Abstract

The virtues approach dominated ethics during the period of Classical Antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages. During Modernity, this rich tradition went through a progressive decline, and was eventually replaced by the influential traditions initiated by authors such as Immanuel Kant, Jeremy Bentham or John Stuart Mill. As it is well known, a seminal article written in 1958 by Elizabeth Anscombe initiated a revival of virtue ethics. Since then, an increasing number of moral philosophers, such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Philippa Foot, Bernard Williams or Martha Nussbaum, have made important contributions to the retrieval of this approach to normative ethics. While several authors have devoted their efforts to a deeper understanding of the classical thinkers and texts of virtue ethics, such as Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas, others have proposed new approaches in dialogue with contemporary developments within normative ethics. Although contemporary virtue ethics was initially developed at the level of general fundamental ethics, in recent years this approach was increasingly used to address contemporary problems within applied ethics, in fields such as human bioethics, environmental ethics, business ethics, communication ethics, political science, etc. It is the goal of the present issue of RPF to offer a contribution to an assessment of the contemporary retrieval of contemporary virtue ethics, evaluating its possibilities and limits, and exploring applications to different realms of human activity. The volume is divided in four parts. The first set of articles addresses fundamental questions concerning the relevance and status of virtues ethics within moral philosophy, opening up fresh perspectives and offering new insightful discussions on themes such as the exemplarist virtue theory, the relation between happiness and the virtues, and the dialogue between virtue ethics and the ethics of care. The second set of articles invites a retrieval of important themes of virtue ethics from an historical perspective, privileging two major authors of the virtues’ tradition, namely Aristotle and Aquinas. In the third part, we gather fresh discussions on unexplored virtues, such “mothering virtues” and honesty. Finally, the last set of articles draws our attention to different applications of virtue ethics within the realm of education, bioethics, and environmentalism.