VIRTUE ETHICS AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Since the middle of the twentieth century, virtue ethics has seen tremendous growth as a modern approach to normative and applied ethics. Today, some of the most exciting work in virtue ethics focuses on extending that approach to political philosophy as well. This chapter overviews some of the major virtue-based approaches to political philosophy developed over the past three decades, focusing specifically on neo-Aristotelian versions of liberalism. While these earlier virtue ethical approaches to political philosophy are distinctive, we note that they share the defect of failing to address the justification of political authority, which is the fundamental question of modern political philosophy. Meanwhile, more recent approaches to virtue and politics, while they do address the justification of political authority, do so from apparently competing metaphysical points of view regarding the relationship between the individual and the state. A critical issue, therefore, remains how to understand this relationship.