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A deeper reason for the demand that we should come up with a crisp answer to ‘What is virtue ethics?’, I suspect, is the persistence of the belief that virtue ethics is not, as I claimed above, ‘a rival to deontological and utilitarian approaches, as interestingly and challengingly different from either as they are from each other’. The suspicion is that, if only the virtue ethicists could be induced to state their position baldly, in a short list of theses, it would become clear that any of the theses that were not obviously and ludicrously false or indefensible could be accommodated by deontology or utilitarianism. But trying to make out that virtue ethics does have a distinctively different approach by listing putatively distinctive and plausible claims it subscribes to, seems to me a needlessly combative task. As things are now, the approach is still new enough to be distinctive, and the aim of this book is to explore what insights can be gained into moral philosophy when it is spelt out in a really detailed and comprehensive way. If utilitarians and deontologists disagree with what I say then of course I shall want to argue with them, and maybe some of our sticking points will be disagreements over particular theses that, typically, though by no means universally, they espouse and virtue ethicist reject, or vice versa. But maybe not. And if they were to agree, and their only protest was ‘But we can say that too-that’s a utilitarian (or a deontological) thesis’, I should not be inclined to argue at all; I should be delighted. Let us by all means stop caring about how we distinguish ourselves and welcome our agreements.
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