Abstract

Present-day philosophy has witnessed an efflorescence of virtue ethics. Although the return to virtue has been portrayed as a rehabilitation of the notion of virtue from the neglect into which it fell in the early modern period, in his seminal article, “The Misfortunes of Virtue,” J. B. Schneewind argues that virtue’s misfortune in the early modern period was not its neglect, but rather its displacement as the central concept in ethics. In Disguised Vices, Michael Moriarty uncovers another misfortune that befell virtue in the early modern period: the suspicion of the concept of virtue, that is, of its applicability to agents, in the work of early modern French philosophers, theologians, and moralists. Moriarty ..