I don't, as he suggests, wish that he discussed other films; I simply think that he's mistaken in praising those in his piece for offering a more virtuous "cinematic ethic" or greater "contact with reality" than others — as if cinematic ethics were higher and reality more real in Portland or the Mississippi Delta than in an office at the Times or The New Yorker or a bedroom in Los Angeles.
Smith has written several academic books and papers on Rand's ideas, including Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist, a volume on Rand's ethical theory published by Cambridge University Press.
Aristotle's view, on the other hand, is usually considered a paradigm example of a "virtue ethics", an ethical theory that gives priority to virtuous character.
This hefty history of the rise of consumerism insightfully analyzes daily luxuries over five centuries — from the drinking-chocolate paraphernalia popular in eighteenth-century northern Europe to the televisions bought by postwar Japanese, who followed an ethic of "virtuous consumption" in order to boost domestic manufacturing.
This variant of constructivism invokes the tradition of Ancient eudaimonism, and defines the good life in terms of virtuous rational agency (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, V 1 1129b2–7, III 4 113a32).
For instance, cowards will overestimate dangers, the rash will underestimate them, and the virtuous will perceive them correctly (Eudemian Ethics 1229b23 27).
However, as has been argued (Keller 2007), she won't be any better pleased if he tells her that he is visiting her because it is what a virtuous agent would do, so virtue ethics has the problem too.
He says that we seek to have virtue and virtuous action for itself as well (Nicomachean Ethics, 1097b 1–10); not to do so is to fail even to be virtuous.
Accordingly, Soqotra's traditional economic sector can be seen either as operating within the bounds of a virtuous circle inspired by an environmentally conscious ethic of frugality, or caught within an infernal impasse of a permanently delayed gratification.
Realize that higher teachings are worthless if you can't even practice the most basic teachings, such as ethics (avoiding the ten non-virtuous actions).
Ecofeminist virtue ethics asks what a morally good or virtuous person would do, and which character traits, attitudes or dispositions a virtuous person would exhibit, in order to predispose the nonhuman natural environment to survive and "flourish" in a healthy way.
