Summary

Virtue ethics

 Is all about possessing deep historical importance and its roots

 It can be traced to such ancient historians such as Socrates, Plato, Cicero (Card, 2004)
Plato
Through the influence of Socrates was convinced that there is an objective truth which is not simply
relative to an individual’s belief.
Philosophized a great deal on important ethical concepts including some specific virtues:

 He wrote Charmides which was about temperance;

 The Laches was about courage,
 And the Euthyphro was about piety

Plato’s ethics essentially looked to freeing the soul from its bondage to thebody. Plato, therefore,
highlighted that sensible pleasures are devoid of moral value
“The road toward the true life of the spirit, then, Is a path of purification where man exerts effort to genuine
wisdom”
For Plato, The Life which is most closely reflects the divinity, which he conceived as multiplicity
possessing diverse characteristic , is the life of Virtue
Aristotle

 Nicomachean Ethics is widely viewed as the most influential early work on virtue ethics
 Historically, Aristotle’s Ethics is the first systematic treatment of ethics in Western Civilization (it
belongs in the tradition that stresses both the supremacy of our rational nature and the purposive
nature of the universe)
Aristotle pointed out out that an ultimate end for people must be one that is self-sufficient, final, and
attainable,; he maintained that happiness is the goal that meets these requirements (consideration of the conditions
are requisite to the attainment of happiness that led Aristotle into discussion of virtue.) which for him refers to the
excellence of a thing and hence it refers to the disposition to perform effectively its proper function (Denise et al.,
2002).
Thus Aristotelian virtue ethics is concerned with pursuing a certain type of morally inclusive excellence,
called Eudaimonia (happiness orhuman flourishing) in ethics (Dobson 1997)
For Aristotle, just like for the other classical philosophers, Hapipiness was a type of activity and an
achievement, rather than a feeling. His definition of Happiness contains two vital concepts

 “Activity of soul” – which means the exercise of reasons.

 And the “Accordance with Virtue”, which describes the quality of performance.
Happiness was a term indicating success; to have lived a happy life was the same as having been a success
at human life (Denise et al., 2002; Pakaluk and Cheffers, 2011; Dobson, 1997).
In this classic virtue theory, four human virtues stand out as being “hinge” or “cardinal” virtues: courage,
moderation, justice, and prudence. Plato was the first philosopher to give such list of the four main virtues,
although the label itself “cardinal virtues” was not coined until the second half of the 4 th century AD by
Ambrose of Millan.
In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas, preserving the pattern and the most of the detail of Aristotle ethics,
judged that Aristotle’s account of the moral virtues was correct in outlining but incomplete with details.