Theories Of Virtue Ethics

2) Virtue ethics is a unified (non-dualistic) theory. That is, in virtue ethics, there is no necessary conflict between the moral goodness of a decision and the personal interests of the moral agent making that decision. In other words, what is good to do is also good for the person who does it, and, likewise, what is bad to do is also bad for the person who does it. Arguments that this is a desirable property can be seen in Plato's tortured attempts to claim it for his deontological approach (e.g., in the Republic, the Gorgias, etc.). But in virtue ethics, there is no conflict between body and soul, material and ideal, pleasure and righteousness. This allows us to determine ethical norms *empirically*. We can ask the question: What

To some extent, it is impossible for an approach to normative ethics to remain entirely irrelevant to any field of human action, and any educator is going to have to think about and deal with questions of integrity, honesty, plagiarism, cooperation, work ethic, etc. But from a virtue ethics perspective, as an educator, my central task is to inculcate virtue, which is inseparable from imparting knowledge and skills. Virtue ethics would similarly help me if I were a legislator, or if I were a novelist or television producer, or if I were a physician, or civil engineer, or attorney, or entrepreneur, or marketing executive, or software engineer, or venture capitalist,

That is (at the risk of oversimplifying), norms governing human interaction are in fact *real* and we have direct knowledge of their reality--it is something we can feel viscerally when we observe violations--but our attempts to express and define those norms symbolically are at best approximations about which we should remain somewhat skeptical. Moreover, the reality of norms governing human interaction is intersubjective; they are communicative constituents of the lifeworld. They are dynamic and improve over time when certain knowable communicative procedural norms are followed. These communicative procedural norms are universal to all language users, and the study of them is known as formal pragmatics. Here we have a system that accounts for both moral relativism and moral universalism and is grounded in an inherently human practice. I believe the formal pragmatic norms are best understood as communicative