An Examination of Virtue Ethics
Brandon Gillette, University of Kansas
To the modern1 thinker, questions of morality are phrased almost exclusively as
questions of right actions versus wrong actions. This seems to make sense, as all
statements about morality are intended to be in some way action-guiding, but to the
ancients, medievals, and to some well into the modern period, questions of ethics are
properly phrased as questions of good personal character versus bad personal character.
Good character traits are referred to as virtues, while bad character traits are referred to as
vices. Actions themselves are important, but ultimately are mere instruments for building
or revealing character. This writing is a summary of some (but of course not all) of the
major ideas of virtue ethics, beginning with the differences between virtue ethics and
deontological and utilitarian ethics, continuing on to summarize Aristotle’s account of the
virtues, and finishing by identifying some difficulties associated with the virtue ethics
approach.
One of the places that something like a virtue ethics approach has prospered is in
teaching morality to the young. Often parents and teachers will remind children of things
like “Nobody likes a sore-loser”, “Cheaters lose in the end”, “Don’t be a tattle-tail”
“Patience is a virtue”, or “Don’t be a liar”. The idea is that it is easier, and maybe more
effective to identify character traits to encourage or discourage than it is to teach children
to consistently apply the hedonic calculus or the categorical imperative. The idea is that
by cultivating certain types of personalities, the natural inclinations of these people as
adults will conform to our standards of morality. In this way, the virtue ethicist focuses
on forming good habits as opposed to adopting a particular kind of decision calculus
every time a decision is called for.
One motivation for taking a virtue ethics approach seriously is that we tend to
only care about whether actions are moral or immoral insofar as they determine how we
treat the people that do those actions. In fact, since a person’s character persists through
time (unlike a person’s actions, which once done cannot be undone) evaluations of
peoples’ characters carry a great deal of weight in interpersonal relationships, and even in
legal punishment. Consider the following selection from David Hume:
“ The only proper object of hatred or vengeance is a person or creature, endowed
with thought and consciousness; and when any criminal or injurious actions excite that
passion, it is only by their relation to the person, or connexion with him. Actions are, by
their very nature, temporary and perishing; and where they proceed not from some cause
in the character and disposition of the person who performed them, they can neither
redound to his honour, if good; nor infamy, if evil. The actions themselves may be
blameable; they may be contrary to all the rules of morality and religion: but the person is
not answerable for them; and as they proceeded from nothing in him that is durable and
constant, and leave nothing of that nature behind them, it is impossible he can, upon their
account, become the object of punishment or vengeance. According to the principle,
therefore, which denies necessity, and consequently causes, a man is as pure and
untainted, after having committed the most horrid crime, as at the first moment of his
birth, nor is his character anywise concerned in his actions, since they are not derived
In philosophy, this means past about 1600 CE, which doesn’t sound modern until you consider that
Western philosophy itself is about two and a half thousand years old.
1
© Brandon Gillette 2010
from it, and the wickedness of the one can never be used as a proof of the depravity of the
other.”2
Approaches to virtue ethics universally take their inspiration from Aristotle, who
not only was the first western thinker to lay out a detailed and comprehensive system of
virtue ethics, but the first western thinker to treat ethics as its own subject. At the heart of
Aristotle’s approach to ethics is the question of what makes the best kind of life for a
person. An argument called the function argument is central to Aristotle’ approach to
answering this question. The function argument proceeds essentially as follows: It is
clear that the best way to judge whether a builder is good is by the quality of the
buildings. Even without someone pointing out what the criteria for good buildings are,
we all have a remarkable degree of agreement about what those criteria are (some
examples might be sturdiness, comfort, logical design, energy efficiency, etc.). Certain
features of a builder, like attention to detail, efficiency, organization, and other features
become the virtues of a good builder. In a similar way, to be just a good person (i.e. to
live the good life) a different set of criteria for what makes a person or a life good will
apply than applied in the specific case of the good builder. The entirety of Aristotle’s
Nicomachean Ethics (so titled because he wrote it for his son, Nicomachus) concerns
examinations of what kind of life is the best and what kind of virtues are central to living
the best life for a person.
The nuances of Aristotle’s approach to these big questions are too manifold to
summarize effectively, but his general method of identifying the virtues is quite
straightforward. The method is as follows: For every personal characteristic there exists
at least one adjective to describe it. Each of these adjectives describes one of three
things, viz. a vice of deficiency, a vice of excess, or a virtue. The virtue is a mean
between the vices of excess and the vices of deficiency. One good example is courage or
bravery. These words are both favorable evaluative terms when applied to someone. But
what of the person who is TOO brave? We have words to describe that such as rash,
hasty, impulsive, reckless, foolish. These would be words we would apply to someone
who exhibits the vice of excess with respect to bravery. On the other side, words like
coward, chicken, wimp, ‘fraidy-cat, etc. describe someone who exhibits the vice of
deficiency with regard to bravery. So the courageous person is able to inhabit the mean
between the vices of recklessness and cowardice. Each virtue will be discoverable and
describable in such terms.
One of the interesting consequences of this approach is that the number of virtues
is limited only by our vocabulary. This expanding of the virtues makes it difficult to
distinguish specifically moral virtues (if there are such things). For example, a virtue of
politeness might exist between vices of obsequiousness and rudeness. It is certainly a
virtue to be polite, but is it a moral virtue? The answer is unclear. Insofar as politeness
contributes to the best life for a person, it is certainly a good, but it feels odd to treat
etiquette as part of morality. In any case, most moral philosophers focus on a set of core
virtues that typically include something like the following:
 Prudence: looking after one’s own interests; a mean between selfishness and
selflessness
 Justice: giving to others their due; a mean between giving more and giving less
than is due
2
David Hume, “On Liberty and Necessity” An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
© Brandon Gillette 2010



Temperance: pursuing temptation sparingly; a mean between asceticism and selfindulgence
Fortitude: facing those things which we are not inclined to face; a mean between
weakness and audacity
Wisdom: the greatest of the moral virtues, consists in reasoning correctly about
the virtues; a mean between ignorance and arrogance.
© Brandon Gillette 2010