From Morality to Virtue

In this book Michael Slote offers the first full-scale foundational account of virtue ethics to have appeared since the recent revival of interest in the topic. Slote advocates a particular form of such ethics for its intuitive and structural advantages over Kantianism utilitarianism and common-sense morality and he argues that the problems of other views can be avoided and a contemporary plausible version of virtue ethics achieved only by abandoning specifically moral concepts for general aretaic notions like admirability and virtue. The 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.