La ‘Virtue Ethics’

Abstract

From being a minority and 'contesting' voice within the philosophical landscape, Virtue Ethics is now recognised as one of the three main approaches in moral philosophy, competing with the deontological and utilitarian approaches. It is possible to identify a number of theses common to all the authors promoting virtue-based ethics today: to name a few, the importance of character, the focus on happiness and the good life, the insufficiency of norms, the overcoming of the fact-value dichotomy, the re-evaluation of the role of the emotions and their synergy with reason, the point of view of the first person, and the focus on an ethics of normality and not primarily of difficult cases.