Virtue ethics (also aretaic ethics, from Greek ἀρετή [aretḗ]) is an approach to ethics that treats virtue as central.
Virtue ethics is usually contrasted with two other major approaches in ethics, consequentialism and deontology, which make the goodness of outcomes of an action (consequentialism) and the concept of moral duty (deontology) central. While virtue ethics does not necessarily deny the importance to ethics of goodness of states of affairs or of moral duties, it emphasizes virtue, and sometimes other concepts, like eudaimonia, to an extent that other ethics theories do not.
Virtue and Moral character
In virtue ethics, a virtue is a disposition to think, feel, and act well in some domain of life. Similarly, a vice is a disposition to think, feel, and act poorly. Virtues are not everyday habits; they are character traits, in the sense that they are central to someone’s personality and what they are like as a person. A virtue is a trait that promotes or exhibits human excellence in the person who exhibits it, and a vice is one that impedes human excellence in the person who exhibits it.
In ancient Greek and modern eudaimonistic virtue ethics, virtues and vices are complex dispositions that involve both affective and intellectual components. That is, they are dispositions that involve both being able to reason well about what the right thing to do is (see below on phronesis), and also engaging our emotions and feelings correctly.
For example, a generous person can reason well about when to help people, and such a person also helps people with pleasure and without conflict. In this, virtuous people are contrasted not only with vicious people (who reason poorly about what to do and are emotionally attached to the wrong things) and with the incontinent (who are tempted by their feelings into doing the wrong thing even though they know what is right), but also with the merely continent (whose emotions tempt them toward doing the wrong thing but whose strength of will lets them do what they know is right).
