A Consideration of the Application of Virtue Ethics in Moral Training; Challenges and Opportunities

A common concern among advocates of Aristotelian virtue ethics is the problem of human character. The problem was particularly scrutinized by researchers of education in the last two centuries, and after the revival of virtue ethics in 1950s, it evolved into practical application of virtue-based approaches to moral training. Since then, character-based or virtue ethics faced new challenges mainly from advocates of care ethics and contextualists. They generally take the existence of character, and virtue for that matter, into question. In this paper, I begin by a consideration of how serious these challenges are through an analytic and critical method, and then I deal with the question: given the Aristotelian requirement of practical wisdom for virtue, is it an achievable goal to present a sage as a role-model for moral training of people in the society, particularly children and teenagers? If not, what is the purpose of virtue-based moral training? This paper is concerned with an inquiry into the nature and place of this goal in the human life today, together with an account of effective methods of training virtuous agents.