preview

Virtue Ethics Research Paper

Satisfactory Essays

Another reason as to why Virtue Ethics doesn’t offer a successful approach to ethical decision making is because it relies too heavily on the character of individuals. For example Milgram’s experiment proved that normal citizens of society are nearly always likely to follow orders of an authority figure even when the lives of innocent people are at risk. The experiment showed that 65% of participants continued to electrocute fellow partakers up to 450 volts, just because they were told to. Virtue ethics is not act based and instead agent centred. In a given ethical decision the question asked would be ‘what kind of person should I aim to become’. Aristotle believed that when we are young ‘that is the time at which the character is being formed’.

Get Access