Virtue Ethics

Virtue ethics is a family of moral theories that takes the central question of ethics to be not “what should I do?” but “what kind of person should I become?” The answer is given in terms of stable character traits — the virtues — that dispose a person to act well across the variety of circumstances life presents. Right action is then understood derivatively, as the action a fully virtuous person would perform in the relevant circumstances.

The position has classical roots in Plato and Aristotle and Christian extensions in Augustine, Aquinas, and the Catholic moral tradition. It was largely displaced in modern academic philosophy by Kantian deontology and by utilitarian and other consequentialist views, and was recovered as a serious analytic option in the second half of the twentieth century. The recovery has been welcomed by conservative moral philosophy for its continuity with the inherited moral tradition and for the resources it offers against contemporary proceduralist accounts of public ethics.

Key Takeaways

• A family of moral theories that grounds ethical evaluation in the cultivation of character traits — the virtues — rather than in rules of conduct (deontology) or in the calculation of consequences (consequentialism).
• Recovered as a serious analytic option in twentieth-century philosophy by G.E.M. Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958) and Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981).
• Conservative interest rests on virtue ethics’ continuity with the classical and Christian moral tradition and on its critique of modern proceduralist accounts of public morality.

History And Context

Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (c. 340 BC) is the founding statement: human flourishing (eudaimonia) is the activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, and the virtues are the stable dispositions that enable such activity across the conditions of human life. The intellectual virtues (practical wisdom, theoretical wisdom) and the moral virtues (courage, temperance, justice, magnanimity) are distinguished but inseparable in the fully virtuous life.

The Christian tradition incorporated and extended the Aristotelian framework. Aquinas‘s treatment of the virtues in the Summa Theologiae (II-II) integrated the four classical cardinal virtues with the three theological virtues (faith, hope, charity), treating grace as completing rather than displacing the natural moral capacities.

Modern moral philosophy from the seventeenth century onward largely set virtue aside. Kant grounded morality in the rational will’s adherence to universal law; Bentham and Mill grounded it in the production of utility; rule-based deontology and consequentialist calculation became the two dominant frameworks. The displacement was not absolute (Hume retained an important place for character) but the academic centre of gravity moved decisively away from virtue.

The twentieth-century recovery began with G.E.M. Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958), which argued that the modern frameworks had become incoherent in the absence of the theological background that had originally given them sense, and that the proper response was to return to a virtue-based account drawn from Aristotle. Philippa Foot’s Natural Goodness (2001) and Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981) and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988) developed the position into a major analytic alternative to deontology and consequentialism.

The Conservative Position

The conservative interest in virtue ethics rests on three features of the position.

First, continuity with the inherited moral tradition. The classical and Christian accounts of the virtues are not optional cultural decorations on a freestanding moral theory; they are the moral theory the inherited tradition actually embodies. A revival of virtue ethics is therefore a revival of the moral framework in which the inherited social institutions — family, profession, parish, civic community — actually make sense as schools of character formation rather than as merely contractual arrangements.

Second, the critique of proceduralist public ethics. Modern liberal political theory (the Rawlsian tradition) attempts to construct public morality on procedural grounds that bracket substantive accounts of the human good. Virtue ethics treats this attempt as incoherent: any procedure presupposes some substantive account of which procedural outcomes count as good ones, and the bracketing manoeuvre simply conceals the account in operation. MacIntyre’s After Virtue argues that the contemporary impasse over moral disagreement is the predictable consequence of attempting moral discourse without the substantive teleological framework that gave the inherited moral vocabulary its meaning.

Third, the political implications of character formation. If the central question of ethics is the formation of character, then the institutions in which character is actually formed — families, schools, religious communities, mediating institutions of civil society — acquire a political importance the modern framework had assigned them less of. The conservative defence of these institutions against state encroachment and market dissolution gains philosophical depth from the virtue-ethical framework.

Differing Positions

Within philosophy, the principal alternatives remain Kantian deontology (Christine Korsgaard, Onora O’Neill) and consequentialism (Peter Singer, Derek Parfit’s tradition). The standard objection to virtue ethics is that it is action-guiding only after a substantive account of the virtues is in place, and that any such account is either contestable (different traditions identify different virtues) or empty (the virtues reduce to platitudes once stripped of tradition-specific content). MacIntyre’s reply is that this objection is itself a symptom of the post-Enlightenment impasse: the demand for a tradition-neutral moral framework cannot be satisfied because every framework is internal to some tradition, the only question being whether the tradition is acknowledged or concealed.

Within virtue ethics, Aristotelian and Thomist accounts (MacIntyre, Foot, Hursthouse) differ from non-naturalist accounts (Christine Swanton, Michael Slote) on how thickly metaphysical the foundations need to be. Conservative writers have generally drawn on the Aristotelian-Thomist line; the non-naturalist accounts have less traction in conservative writing.

Liberal political philosophers (William Galston, Stephen Macedo) have attempted hybrid positions that draw on virtue-ethical resources for civic education while retaining a broadly Rawlsian framework for public reason. Conservative readers treat these hybrids as either welcome partial recoveries or as borrowings without full assimilation, depending on how much theoretical weight is placed on the underlying liberal framework.

References

1. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999), bks. I–II.
2. G.E.M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy 33, no. 124 (1958): 1–19.
3. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007 [1981]), chs. 5–8, 14–15.
4. Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), chs. 2–4.