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 asks not "what is the right action?" but "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.