Virtue Ethics
The third way in moral philosophy: what it claims, why it came back, and where it is vulnerable
A friend is in hospital. You visit. She is touched, and says so. “Don’t mention it,” you reply. “I worked out that visiting you would produce more overall happiness than anything else I could do this afternoon.” Or: “I recognised that I had a duty to visit, and I always do my duty.”
Something has gone badly wrong, and it is not that you did the wrong thing. You did the right thing. What is missing is you – the friend who visits because she cares about her friend, not because a theory told her to. The philosopher Michael Stocker used this example in 1976 to diagnose what he called the “schizophrenia” of modern ethical theories: they split what we ought to do from what a good person actually feels and wants. Virtue ethics is the attempt to put them back together.
This entry is about that attempt in its modern form. For the long history of the concept of virtue itself – from Homer through Aristotle and Aquinas to its eighteenth-century eclipse – see our separate entry on Virtue. Here we take up the story where that one leaves off: with the revival of virtue as the foundation of an ethical theory, the shape that theory has taken, and the arguments for and against it.
For two thousand years, ‘virtue’ was the central word in Western ethics – the name for whatever it is that makes a person good at being a person. Then it nearly disappeared, and then it came back. This entry traces the concept from Homer and Socrates through Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and Aquinas to Hume, Kant and the twentieth-century revival, and asks what a virtue actually is.
What virtue ethics claims
Normative ethics – the part of philosophy that asks how we should live – is usually taught as a contest between three approaches. Consequentialism says that what matters is outcomes: the right act is the one that produces the best results. Deontology, in its Kantian form, says that what matters is duty: the right act is the one that conforms to the moral law, whatever the results. Virtue ethics says that what matters, first and foremost, is character: the fundamental moral question is not “What should I do?” but “What kind of person should I be?”, and the answer to the first question falls out of the answer to the second.
The point is one of priority. Every ethical theory talks about virtues; Kant wrote a whole Doctrine of Virtue, and Mill discusses it at length. What makes a theory a virtue ethics is that it treats virtue as basic and explains right action in terms of it, rather than the other way round. The Kantian defines a virtue as a disposition to do one’s duty; the utilitarian defines it as a trait that tends to produce happiness. The virtue ethicist reverses the direction of explanation: a right action is what a virtuous person would do.
Three concepts do most of the work. Virtue itself – a stable trait of character such as honesty, courage or kindness, involving not just behaviour but perception, emotion and motivation. Practical wisdom (phronēsis) – the capacity to see what a situation calls for and to act on it, which the tradition regards as the master virtue without which the others misfire. And, in most versions, flourishing (eudaimonia) – the good human life, which the virtues are supposed to constitute or make possible.
How it came back
By the middle of the twentieth century, English-language moral philosophy had narrowed to a dispute between Kantians and utilitarians about which principle determined right action. Character barely figured. Three things changed that.
The first was Elizabeth Anscombe’s 1958 paper “Modern Moral Philosophy,” which argued that the concept of moral obligation was a relic of a divine-law ethics most philosophers had abandoned, and that we should stop doing moral philosophy altogether until we had “an adequate philosophy of psychology” – an account of action, intention, wanting and character. Her suggestion was to return to Aristotle and to the concrete vocabulary of the virtues: instead of asking whether an act was “morally wrong,” ask whether it was unjust, or dishonest, or cowardly.
The second was a growing dissatisfaction with the rival theories on their own terms. Bernard Williams argued that utilitarianism could not make sense of integrity – it treated a person’s deepest commitments as just one more input into the calculation. Stocker’s hospital example made the parallel point about motive. Both theories seemed to describe a moral agent no one would want to be.
The third was the recovery of the tradition itself. Philippa Foot’s essays, collected in Virtues and Vices (1978), showed that Aristotelian questions could be asked in a modern analytic idiom. Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981) told a sweeping story in which the Enlightenment’s attempt to justify morality without any conception of human purpose had failed, leaving us with emotivism and moral fragments. Iris Murdoch, in The Sovereignty of Good (1970), insisted that moral life was mostly a matter of attention – of seeing other people justly – rather than of dramatic choices.
By the 1990s these currents had a name and a programme. Rosalind Hursthouse’s On Virtue Ethics (1999) was the first fully systematic statement, and it remains the reference point.
Alasdair MacIntyre (1929--2025), whose After Virtue (1981) argued that modern moral philosophy had lost the tradition that made moral language intelligible.
The varieties
“Virtue ethics” is a family, not a single theory. Four members are worth distinguishing.
Eudaimonist (neo-Aristotelian) virtue ethics is the mainstream. Its central claim is that the virtues are the traits a human being needs in order to flourish – to live well as a human being. Foot’s Natural Goodness (2001) gave this a bold form: “good” applied to a human being works like “good” applied to any living thing. A good wolf has what wolves need to live the wolf’s life; a good human being has what humans need to live the human life, and since humans are social, rational animals, that includes justice, honesty and the rest. Hursthouse defends a similar naturalism, while stressing that it is ethical naturalism – the standard is human nature seen from inside the ethical outlook, not biology read off from outside.
Hursthouse also gave the theory its best-known account of right action:
Agent-based virtue ethics, developed by Michael Slote in Morals from Motives (2001), goes further. It grounds rightness directly in the agent’s motives: an act is right if it expresses good inner states such as benevolence or caring, and wrong if it expresses bad ones, regardless of any independent account of flourishing. This makes the theory purer but, critics say, harder to reconcile with the thought that well-meaning people sometimes do wrong.
Target-centred virtue ethics, Christine Swanton’s view (Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View, 2003), holds that each virtue has a “target” – what it aims at in its field – and that an act is right if it hits the targets of the relevant virtues, whether or not the agent is virtuous. Swanton is also a pluralist about the sources of virtue: not only flourishing, but also respect, love and creativity, drawing on Nietzsche and Hume as well as Aristotle.
Exemplarist virtue ethics, Linda Zagzebski’s proposal (Exemplarist Moral Theory, 2017), starts not from definitions but from people. We identify moral exemplars – individuals we admire on reflection – and define the other moral concepts by reference to them: a virtue is a trait we admire in such people, a right act is what they would do. This mirrors how, in practice, most of us actually learn morality.
Two neighbouring positions should be mentioned. Care ethics (Nel Noddings, Virginia Held) shares virtue ethics' focus on relationships, emotion and particular persons rather than impartial rules, and is sometimes classed as a branch of it, though its proponents often resist the label. And Confucian ethics is now widely read as a virtue ethics in its own right, with ren (humaneness), li (ritual propriety) and the figure of the junzi (exemplary person) doing work parallel to Aristotle’s virtues, practical wisdom and phronimos.
The advantages
Why did so many philosophers find this attractive? The main reasons are these.
It fits moral experience. We do not, in fact, admire people for correctly applying principles. We admire them for being kind, honest, brave, fair. And we care about why people act, not just what they do – which is why the hospital visitor’s explanation grates. Virtue ethics builds motive and emotion into the account of good action from the start, rather than adding them as afterthoughts.
It has a richer vocabulary. Williams distinguished “thin” ethical concepts – right, wrong, ought, good – from “thick” ones such as cruel, generous, treacherous, loyal. The thin concepts are where modern theory lives; the thick ones are where moral life actually happens. Virtue ethics works in the thick vocabulary, and so can say more, and more precisely, about particular cases.
It takes judgement seriously. No set of rules can anticipate every situation, and a person who can only follow rules is helpless when they conflict or run out. Aristotle’s insistence that ethics is not a matter of rules but of perception – of seeing what this situation, with these people, calls for – has always seemed to many people simply true, and virtue ethics is the one theory that makes it central rather than embarrassing.
It explains moral development. Kantianism and utilitarianism describe what a fully formed agent should do. They have little to say about how anyone becomes such an agent. Virtue ethics has a detailed account: habituation, imitation of exemplars, the gradual education of emotion, the growth of judgement through experience. It is the only major theory with a built-in moral pedagogy.
It reconnects morality with a good life. The eudaimonist version dissolves a puzzle that haunts the other theories – why be moral? If the virtues are the traits a person needs in order to flourish, then being good is not a sacrifice imposed from outside but part of living well. Morality and self-interest, properly understood, do not compete.
It is comfortable with partiality. Impartialist theories struggle to explain why you may favour your children, friends and projects. Virtue ethics has no such trouble: loyalty, friendship and love are virtues, and a person who treated their own child with strict impartiality would be exhibiting a defect, not a moral achievement.
Martha Nussbaum, whose 1988 paper on non-relative virtues is the standard reply to the charge that virtue ethics is culturally relative.
The criticisms
The objections are just as well developed, and several of them are serious.
It gives no guidance. This is the oldest complaint, pressed by Robert Louden in “On Some Vices of Virtue Ethics” (1984). Faced with a hard decision, being told to “do what a virtuous person would do” is useless: if I knew that, I would not be asking. And it seems circular – the virtuous person is defined as one who acts rightly, and right action as what the virtuous person does.
Hursthouse’s reply is that the theory does generate rules – what she calls v-rules: “do what is honest,” “do not do what is cruel,” “be fair.” These are as action-guiding as “maximise utility” or “act only on universalisable maxims,” and considerably more concrete. Applying them still requires judgement, but so does applying any principle. And the circularity charge misfires against eudaimonism, which defines virtue independently, by reference to human flourishing, not by reference to right acts. Even so, critics reply that the v-rules can conflict – honesty and kindness pull apart every day – and the theory offers nothing but “use practical wisdom” to resolve them. Virtue ethicists respond that the rival theories face dilemmas too, and that pretending a formula could dissolve them is a vice, not a virtue, in a theory.
The virtues are culturally relative. MacIntyre himself observed that Homer, Aristotle, the New Testament, Jane Austen and Benjamin Franklin give strikingly different lists. If the content of virtue varies with time and place, what stops virtue ethics from endorsing whatever a society happens to admire? Martha Nussbaum’s “Non-Relative Virtues” (1988) is the standard reply. Every human society faces the same spheres of experience – fear of death, bodily appetite, the distribution of scarce goods, the management of anger – and every society has a concept of behaving well in each sphere. That fixes the reference of the virtue terms, even if their content is contested. The argument about what courage really is can then proceed rationally, just as arguments about justice do.
There is no such thing as character. The most discussed recent objection comes not from philosophy but from social psychology. In Isen and Levin’s 1972 experiment, people who had just found a coin in a phone booth were far more likely to help a stranger pick up dropped papers. In Darley and Batson’s 1973 study, seminary students hurrying to give a talk – on the parable of the Good Samaritan, no less – mostly stepped past a slumped, groaning man in a doorway. Stanley Milgram’s obedience studies are the grim classic. John Doris (Lack of Character, 2002) and Gilbert Harman argued that this evidence shows behaviour is driven by situation, not by stable, cross-situational traits – and if there are no such traits, virtue ethics is built on a psychological fiction.
Virtue ethicists have replied in several ways. Rachana Kamtekar pointed out that the experiments measure isolated behaviours, whereas a virtue involves practical reasoning, perception and motive, none of which the studies examine. Julia Annas observed that the tradition always held full virtue to be rare and hard-won; that most people fall short is exactly what Aristotle would predict. Others note that the studies report averages – some seminarians did stop – and that the situationist result is itself a reason to cultivate the kind of stable character that resists situational pressure. The debate has generated a large literature and is far from settled.
It is self-centred. If the point of virtue is my flourishing, is the virtuous person not, at bottom, concerned with herself? The reply is that this confuses the justification of virtue with the motive of the virtuous person. The just person acts justly because it is just, not in order to flourish; the theory says she thereby flourishes, but that is not what she is thinking about. Still, critics press: if she never thinks about it, in what sense is flourishing the foundation?
Its naturalism is doubtful. Foot’s claim that “good human being” works like “good wolf” faces the obvious objection that nature is not normative. Evolution has equipped humans with tendencies to aggression, deception and tribalism as well as to cooperation; why should the second set count as our nature and the first as defects? Hursthouse concedes that the standard cannot simply be read off from biology and must be filled in from within the ethical outlook – at which point critics ask whether the appeal to nature is doing any work.
It has little to say about institutions. Virtue ethics is at home with individuals and their relationships. It has been less successful with the questions that dominate modern political morality – rights, justice between strangers, the design of laws and institutions. MacIntyre’s response was to embrace this and argue that the virtues can only flourish in small communities of shared practice, a conclusion many find defeatist. Nussbaum’s capabilities approach is one attempt to build an Aristotelian political theory that avoids it.
Where the debate stands
Two things have happened in the last thirty years. First, virtue ethics has established itself as a genuine third option, taught alongside its rivals and applied across the practical fields: medical ethics (Edmund Pellegrino), business ethics (Robert Solomon), environmental ethics (Ronald Sandler) and, most recently, the ethics of technology and artificial intelligence (Shannon Vallor’s Technology and the Virtues, 2016). Hursthouse’s own 1991 paper on abortion was an early demonstration that the approach could say something distinctive about a hard concrete case.
Second, the boundaries have blurred. Kantians such as Barbara Herman, Onora O’Neill and Christine Korsgaard have shown that Kant’s ethics is far more hospitable to character and emotion than the caricature suggests. Consequentialists such as Julia Driver and Thomas Hurka have developed sophisticated virtue theories – accounts of what virtues are and why they matter – within a consequentialist framework. It is now common to distinguish virtue theory (any account of the virtues) from virtue ethics (the view that makes them fundamental), and to observe that everyone now has the former. Whether the latter is true – whether character really comes first – remains the open question.
Why it matters
The dispute can sound academic. It is not.
Professional life. Codes of conduct multiply, and scandals continue. Virtue ethics explains why: rules tell you what not to do, but only judgement tells you what to do when the rules run out, and only character makes you want to. The best professional education has always been an apprenticeship in seeing – learning what a good doctor, teacher or engineer notices – rather than a course in compliance.
Moral education. If virtue ethics is right, then children become good mainly by practice, example and the training of emotion, not by being taught principles. That has direct implications for how we raise them and what schools are for. It also puts the spotlight on the adults: if the young learn by imitation, then what matters most is who they are imitating.
Artificial intelligence. The ethics of AI is dominated by rules and outcomes – what a system may not do, what harms it must avoid. Vallor and others argue that the more urgent question is what technologies are doing to us: whether they cultivate or corrode the honesty, patience, attention and courage on which everything else depends. That is a virtue-ethical question, and no rule will answer it.
The situationist warning. Even if the social-psychology objection does not refute virtue ethics, it teaches something the tradition already knew: character is fragile, situations are powerful, and the people who behave well under pressure are usually those who prepared for it. Choosing your circumstances – your friends, your workplace, your habits – is itself a moral act.
Your own life. Finally, virtue ethics gives you a question you can actually use. “What would maximise utility?” is almost impossible to answer honestly in real time. “What would a kind, honest, fair person do here?” is not. And “What kind of person am I becoming by doing this?” may be the most useful question in moral philosophy.
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Where to start reading
- Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford, 1999) – the standard systematic statement. Part I, on right action and the v-rules, is the place to begin.
- Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue (Oxford, 2011) – short, clear and contemporary; the best account of what a virtue is and of the analogy between virtue and skill.
- Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices (Oxford, 1978; reissued 2002) and Natural Goodness (Oxford, 2001) – the founding essays and the mature naturalist theory, both beautifully written.
- Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, 3rd ed. 2007) – the polemical history; chapters 14–15 set out his own account of practices, narrative and tradition.
- Roger Crisp and Michael Slote (eds.), Virtue Ethics (Oxford, 1997) – an anthology containing the key papers: Anscombe, Foot, Stocker, Williams, Louden, Nussbaum and others.
- Daniel C. Russell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Virtue Ethics (Cambridge, 2013) – commissioned essays covering the varieties, the objections, the situationist debate and the Confucian tradition.
- Michael Slote, Morals from Motives (Oxford, 2001) and Christine Swanton, Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View (Oxford, 2003) – the two most important alternatives to the neo-Aristotelian mainstream.
- John Doris, Lack of Character (Cambridge, 2002) – the case against, from the psychological evidence; essential for seeing what virtue ethics has to answer.
- Nancy Snow (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Virtue (Oxford, 2018) – for going deeper on any particular topic, including virtue in non-Western traditions and in psychology.
Read more
- Virtue Ethics – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Hursthouse and Pettigrove’s authoritative survey of the varieties and the objections.
- Moral Character – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The concept of character and why it matters to the theory.
- Empirical Approaches to Moral Character – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The situationist challenge and the replies, in detail.
- Aristotle’s Ethics – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The source text, expertly guided.
- Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The philosopher whose 1958 paper started the revival.
- Feminist Ethics – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Includes the relationship between care ethics and virtue ethics.
- Moral Particularism – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The debate about whether ethics can be codified in principles at all.
- Virtue Ethics – Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. A more approachable overview of the history, varieties and objections.
- Care Ethics – Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The neighbouring tradition and how it relates to virtue ethics.
- Alasdair MacIntyre – Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. A full account of After Virtue and what came after it.
- Confucius – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. For the parallel tradition of virtue ethics in China.
