Paper Summary:

The paper explains that virtue ethics refers to the theory or a system of philosophical belief that focuses on the entire personality or disposition of a person instead of actions alone. The paper discusses how virtue ethics were developed by ancient thinkers Plato and Aristotle but it was in the 1950s that interest in virtue ethics was renewed by Anscombe's famous paper ""Modern Moral Philosophy."

From the Paper:

"Prior to the 1960s, the field of normative ethics was largely dominated by deontology, which was based on the values and beliefs of eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant, and utilitarianism, which was based on the views of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophers Jeremy Bentham and J. S. Mill. In most of the books published up until thirty years ago, virtue was discussed in terms of deontology or utilitarianism. Gradually a change was witnessed as people began searching for something beyond deontology and utilitarianism as it was found that these two theories did not encompass many important issues or had no answers for some modern problems. This gave rise to virtue ethics, which was not exactly seen as the third approach at first but attained a distinguished status of its own as it began to grow in stature and importance."

Sample of Sources Used:

• GEM Anscombe. "Modern Moral Philosophy" reprinted in Virtue Ethics. Roger Crisp, Michael Slote edition. (1997) Oxford University Press- Oxford Publication.

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