The current renewal of philosophical interest in the virtues is one of the most noteworthy developments in contemporary ethical theory. The first signs of this revival appeared in 1958, when Elizabeth Anscombe called for the restoration of Aristotelian notions of goodness, character, and virtue as central concerns of moral philosophy. While initial reactions to Anscombe's call were modest, interest in the virtues gathered momentum during the 1980s, largely because of the work of philosophers such as Philippa Foot, Bernard Williams, and Alasdair MacIntyre. The philosophical literature on the virtues is now vast, and there is a great variety of different views which advertise themselves as forms of virtue ethics. Many of those who hold such views argue that virtue ethics can lay serious claim to rival Kantianism and utilitarianism as comprehensive normative ethical theories. But what exactly is virtue ethics? What are the central claims which the variants of virtue ethics share, and how is virtue theory distinct from other, more familiar ethical theories?

There is a somewhat bewildering diversity of claims made by philosophers in the name of virtue ethics. Many of those claims are put in negative form, and are expressed in terms of an opposition to an ‘ethics of principles’, or to an ‘impartialist ethics’, or to ‘abstract ethical theory’, or simply to an ‘ethics of action’.