Virtues and Moral Reasoning
What does this have to do with ethics? If ethics is concerned with how one should live, the conception of what it means to live well will be concerned with more than simply the kind of world I should strive to bring about or the actions I should or should not do. For a car to run well, it needs certain qualities that enable it to fulfill its function in the ways described. Simi- larly, for students to do well in school, they need certain qualities that enable them to fulfill their goals. These would be the virtues of a car and of a student, respectively. In the same way, we might speak of the qualities that enable a person to live well as a whole and to flour- ish as a human being. These qualities are what we call the moral virtues. So virtue ethics is concerned with two questions: What does it mean for a person to live well and to flourish? and What are the virtues needed for this?
These ideas should be familiar. We often speak of the courage of someone fighting a disease, and we are impressed by the kindness of a neighbor or the generosity of a relative, the patience of a schoolteacher and the sense of justice of an activist, the self-control that a former addict has developed after years of struggle, or the wisdom of a rabbi. Moreover, we can easily see how these qualities are connected to an idea of living well, whether in light of the function or purpose of particular roles like neighbor, teacher, and rabbi, or in light of a sense of overall health and well-being.
Virtue ethics begins with the fact that we seem to have ideas about what a well-lived life involves, what kinds of qualities are admirable, and what sort of behavior people with these qualities will exhibit. The task of ethics, on this view, is to help us refine these ideas, resolve conflicts among them, and explore their implications.
Our source for these ideas will be the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BCE), particularly his book, Nicomachean Ethics, in which he declared that the aim of studying eth- ics is not to gain knowledge but to become better people (Aristotle, 1931, 1103b). But before considering his ideas, let’s first get a broad sense of what moral reasoning looks like accord- ing to virtue ethics.