What is the point of virtue ethics?
virtue seems to be just a disposition to do the right thing, so the goodness of virtue seems to reduce to the goodness of acts But there is a meta-ethical point to virtue ethics, if you don’t think there are non-trivial rules for action i.e. that there is an exception to every rule; the particular circumstances of each action have to be taken into account judgements about what to do in individual particular situations are primary; general rules for action are just rough generalizations from these particular judgements Moral knowledge must be a knowledgeable disposition to make judgements about particular situations. But that’s what a virtue is. Virtue theory is important to the particularist, because it provides a way of making sense of moral knowledge learns to be good by training: one gets used to doing the right thing until this becomes the natural thing to do.
