What is virtue ethics? ?
The Christian ethicist focuses upon three reference points: the universal message, the contemporary situation, and the moral agent. In the last two decades, there has been an “increasing interest among Christian ethicists in the significance of the moral agent and in the question as to how the kind of person one is bears upon the kind of decisions one makes.”5 Of course, the field of virtue ethics is not a late twentieth century phenomenon, but rather it has a strong historical tradition. Virtue as a moral quality has been known since the Greco-Roman period. In fact “all the classical ethical systems centered around virtue.”6 Virtue was related to health by the ancient Greeks, but virtue seemingly went into oblivion when the classical Greek philosophers devalued health as a virtue. Virtue ethics, as Alasdair MacIntyre espouses in his book After Virtue, was a major ethical theory from the Greeks to the Enlightenment, but the Enlightenment upset the “applecart,” and virtue ethics became
It is the ethics concerned with the question how to become a good man/woman. It is about features of a person, not of an act. The classical thinkers (Plato, Aristotle) were thinking of ethics as virtue ethics. When a person was raised the proper way his personality would have the just features and therefore he would know how to act in a just way. Later thinkers came with ethics based on acts: the question now became which acts are just and not which features made a person just. Both visions don’t bite each other. It’s just another perspective.
