From Morality to Virtue [Paperback]

In this book, Slote offers the first full-scale foundational account of virtue ethics to have appeared since the recent revival of interest in the ethics of virtue. Slote advocates a particular form of such ethics for its intuitive and structural advantages over Kantianism, utilitarianism, and common-sense morality, and he argues that the problems of other views can be avoided and a contemporary plausible version of virtue ethics achieved only by abandoning specifically moral concepts for general aretaic notions like admirability and virtue. Although this study is not bound by particular Aristotelian doctrines, it places an Aristotelian emphasis on both self-benefiting and other-benefiting virtues. Slote criticizes Kantian and common-sense morality for internal incoherencies and for downgrading the moral individual and her well-being in some previously unnoticed ways. By contrast, this book defends a distinctive, intuitive, and symmetric ethical principle according to which we should balance self-concern with concern for others, but it also concludes that there is, contrary to utilitarianism, no single basis for status as a virtue nor any simple relation between the virtues and human well-being.

This book draws on...[Slote's] earlier ones, but it also advances many new and important arguments of its own. Indeed, it is rich enough to confirm Slote's status as one of the most important contemporary moral philosophers....As a whole, the book amounts to a defence of virtue ethics, but it is as important for its discussions of the other theories mentioned as it is for its development of virtue theory itself. --Mind

From Morality to Virtue...does important work...in helping to bring into constructive engagement thinking about the virtues with that on moral theory, and conversely. Given the decided lack of interaction between these two traditions, this is much to be praised. --Philosophy and PhenomenologicalResearchl³ƒ