Some care ethicists have sought to take the virtues that had long been relegated to the private realm, such as paying particular attention to those who are vulnerable or taking into consideration circumstances and not just abstract principles, and use them as well in the public realm.
Now we take the private lives of politicians as personally as we used to take the virtue of actors.
In the work of other writers, there is often irony or ambivalence for the reader to unpick, but in Steinbeck one learns quickly to take the virtue - and the vice - at face value.
I took the good virtues of each culture and left aside the rest".
Yet even taking these virtues into account, the finances of the Catholic church in America are an unholy mess.
Be that as it may, this project, produced and directed by Frances Causey and Donald Goldmacher, has the virtue of taking the long view of a crisis that recent films like "Inside Job" and "Too Big to Fail" have only sketchily explored.
Yes, the people in question were Catholic nuns, those still-heroic figures in American life who spend most of their time exemplifying the virtue of taking the option for the poor.
The pattern was set, with Kvitova taking the first set by virtue of making marginally fewer errors and more winners, albeit struggling herself.
George Orwell famously said that a writer should be as a pane of glass; how I longed for De Waal's prose to take on the virtues of the porcelain he admires: to be translucent, luminous, white.
