Virtue ethics
Judging moral character and disposition rather than the moral status of single acts.
What it commits you to
Virtue ethics asks what sort of agent someone is becoming rather than whether a particular action is permitted. It handles partiality, loyalty and long-horizon dispositions better than either deontology or consequentialism, which is why it is attractive for questions about relationship and about trained habits. Its weakness is that it is underspecified at exactly the points where specification is most needed.
Which realms lean on this
Ethics is where the realms argue about what counts: the parties, the pleasures, the duties, the care.
ethics · 9 realms — The Benthamite Foundry, The Care Weft, The Contractual Court, The Kantian Citadel, The Longview Foundry, The Middle Kingdom, The Stoic Ramparts, The Ubuntu Weave, The Virtue Garden.
Canon that discusses this
primary · 340 BCE
Nicomachean Ethics
The first sustained attempt to say what a life is for. Happiness is the end, and it is achieved by habituated virtues exercised with practical wisdom, in the particular and under uncertainty. No manuscript carries an authorial colophon and the dating is reconstructed from cross-references, so 340 BCE is a conventional anchor.
modern · 2006
Ethics of Care
Held develops the care perspective into a full ethical position and argues against the priority claim of justice: obligations arise inside particular relationships, are partial, and are not derivable from general principles. The book that made partiality respectable in moral theory. The excerpt below paraphrases Held's thesis rather than quoting the 2006 book.
primary · 1921
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Completed during the First World War and published without an authorial name, in the series Wittgenstein edited himself. It ends where most of what people want to say about ethics cannot be said in propositions at all — a limit-statement that is also the sharpest warning available about systems that are fluent and not intelligible.
modern · 1950
The Human Use of Human Beings
Wiener applies the theory of feedback and control to law, politics and medicine, and argues that communication is more fundamental than command. The book that gave cybernetics its name in 1948 becomes, two years later, the founding text of the ethics of steering large systems without crushing what they steer. The excerpt below paraphrases the book rather than quoting it.
See also
Eudaimonia
ethicsFlourishing: the human life lived well, rather than the merely pleasant one.
Flourishing
ethicsThe condition of living well in a way that is more than the absence of suffering.
Deontology
ethicsDuty-first ethics: some things are wrong regardless of the totals they produce.
Consequentialism
ethicsJudging actions solely by the outcomes they produce.