Basic Virtue and Differentiated Virtue

This chapter argues that virtue ethics in traditional form has been overly simple, since it has not adequately integrated within its theoretical structures such important ethical features as role ethics, the narrative quality of our lives, cultural and historical location. It is important for Target Centred Virtue Ethics to offer a theoretical account of how such features can be accommodated within virtue ethics and how the targets of virtues can be more closely specified once that is done. The resulting view is not relativist but an objectivist realist position. This is achieved by a distinction between basic and differentiated virtue so that in role ethics, for example, a basic virtue such as generosity is role differentiated to form a virtue of generosity qua CEO which limits permitted acts of generosity.