|
In saying this, I do not mean to claim, in advance of future developments, that virtue ethics, in contrast to deontology and utilitarianism, is bound to survive, as Oakley puts it, ‘as an enduring feature of the ethical landscape’.[8] Indeed, I rather hope that future generations of moral philosophers, brought up on all three approaches, will lost interest in classifying themselves as following one approach rather than another; in which case all three labels might become of merely historical interest. But that is still over the horizon, for much of what those future generations could be taught under the label ‘virtue ethics’ still needs to be provided.
An obvious gap is the topic of justice, both as a personal virtue and as the central topic in political philosophy, and I should say straight out that this book makes no attempt at all to fill that gap. In common with nearly all other existing virtue ethics literature, I take it as obvious that justice is a personal virtue, and am happy to use it as an occasional illustration, but I usually find any of the other virtues more hospitable to the detailed elaboration of points. But, in a book of this length, I do not regard this as a fault. I am writing about normative ethics, not political philosophy, and even when regarded solely as a personal virtue (if it can be), justice is so contested and (I would say) corrupted a topic that it would need a book on its own.
----
[8]Oakley, ‘Varieties and Virtue Ethics’, 152 | | |