In "The New Meaning of Treason," Rebecca West warned decades ago of "confusing unpopular forms of virtue with evil".
In one of his aphorisms, he pronounced: "The forms of virtue are erect, the forms of pleasure undulate.
As noted under "Preliminaries" above, a few non-Aristotelian forms of virtue ethics have developed.
It has also generated virtue ethical readings of philosophers other than Plato and Aristotle, such as Martineau, Hume and Nietzsche, and thereby different forms of virtue ethics have developed (Slote 2001; Swanton 2003, 2011a).
If your Latin is rusty, "virtus" is a form of virtue, specifically the "kind of integrity and strength" that was prized in the ancient Roman republic, according to Joe Fazzino, a spokesman for Virtus Investment Partners, the fund's parent company, a 2008 spin-off from the Phoenix life insurance group in Hartford, Conn.
If Michaels is right, and the differences we ritually complain about are the differences we love (because beating our breasts about them is a cheap form of virtue), any controversy that the show might provoke will fit right into the society's unwillingness to contemplate real social change.
In a similar vein, Nancy Daukas argues for an explicitly social form of virtue epistemology that takes as its core epistemic virtue "epistemic trustworthiness" (2006, 2011).
Note that despite the prominent place of virtues in Mohist ethics, the theory is not a form of virtue ethics, because the virtues are not taken as the basis for fundamental criteria of right action.
So far this discussion has taken it as given that, whatever problems reliabilism faces in this regard, there are epistemological theories available some form of virtue epistemology, for example that can deal with them.
We need to engage in ethical theory, and to reason well in this field, if we are to move beyond the low-grade form of virtue we acquired as children.
The ideal was that, with justice as a foundation, political life would enable its participants to flourish and to achieve the overarching human end of happiness (eudaimonia), expressing a civic form of virtue and pursuing happiness and success through the competitive forums of the city.
