This document provides an overview of virtue ethics from Aristotle to modern philosophers. It discusses Aristotle's concept of eudaimonia or human flourishing as the goal of ethics achieved through developing moral virtues like courage, justice, and temperance. Aristotle defined virtues as means between vices of excess and deficiency. Later virtue ethicists expanded on Aristotle's work, with some emphasizing narrative traditions or ethics of care. Strengths of virtue ethics include its focus on character, community, and long-term moral development, though weaknesses include vagueness and dependence on strong communities.

1. VIRTUE ETHICS
FROM ARISTOTLE TO THE 21ST
CENTURY

2. WHY SHOULD I BE MORAL?
BECAUSE OF MY
CHARACTER!

3. ARETOLOGY
• Arete - Excellence, Strength, Virtue
• Aretaic Ethics - Strength-Centred Ethics
• Emphasizes Virtues (Strengths) and Vices (Weaknesses) of Character
• Not “What Should I Do?” (both Deontology and Teleology) but
“What Kind of Person Should I Be?”

4. ARISTOTLE’S ETHICS
• 384-322 B.C.
• The Nicomachean Ethics
• Two Kinds of Persons
• Continent:
• Do what is right, but not necessarily because they want to
• Temperate:
• Do what is right because they want to; the more holistic person

6. THE GOAL OF HUMAN
EXISTENCE
Eudaimonia
Flourishing, Happiness
A Lifelong Pursuit,
accomplished
◦ Rationally, through
theoretical wisdom and
contemplation
◦ Functionally, through
practical wisdom and
politics

7. THE GOAL OF HUMAN EXISTENCE &
EUDAIMONIA
• Aimed at the “perfect happiness”
which is the perfect activity
• An excellence in any activity in
accordance with the nature of
that activity
• Thus, “Human happiness is the
activity of the soul in accordance
with perfect virtue (excellence)”.
(I.8; Pojman, 394).

8. THE VIRTUES
• Intellectual Virtues
• Wisdom, Understanding, Prudence
• Taught through instruction
• Moral Virtues
• Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance
• The result of habit
• Not natural or inborn but acquired through
practice
• Habit or disposition of the soul (our fundamental
character) which involves both feeling and action
• “Those strengths of character that enable us to flourish”
(Hinman)

9. THE VIRTUES
• Defined / understood in terms of spheres of human experience
Fear of important
damages
Courage
Bodily appetites and
their pleasures
Moderation
Distribution of limited
resources
Justice
Attitude to slights and
damages
Mildness of Temper
Adapted from Martha C. Nussbaum, “Non-Relative Virtues”

10. THE DOCTRINE OF THE MEAN
• Proper position between two extremes
• Vice of excess
• Vice of deficiency
• Not an arithmetic median
• Relative to us and not the thing
• Not the same for all of us, or
• Any of us, at various occasions
• “In this way, then, every knowledgeable person avoids
excess and deficiency, but looks for the mean and chooses
it” (II.6)

11. THE MEAN
Vice of Deficiency Virtue Vice of Excess
Cowardice Courage Foolhardiness
Stinginess Generosity Prodigality
Shamelessness Modesty Bashfulness
Maliciousness Righteous
Indignation
Enviousness

12. VIRTUES AND THE MEAN
• Defined through Reason
• Education, contemplation, reflection
• Balanced with Other Virtues and applied using
phronesis:
• To have any single strength of character in full
measure, a person must have the other ones as well.*
• Courage without good judgement is blind
• Courage without perseverance is short-lived
• Courage without a clear sense of your own abilities is
foolhardy
• “The virtuous person has practical wisdom, the
ability to know when and how best to apply these
various moral perspectives.” (*Hinman)

13. VIRTUES AND COMMUNITY
• Virtues are defined and lived in community
• Sharing a common identity and story
• Modelling the Virtues
• Importance of Moral Exemplars (Saints and Heroes)
• Practicing the Virtues – Habit is Crucial!
“In a wo rd, the n, like activitie s pro duce like dispo sitio ns.
He nce we m ust g ive o ur activitie s a ce rtain q uality,
be cause it is the ir characte ristics that de te rm ine the
re sulting dispo sitio ns. So it is a m atte r o f no little
im po rtance what so rt o f habits we fo rm fro m the e arlie st
ag e it m ake s a vast diffe re nce , o r rathe r allthe̶
diffe re nce in the wo rld. ” (II. i. ) (Po jm an, 39 6 )
 Reinforcing the Virtues

14. OTHER VIRTUE ETHICISTS
 G.E.M. (Elizabeth) Anscombe
In 1958 she published an article
called Modern Moral Philosophy arguing
that we should return to the virtues,
as the idea of a law without a lawgiver
was incoherent.

15. OTHER VIRTUE ETHICISTS
• Alasdair MacIntyre
• After Virtue (1981)
Modern moral philosophy is bankrupt; it must recover the
tradition of virtue.
Importance of Narrative as a
“live tradition” – you need to know where ethics has come
from.
Virtues change over time.

16. OTHER VIRTUE ETHICISTS
• Philippa Foot
Tries to modernise Aristotle.
Ethics should not be about dry
theorising, but about making the
world a better place (she was one of the founders of
Oxfam)
Virtue contributes to the good life.

17. OTHER VIRTUE ETHICISTS
 Rosalind Hursthouse
A neo-Aristotelian – Aristotle was
wrong on women and slaves, and
there is no need to be limited to
his list of virtues.
We acquire virtues individually, and
so flourish, but we do so together
and not at each other’s expense.

18. OTHER VIRTUE ETHICISTS
 Carol Gilligan
In a Different Voice (1982)
Developmental theories have
been built on observations and
assumptions about men’s lives
and thereby distort views of
female personality.
The kinds of virtues one honors
depend on the power brokers of
one’s society.
The Ethics of Care

19. OTHER VIRTUE ETHICISTS
• Michael Slote
Develops the feminist ‘ethics of care,’
and links it to a virtue ethics inspired
more by Hume and Hutcheson’s moral
sentimentalism than by Aristotle.
Slote’s version of virtue ethics is agent-based (as opposed
to more Aristotelian forms which are said to be agent
focused) i.e. the moral rightness of acts is based on the
virtuous motives or characters of the agent. The motives are all
important.

20. OTHER VIRTUE ETHICISTS
Martha Nussbaum
She interprets Aristotle’s views as
absolutes… justice, temperance,
generosity etc. are essential to human flourishing
in all societies and in all times.
Nussbaum sees a relativist approach as being incompatible with
Aristotle’s virtue theory.

21. EXAMPLES OF VIRTUE ETHICS
• Bruderhof and Amish communities
• Anti-worldly
• Pacifist
• Family
• Story

22. WHAT MAKES ONE GROUP
VIRTUOUS AND NOT
ANOTHER?
• Inner-City Gangs
• Common values
• Models
• “Virtuous” actions
• Codes of honour

23. ARE THE VIRTUES THE SAME
FOR EVERYONE?
• People are very different.
• But we face the same basic problems and have the same basic needs.
• Everyone needs courage as danger can always arise.
• Some people are less well off, so we will need generosity.
• Everyone needs friends so we need loyalty.

24. STRENGTHS OF VIRTUE ETHICS
• Importance of the Person, Motive, Heart, Conscience
• Connection to Community
• Realization that morality is not defined by moments but by a long-term
process
• Allowance for gray areas, varying contexts, different levels of moral maturity
and life contexts

25. WEAKNESSES OF VIRTUE ETHICS
• Dependence on strong communities
• Not easily applied to ethical issues or to give us practical solutions
• Demands time
• Can be turned into a really poor duty-based ethics
• Might be taken as situational ethics

26. CONCLUSIONS
• Utilitarianism and Deontology are helpful
• They demand some kind of larger criteria or grounding, a larger view
• Virtue ethics seems to provide this view
• It seems to reflect Christian ethics best, and
• It is not dependent on any particular way of thinking (e.g. Enlightenment
rationalism)