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One reason I think people want us to do it is simply unfamiliarity. No one actually in moral philosophy, as I am and the complainants are, minds deontology and utilitarianism being introduced by loose slogans because we all learnt the terms when we were students and have been familiar with them ever since, like ‘rationalism’ and ‘empiricism’. We use the slogans in our lectures but we know how to go beyond them, introducing the next philosophical generation of students to, for example, rule and ‘government house’ variants once we have told them about act utilitarianism. Armed with a sense of the difference between the two familiar approaches, we confidently identify utilitarian strands in a particular deontologist’s thought and vice versa. But, apart from the people who actually espouse virtue ethics, as I do, only a few can do the same with a virtue approach.
I doubt that any short answer to ‘What is virtue ethics?’ would provide a satisfactory solution. What is needed is a familiarity with virtue ethics comparable to that which everyone in the profession has with deontology and utilitarianism. But this is not easy to acquire from the existing literature. Although there are lots of articles, there is, as I write, only one book which explores virtue ethics systematically and at length, namely Michael Slote’s From Morality to Virtue (1992). What I offer is another one, which addresses different issues, in different ways. My approach is more concerned with details, examples, and qualifications that Slote’s and, in being thereby less abstract, is more committed to exploring a particular version of virtue ethics. Books espousing other versions are doubtless in the pipeline[7] and pretty soon it ought to be the case that everyone in moral philosophy is as familiar with ‘the’ virtue ethics approach as they are with the other two and stops worrying about definitions.
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