Abstract

There are different ways of understanding the place of virtue in ethics. I will be interested in certain of the most ambitious, those neo-Aristotelian views that take it that right action is action from and for the sake of virtue, that right practical reasoning is virtuous practical reasoning, that the virtues are corrective,[i] and that, as Philippa Foot put it, "not every man who has a virtue has something that is a virtue in him."[ii] Virtues regulate individual action and response (tending to produce right choice, right action, appropriate emotions or passions, and tending to be constituted in part by developed sensitivities to ethical salience).[iii] These excellences benefit their bearers (in some sense) and benefit others (in several senses). And virtue makes the human adult good qua human being.