From Confucian ritual and Socratic knowledge to Aristotle's mean, Christian charity, and the modern revival of character ethics — one idea about human excellence.
What makes a human being excellent — and can such excellence be taught?
Virtue is the oldest theme in ethics and, in one form, its most recent. The Greeks called it aretē — the excellence that lets a thing perform its function well — and asked whether it is one or many, whether it is knowledge, and whether it can be taught. Confucius and Mencius built a parallel tradition around ren, ritual, and the cultivation of a noble character. Christianity fused the classical virtues with faith, hope, and charity infused by grace; the moderns from Hume to Kant then quarrelled over whether virtue lies in useful sentiments, in the good will, or nowhere at all. When Elizabeth Anscombe declared modern moral philosophy bankrupt in 1958, she reopened the ancient question, and virtue ethics returned as a living rival to duty and consequences.
Confucianism
Virtue centres on ren — humaneness or benevolence — cultivated through ritual propriety (li), learning, and filial devotion. The exemplary person (junzi) becomes good not by rule-following but by long practice until right conduct is second nature. 'Is virtue a distant thing? I desire it, and lo, it is at hand.' Character is shaped by imitation of models and by the transforming power of a ruler's own goodness.
The Analects.
Ancient Greek
Virtue is a kind of knowledge, so no one does wrong willingly — wrongdoing is ignorance of the good. Because to know the good is to do it, the virtues are ultimately one, unified in wisdom, and vice is a failure of understanding rather than of will. This intellectualism makes the examined life the precondition of goodness.
Plato's Protagoras and Meno ('Can virtue be taught?').
Ancient Greek (Academy)
Virtue is the health and harmony of the soul, whose three parts — reason, spirit, and appetite — must each do their own work under the rule of reason. The four cardinal virtues are wisdom, courage, temperance, and, binding them, justice. True virtue depends on knowledge of the Form of the Good, so the philosopher who has seen it is alone fit to be virtuous and to rule.
Republic, Books IV and VII.
Ancient Greek (Peripatetic)
Moral virtue is a stable disposition to feel and act well, lying in a mean between excess and deficiency relative to us — courage between cowardice and recklessness. It is acquired by habituation, not teaching, and guided by practical wisdom (phronesis) in the concrete case. Virtue is not enough by itself: it is the core of eudaimonia, the flourishing that is the human good.
Nicomachean Ethics, Books II–VI.
Confucianism
Human nature is innately good: everyone possesses four 'sprouts' — compassion, shame, courtesy, and a sense of right and wrong — which grow into the virtues of benevolence, righteousness, propriety, and wisdom. The example of a child about to fall into a well shows that moral feeling is spontaneous. Virtue is therefore cultivation of what we already have, like tending a plant, and cruelty is the stunting of nature, not its expression.
The Mencius (Mengzi).
Epicureanism
The virtues are prized not for themselves but because they are indispensable to a pleasant life: one cannot live pleasantly without living prudently, honourably, and justly. Prudence (phronesis) is the chief virtue, teaching which pleasures to pursue and pains to accept. Justice has no independent value beyond the mutual advantage of not harming and not being harmed.
Letter to Menoeceus; Principal Doctrines.
Stoicism
Virtue is the only true good and is sufficient for happiness; it consists in living in agreement with nature and reason. The virtues form an inseparable unity grounded in knowledge, so that to have one perfectly is to have them all. Everything else — health, wealth, reputation — is a matter of indifference, though some indifferents are naturally 'preferred'.
Founder of the Stoa; teachings preserved via Diogenes Laertius and later Stoics.
Scholasticism
Aquinas grafts Aristotle onto Christian faith: the four cardinal virtues can be acquired by human effort, but the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity are infused by God's grace and order us to our supernatural end. Virtue is a good habit perfecting a power of the soul, and charity is its 'form', directing every other virtue to the love of God. Without grace, natural virtue remains incomplete.
Summa Theologiae, I–II, qq. 55–67.
Scottish Enlightenment / sentimentalism
Virtue is whatever mental quality gives an observer the pleasing sentiment of approval; reason alone is inert and cannot motivate. Virtues divide into the natural (benevolence, generosity) and the artificial (justice, fidelity), which arise from social convention and utility. What makes a trait a virtue is that it is useful or agreeable, to its possessor or to others.
A Treatise of Human Nature, Book III; Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals.
German idealism / critical philosophy
Virtue is the strength of a person's will in fulfilling duty against opposing inclinations; it is moral firmness in obeying the categorical imperative. Only the good will has unconditional worth, and an action has moral value when done from duty, not merely from feeling or habit. Since inclinations tempt us, virtue is a constant striving rather than a settled, comfortable disposition.
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals; The Metaphysics of Morals ('Doctrine of Virtue').
Genealogical critique
The reigning 'virtues' of humility, pity, and obedience are the values of a slave morality that inverted the noble ideals of strength and self-affirmation. Genuine virtue is life-enhancing: honesty, courage, generosity flowing from a plenitude of power, a 'gift-giving virtue' rather than self-denial. Each higher individual must create his own virtues rather than submit to a herd's tablet of good and evil.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra; On the Genealogy of Morality (1887).
Analytic philosophy
Modern moral philosophy is confused because it keeps notions of moral 'obligation' and 'ought' that only made sense within a divine-law framework it has abandoned. We should drop this hollow legalistic vocabulary and return to the concept of virtue and the older question of human flourishing, grounded in a philosophy of psychology. Her 1958 essay effectively refounded contemporary virtue ethics.
'Modern Moral Philosophy' (1958).
Analytic virtue ethics
The virtues are 'corrective', each standing at a point where human nature tends to fail — courage where fear would deter us, temperance where desire would mislead. Later she argued that goodness is a form of 'natural normativity': just as there are defective plants and animals, there is natural goodness and defect in human beings as the rational, social creatures they are. Virtue is thus rooted in the facts of the human life-form.
'Virtues and Vices' (1978); Natural Goodness (2001).
Communitarian / neo-Aristotelian
Modern moral debate is interminable because we inherited fragments of the Aristotelian tradition without its framework of purpose. Virtues are qualities that let us achieve the goods internal to social 'practices', sustain a narrative unity of a whole life, and carry on a moral tradition. Detached from a community and a shared telos, moral language decays into mere expressions of preference — 'emotivism'.
After Virtue (1981).