The phrase "a sort of virtue" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when describing something that has qualities or characteristics resembling virtue, but may not fully embody it.
Example: "In his actions, there was a sort of virtue that inspired those around him, even if it was not always consistent."
Alternatives: "a kind of virtue" or "a type of virtue".
From DC-based food truck impresario Justin Vitarello, to the Silicon Valley-based Tyle brothers (the elder, Sheel, is a venture capitalist; the younger, Sujay, a technology entrepreneur) the idea of doing your own thing well, of being an entrepreneur, was reinforced as a sort of millennial virtue.
He names Sartre and his followers, "who seem to make the taste for servitude a sort of ingredient of virtue".
Decency, here, is a circumspect sort of virtue.
It is a sort of pyramidal model of virtue, with fertility at the basis and wisdom at the top (only very few people can reach wisdom) (De utilitate, OO, II, 25b; Theonoston, OO, II, 302b; on Cardano's views on virtue, see Ingegno 1980, 318 76).
The truth is, he indeed took an immoderate pleasure in military operations and in warfare, to which he devoted himself, as the special means for exercising all sorts of virtue, and utterly contemned those who were not soldiers, as drones and useless in the commonwealth.
The Prince is a sustained attempt to define, in the most realistic terms possible, the sort of virtue that a prince must possess if he wants to succeed in achieving his objectives.
HENDRIK HERTZBERG: In Avatar's case, what makes it worse is that the strengths of the Na'vi are painstakingly noted: oneness with nature, a sort of shared consciousness, Zen virtues etc., and then there's a straight-out military battle which they win using ordinary earthbound methods, like shooting and stabbing.
It acts as a sort of lighthouse for other virtues, guiding them to safe port in the middle of the ocean.
So the question that Aristotle's concerned with, in the pages that we read, is a question of what that virtue looks like, and how that sort of virtue might be cultivated.
