The Cambridge Companion to Virtue Ethics

Daniel C. Russell

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781107001169
• eBook ISBN:
  9781107453401
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Virtue ethics has emerged from a rich history, in which both Aristotle and Aquinas have played an important role, to become one of the fastest-growing fields in contemporary ethics. In this volume of newly commissioned essays, leading moral philosophers offer a comprehensive overview of virtue ethics. They examine the theoretical structure of virtue ethics and its place in contemporary moral theory and other topics discussed include the history of virtue-based approaches to ethics, what makes these approaches distinctive, what they can say about specific practical issues and where we can expect them to go in the future. This Companion will be useful to students of virtue ethics and the history of ethics and to others who want to understand how virtue ethics is changing the face of contemporary moral philosophy.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Figures
• Introduction
• 1 Virtue ethics, happiness, and the good life
• 2 Ancient virtue ethics
• 3 Virtue ethics and the Chinese Confucian tradition
• 4 Virtue ethics in the medieval period
• 5 Humes anatomy of virtue
• 6 The historic decline of virtue ethics
• 7 Virtue ethics in the twentieth century
• 8 Virtue ethics and right action
• 9 Virtue ethics and bioethics
• 10 Environmental virtue ethics
• 11 The virtue approach to business ethics
• 12 Virtue and politics
• 13 The situationist critique of virtue ethics
• 14 The definition of virtue ethics
• Bibliography
• Index