Virtue Ethics

Virtue ethics shifts the central question of morality. Instead of asking "What should I do?" it asks "What kind of person should I become?" Rather than focusing on the rightness of individual acts, it focuses on character—the stable traits, or virtues, that make someone a good human being. Its classic source is Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, and after a long eclipse it enjoyed a major twentieth-century revival.

Eudaimonia as the human end

Aristotle begins from the observation that all our activities aim at some good, and that there must be some final good we pursue for its own sake rather than for the sake of anything further. He calls this eudaimonia, often translated as "happiness" but better rendered as "flourishing" or "living and doing well." Eudaimonia is not a passing feeling of pl