Aristotle Virtue Ethics

Aristotle’s concept of virtue ethics as discussed in Nicomachean Ethics emphasizes the development of good character traits—such as kindness and generosity—which then in turn allow a person to make morally correct decisions in life. In saying this, Aristotle also places attention on the fact that people must break bad habits of character, such as greed or anger, in order to free themselves from the vices that stand in the way of becoming a good person. While virtue ethics are important in that they contribute to our understanding of morality, discrepancies also arise with Aristotle’s concept of virtue ethics; his concept of virtue ethics is not action guiding and not culturally relative.

One essential issue with virtue ethics is that it fails

While this is a widely accepted truism, virtues can also overturn it: someone may be excessively compassionate or generous in which case these virtues are sometimes considered faults. For example, someone’s compassion may lead him or her to act wrongly and tell a lie to protect someone else’s feelings. Another example is that someone who is generous, honest, courageous, etc. may not be morally good; or, if they are in fact morally good, then the conclusion can be made that morally good people may be led by what makes them morally good to act wrongly, ultimately contradicting Aristotle’s concept that virtue ethics allows people to make correct decisions. Thus, Aristotle’s theory of virtue ethics lacks a guiding principle for people’s

A virtue-based ethical system brings into question what the ideal character is for people to have, which varies from culture to culture. While Aristotle may see the answer to this question as self-evident, it is anything but; Aristotle’s assumption that we are able to identify virtuous people as a matter of course is linked to pre-existing behavior of his time such as slavery, making his theory less applicable to the present. While his assumption may have been true for a city-state existing in the empires of his time, the same cannot be said about the pluralistic, multicultural society we live in today. A fundamental problem with Aristotle’s theory lies in the difficulty of establishing the nature of virtues, especially as different people, cultures and societies often have immensely different viewpoints on what constitutes a virtue. Now, Aristotle may say that we can determine what the right virtues are in a given culture by asking a virtuous—and thus happy—person, but that assumes that happiness and virtue always coincide with one another, which is not an obvious truth. Cultures vary in what actions are deemed right or wrong, and have different ideas about what constitutes happiness and welfare. Therefore, his theory as it is written is very restrictive and applicable only to a select few number of cultures that fit his specific