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What is a theory of virtue about? It is about what constitutes a good moral character, or a good quality of character. It is not about what makes an action right or wrong, though virtuous people generally act rightly. The evaluation of character as good or bad and the evaluation of actions as right or wrong are different departments of ethical theory. Neither can be reduced to the other, and there is reason to care about both of them. This chapter explains and defends these theses, and the remaining chapters of the book are sketched in outline.

Virtue, comprehensively considered, is intrinsic excellence of persisting moral character, and excellence of moral character must be excellence in being for what is good. This chapter elaborates the concepts of being forsomething, of the good that virtue is for, and of excellence. The concept of a particular virtue or excellent trait of moral character is distinguished from, and related to, the more comprehensive concept of virtue.

Despite the evidence for the good will reading of the humanity formulation, many readers will find it unpalatable. It may seem that if good will is the end in itself, then the humanity formulation allows the abuse of many humans who are insufficiently committed to morality. But Kant’s own account of a complete system of duties, or a metaphysics of morals, implies that all typical humans must be treated as if they are ends in themselves, even if some lack good wills. Kant actually provides several reasons for this, including that others’ moral character cannot be accurately discerned, that people are prone to elevate their own self-worth in comparison to others, that treating immoral people with disrespect will discourage them from reforming themselves, and that abusing any humans will likely decrease someone’s respect for all humans. Furthermore, given a proper understanding of good will, there is no reason to think good wills are a rarity among humans.

This chapter argues that the moral character of God, as portrayed in the Scriptures he is supposed to have inspired, is a reasonable test of the claim that those Scriptures convey a divine revelation. The Christian Scriptures (the ‘Old’ Testament and the New) fail the test. They frequently represent God as authorizing bad conduct. He commands child sacrifice and genocide. He permits slavery and rape. This is only a partial list of passages which make it incredible that the morally perfect being of Christian theology could have inspired the Bible. Also problematic: the Bible contradicts itself about how God will treat his creatures after death, sometimes denying an afterlife, sometimes affirming it; when it affirms an afterlife, it threatens those who do not believe with eternal punishment. Better to give up the hypothesis of divine inspiration than to corrupt our moral thinking by trying to defend the indefensible.

This chapter argues that the Enlightenment's biggest success in the field of education has been in convincing future generations to make school and university education more accessible to vastly larger numbers of people. However, Enlightenment intellectuals' emphasis on education as a vehicle of intellectual, civic, and moral transformation has been de-emphasized in the contemporary world. Although certain aspects of Enlightenment intellectuals' faith in the transformative power of education to shape intellectual and moral character do not always survive scrutiny, their assumption that compatible internal, attitudinal changes need to accompany external, societal changes if the latter are to be freely adopted and made efficacious appears to be correct. This leads to an awkward conclusion: however numerous the external signs of a global civil society may be at present, most people still do not morally endorse it. To this extent, education — from an Enlightenment perspective — has failed.

This chapter considers Aristotle's own explanation of why he includes a discussion of voluntariness in his discussion of moral character. The connection he sees between voluntariness and the praiseworthiness and blameworthiness of states of character gives us reason to suppose that the account of voluntariness is intended to capture conditions of moral responsibility for action. He thinks we are morally responsible for those actions and feelings produced by our states of moral character. The account of praiseworthiness on which he relies, however, fails to endorse a common modern assumption about moral responsibility — the view that one's praiseworthiness or blameworthiness for action requires responsibility for the states of character from which one acts.

The topic of this chapter is the application of virtue ethics to the development of artificial moral agents. The difficulties of applying general moral theories in a top‐down fashion to artificial moral agents motivate the return to the virtue‐based conception of morality that can be traced to Aristotle. Virtues constitute a hybrid between top‐down and bottom‐up approaches in that the virtues themselves can be explicitly described, but their acquisition as moral character traits seems essentially to be a bottom‐up process. Placing this approach in a computational framework, the chapter discusses the suitability of the kinds of neural network models provided by connectionism for training (ro)bots to distinguish right from wrong.

This chapter examines the ‘Virtue Ethics’ approach to the problem of evil, which focuses on the idea of ‘character’ – certain individuals have a character which leads to them perform evil actions. It explores John Kekes's distinction between choice-morality and character-morality, and defends a Kantian choice-morality against his critique. The problem with character-morality is that the agent does not choose their character traits, and therefore morality becomes a matter of luck. And again, the possibilities of reform and redemption a marginalised by those approach.

This chapter deals with explanations that have been given by leading commentators for the key justificatory characteristic of the doctrine of provocation, and with the concepts of anger that underpin those explanations. The sections that follow in this chapter examine the importance of moral justification; provocation and causation; causation and conceptions of anger; anger as irresistible impulse; provocation and personality as causes; anger and moral character; character and criminal culpability; and justified retribution and law reform.

This chapter expounds the idea of ethical autonomy. Ethical autonomy is personal autonomy modulated by moral character. It is different in kind from personal autonomy. Fusing personal autonomy with moral character alters the autonomous individual’s utilization of her rational and imaginative faculties, her will, her capabilities, and her options. Ethical autonomy is supportive of various kinds of social, political, and religious forms of difference. It is not a comprehensive doctrine. It is suitable for inclusion in educational spheres and it supports citizenship in free societies. Ethical autonomy strengthens reasonable pluralism and the cardinal principles of a liberalism of conscience. It holds special promise for liberalism and democratic life.

This chapter considers Aristotle's differing verdicts, in the different ethical works, on whether compelled actions are voluntary. In the EE and the MM Aristotle classifies such actions as involuntary, but in the EN he insists that they are voluntary. These conflicting verdicts reflect different ways of making precise the basic presupposition guiding his dialectical inquiry into voluntariness, the thesis that agents are morally responsible for the actions produced by their moral character. In the EE and MM he denies that such actions originate in the agent because he thinks such actions are not expressions of the agent's character, while in the EN he insists that such actions are voluntary because he believes they do express the agent's character. Reflecting on these difficult cases forces Aristotle to specify the sort of causal relation between character and action he has in mind, and to do this he appeals to his distinction, familiar from his physical works, between intrinsic (kath' hauto) and accidental (kata sumbebēkos) efficient causation. He shows that he thinks the agent's moral character must be the intrinsic, not merely the accidental, cause of the actions for which he is morally responsible. His invocation of this distinction allows him to offer a satisfactory defence of the thesis that agents are morally responsible for compelled actions while at the same time acknowledging the ways in which such actions are different from the other actions for which we are morally responsible.

Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge opens with a famous episode in which a poor hay trusser, Michael Henchard, sells his wife, Susan, by impulsively putting her up for auction in a public market. Susan is purchased by a sailor, with whom she departs, and they subsequently live as husband and wife. Subtitled “The Life and Death of a Man of Character,” the novel explores the flawed moral character of the man who sold his wife. This chapter interprets the novel's account of the moral consequences of the wife sale in The Mayor of Casterbridge by examining the shifting legal and social meanings of the practice in nineteenth-century Britain. Wife selling was a rare but recognized practice by which poor rural people got divorced by mutual consent, particularly before the marriage laws were reformed to make divorce more accessible in 1857. As a mode of popular divorce, it was regarded by the lower-class people who practiced it as a ritual of legitimating the end of a marriage in the eyes of the public, whereas the middle and upper classes viewed it as morally offensive and criminally punishable. The chapter shows how the novel, read against the background of this socio-legal landscape, exploits the uncertainties about the legal consequences of wife sale, as well as disagreements about its morality, to dramatize the tragic nature of the protagonist's character. In this way the legal context illuminates Henchard's tragedy, while the tragedy at the same time gives insight into the nature of legal arrangements for people who live outside the world of privilege that is the focus of many legal histories.

Chapter 2 offers an overview of the psychology of character and describes how the recent renaissance in personality research has led to renewed interest in the study of character and its relation to personality. Using a trait-centered approach, it provides an empirical and theoretical foundation for the recent revival of character as an subject of scientific psychological study. In particular, it outlines five key questions for the study of moral character, reviews the extant research on character, and discusses areas for future research. The questions concern the relationship of moral behavior to personality traits in general, the consistency of moral behavior, the internal causal structure of character, the rolel of character in self and other knowledge, and the development of character.

Chapter 4 considers the importance of moral character in the impressions and evaluations we form of other people in our daily lives, reporting on recent research showing that moral character is extremely important in person perception and evaluation, much more so than the related notion of social warmth. Moral character is also seen as fundamental to identity. The chapter raises three central questions about the perception of moral character that remain to be answered: (i) Is morality properly conceived of as a third dimension of person and group perception, separate from both competence and warmth? (ii) How is morality and warmth information actually obtained in ordinary social interactions?, and (iii) What is the perceived structure of moral character? It then take some preliminary steps in these directions.

A natural approach to justifying the coercive administration of morally enhancing neurointerventions is to appeal to a principle of moral paternalism. This chapter outlines the factors that need to be taken into account in order for a principle of moral paternalism to morally justify coercively administering neurointerventions. First, the author argues that the moral paternalist must take special care to ensure that the interventions will improve moral character. Second, she outlines the potential costs that the moral paternalist needs to address before a moral paternalistic interference is justified. The author argues that whilst the moral paternalistic administration of a neurointervention may have more kinds of cost to consider than other forms of moral paternalistic interference, this does not mean that such interventions cannot be justified under the principle.

Kampala is just one place where the AIDS pandemic has generated a plethora of contradictory codes for the sexual behaviour of young people, influenced by a range of transnational actors. Yet amidst the discursive complexities and possibilities, it remains a considerable concern for many to present as a ‘good’, ‘respectable’ person, signalling recourse to local, enduring notions of what constitutes honourable behaviour in Ganda society. Drawing on ethnographic data from a group of Pentecostal university students, this chapter explores the implications of the reification of moral character for the sexual behaviour of young born-again Christians. The critical importance of secrecy and discretion around sexual behaviour is revealed. Based on this evidence, I argue against the analytical dangers of assuming a direct relationship between what Pentecostal Christians might say about their sexual behaviour and their actual sexual behaviour. Please suggest 5–10 keywords which can be used for describing the content of the chapter. The keywords should appear in the abstract if possible. They should not be too generalised. Single words are preferred, but two- or three-word specialist phrases are acceptable. Keywords may be taken from the chapter title as long as they also appear in the abstract.