The resurgence of interest in virtue ethics can be traced to the late 1950s and to the work of Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot. On Anscombe's view, both deontologism and consequentialism are guilty of judging the " rightness " or " wrongness " of actions on the model of rendering a verdict based on one's understanding of the law and of an agent's obligations under the law. The fundamental ...

The encounter between a patient and her surgeon is unique for several reasons. The surgeon inflicts pain upon a patient for the patient's own good. An operative intervention is irreducibly personal, such that the decisions about and performance of operations are inseparable from the idiosyncrasies of the individual surgeon. Furthermore, there is a chasm of knowledge between the patient and surg...

I argue here that good medical ethics requires an empirically-informed moral psychology of medical virtue along with sound action-guiding prescriptions for virtuous medical practice. After distinguishing between three levels of justification, I indicate how medical virtue ethics can draw constructively on relevant empirical research in developing feasible and realistic aspirational standards fo...

Note: This is a preprint of my introduction to the forthcoming translation by Margaret Atkins of Thomas Aquinas's Disputed Questions on the Virtues (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy). The basic procedure was simple. The topic would be announced in advance so that everyone could prepare an arsenal of clever arguments. When the faculty and students had gathered, the professor would of...