Chapter 2 covers the key figures in the history of virtue ethics, including Socrates, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Alasdair MacIntyre. For each figure, several conceptions integral to moral philosophy are examined, such as the definition of virtue, its source and cultivation, anthropology, the human problem, and theology. This chapter consequently provides an introduction to virtue ethics, one tailored to my purposes, and may be dispensable for readers fluent in the subject. Nevertheless, debates and questions are raised here that shape the rest of the study, contributing to the bank of philosophical resources necessary for establishing the book of Proverbs as a moral tradition, and for that reason are indispensable to its argument.

After a brief summary of the book’s argument, I suggest how understanding Proverbs as a tradition of virtue helps to address other questions about the ethics of the book, such as recent discussions about character. Specifically, I draw together and draw out the book’s conception of human nature, moral action and character, the relation of moral and theological virtue, the human problem, and how Proverbs relates to its moral rivals.