From morality to virtue

About this book

In this book, Slote offers the first full-scale foundational account of virtue ethics to have appeared in this century. In a plain and direct fashion, Slote advocates a particular form of such ethics for its intuitive and structural advantages over Kantianism, utilitarianism, and common-sense morality. He argues that the problems of these other views can be avoided and a plausible, contemporary version of virtue ethics achieved only by abandoning specifically moral concepts for general aretaic notions like admirability and virtue. Although this study is not bound by particular Aristotelian doctrines, From Morality to Virtue places an Aristotelian emphasis on both self-benefiting and other-benefiting virtues. Slote criticizes Kantian and common-sense morality for internal incoherencies and for downgrading the moral individual's well-being in some previously unnoticed ways. By contrast, this book defends a distinctive, intuitive, and symmetric ethical principle according to which we should balance self-concern with concern for others, but it also concludes that there is, contrary to utilitarianism, no single basis for status as a virtue nor any simple relation between the virtues and human well-being.