Virtue Ethics Revived: Aristotle's Golden Mean to Anscombe's 1958 Essay

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Virtue ethics asks what kind of person you are becoming rather than which rule to follow or which outcome to maximize. The episode sets it against Immanuel Kant's duty-based deontology and John Stuart Mill's consequentialism using a dropped wallet: the virtue ethicist returns it because that is what an honest person does. Rooted in Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, it treats a virtue as a deep disposition to think, feel and act well. Aristotle separated the incontinent person who gives in to temptation from the continent person who resists by willpower, and ranked both below the virtuous person whose feelings match the act. His golden mean places each virtue between two vices, and phronesis, practical wisdom, finds that mean in the moment, all aimed at eudaimonia, human flourishing.

Carried by the Stoics, Cicero and Thomas Aquinas, virtue ethics was pushed to the margins in the Enlightenment as philosophers sought clean universal laws. Elizabeth Anscombe's 1958 essay Modern Moral Philosophy argued that moral duty without a divine commander is incoherent, sparking the aretaic turn. Alasdair MacIntyre and Rosalind Hursthouse expanded it, and it fed Martin Seligman's positive psychology, Daniel Goleman's emotional intelligence and arguments in health care. Critics remain: Martha Nussbaum says Kant and Mill wrote about virtue too, and Robert Louden warns that in a pluralistic society no single list of virtues can guide action.

• Rosalind Hursthouse defines virtues as dispositions to feel emotions on the right occasions, toward the right people, for the right reasons.
• Aristotle counted wittiness as a moral virtue, the mean between boorishness and buffoonery.
• Courage sits between cowardice and rashness, with the courageous person feeling the right amount of fear.
• John McDowell describes practical wisdom as a perceptual sensitivity to what a situation requires.
• Shannon Vallor proposes new techno-moral virtues, such as intelligent fear and intelligent hope about AI, for life with modern technology.