Virtue Ethics and Social Psychology

Abstract

Recently there has been a striking revival of what has been called virtue ethics: a kind of ethical theory whose basis is virtue and character, and which takes the primary ethical issue to be that of what kind of person I should aim to be. In everyday life we have always cared about virtue, for we care about whether we and other people are brave or cowardly, generous or stingy. We care about the kind of people we are making ourselves into by the way we live our lives; we think that the question, what kind of life I am living and whether I should improve it, is centrally important to my life. For over a century these issues have been ignored by academic ethical philosophy, which has treated them either as falling below the level of theory or as issues that a proper ethical theory actually gets rid of. The issues went away for some time in academic ethical theory, but since theory is not magic they never went away in the real world; they have persisted in ordinary ethical discourse and elsewhere in the culture, in popular psychology and self-help books. Now they have for some time returned from exile back into ethical theory and we find exciting new debates about the kind of structure for ethical thinking that we need when issues of virtue and the good life move back into the

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