ABSTRACT
True understanding of the virtues requires to understand the good life to which they contribute. The good life is, to many in modern society, far more plural than Aristotle, the Stoics or even arguably MacIntyre believed it to be. Scientific virtue is, in other words, specific to science—and the practice of science is not representative of everyday life. The homogeneous community requirement, though, seems to point to a drift between scientific virtue and civic virtue. The task of articulating an account of scientific virtue requires that articulate the nature of the scientific endeavour. Humility, for instance, has an ethical meaning that can see in both scientific and civic life. The function of the scientist is, on purely logical grounds, narrower than the question of the function of the human.
