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What is a good life? What does it mean to be a good person? Richard White answers these questions by considering aspects of moral goodness through the virtues: courage, temperance, justice, compassion, and wisdom. White explores how moral virtues affect and support social movements such as pacifism, environmentalism, multiculturalism, and animal rights. Drawing on the classics, White includes historical and cross-cultural analysis and examines the lives of Socrates, Buddha, and Gandhi, who lived virtuous lives, to help the reader understand and acquire moral wisdom. Book jacket.

Much of the work that has been done on virtue has been devoted to getting virtue ethics a seat at the theoretical table. It has been concerned with showing that virtue ethics can provide a satisfactory account of right action to rival accounts offered by consequentialism and deontology. This volume of essays explores the nitty-gritty details of particular virtues. It includes original contributions from a number of leading scholars in virtue ethics. Most of the virtues discussed – such as ambition, cheerfulness, creativity, magnificence, pride, wit, and wonder – have been almost wholly neglected by contemporary ethicists. The volume also includes coverage of other virtues that have received a fair amount of attention in recent years, such as charity, hope, justice, practical wisdom, and temperance. Here the essays address largely ignored dimensions of these virtues and show how these discussions can enrich our understanding of neglected virtues. Neglected Virtues is a welcome addition to the scholarly literature on virtue ethics. Its focus on individual virtues, while not meant to be exhaustive, will open new avenues for future research in this rapidly growing area of ethics and moral philosophy.

Lisa Tessman's Burdened Virtues is a deeply original and provocative work that engages questions central to feminist theory and practice, from the perspective of Aristotelian ethics. Focused primarily on selves who endure and resist oppression, she addresses the ways in which devastating conditions confronted by these selves both limit and burden their moral goodness, and affect their possibilities of flourishing. She describes two different forms of "moral trouble" prevalent under oppression. The first is that the oppressed self may be morally damaged, prevented from developing or exercising some of the virtues; the second is that the very conditions of oppression require the oppressed to develop a set of virtues that carry a moral cost to those who practice them--traits that Tessman refers to as "burdened virtues." These virtues have the unusual feature of being disjoined from their bearer's own well being. Tessman's work focuses on issues that have been missed by many feminist moral theories, and her use of the virtue ethics framework brings feminist concerns more closely into contact with mainstream ethical theory. This book will appeal to feminist theorists in philosophy and women's studies, but also more broadly, ethicists and social theorists.

"This book of metaethics focuses on Catholic virtue theory. To create an ecological model through which we can imagine the human moral character, the book integrates concepts of ecology with Aquinas' vision of moral character. The book describes the dynamics of a moral character in terms of the processes and functions that take place in an ecosystem. The virtues parallel species and other aspects of ecosystems, and other participants, such as the passions, the will, and the intellect, are also described in terms of this model. The book is a creative project with a solid and documented scholarly foundation. It aims to begin a conversation about a rarely discussed aspect of virtue ethics. The images we use to think about moral character are powerful. They inform our understandings of the moral virtues and the ways in which moral character develops. The book asks readers to choose deliberately the models we use to imagine moral character and offers this ecological virtue model as a good example for our own time"--