An idea · Classical Greek · first attested 340 BCE
Virtue Ethics
The good life is the life of cultivated excellence of character.
Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics sets aside "what is the right action?" and asks instead: "what kind of person should I be?" Virtue is a hexis – a settled disposition – acquired through practice, sitting as a mean between extremes. Courage is the mean between cowardice and recklessness; generosity between miserliness and wastefulness. Modern virtue ethics revives this approach after 20th-century discontent with both Kantian duty and utilitarian calculation.