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Three Versions of Virtue Ethics: Virtue 1, Virtue 2, and Virtue 3

15 January, 2016 - 09:08
Available under Creative Commons-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Download for free at http://cnx.org/contents/05c97be4-3ad0-47f2-b5a7-a75d0ad90ab7@3.72

Virtue ethics has gone through three historical versions. The first, Virtue 1, was set forth by Aristotle in ancient Greece. While tied closely to practices in ancient Greece that no longer exist today, Aristotle's version still has a lot to say to us in this day and age. In the second half of the twentieth century, British philosophical ethicists put forth a related but different theory of virtue ethics (virtue 2) as an alternative to the dominant ethical theories of utilitarianism and deontology. Virtue 2 promised a new foundation of ethics consistent with work going on at that time in the philosophy of mind. Proponents felt that turning from the action to the agent promised to free ethical theory from the intractable debate between utilitarianism and deontology and offered a way to expand scope and relevance of ethics. Virtue 3 reconnects with Aristotle and virtue 1 even though it drops the doctrine of the mean and Aristotle's emphasis on character. Using recent advances in moral psychology and moral pedagogy, it seeks to rework key Aristotelian concepts in modern terms. In the following, we will provide short characterizations of each of these three versions of virtue ethics.