translated as flourishing or living well. For Aristotle it is the final end of human action — activity of the soul in accordance with excellence, over a complete life, rather than a feeling of contentment.