ABSTRACT
This paper examines the ways in which Sartre’s philosophy of mind supports some of the foundational claims of virtue ethics. Virtue ethics understands the idea of character as being explanatorily and normatively prior to the concepts of rightness and of value. This sharply distinguishes it from other approaches to normative ethics such as deontology and consequentialism. My aim is to show how Sartre’s philosophy of mind is structured around a basic asymmetry between first and third personal ascriptions of mental predicates in a way that is very important to the phenomenological plausibility of virtue ethics. I will further argue that Sartre’s claim that there is a sense in which one cannot think of one’s own character as an ‘object’ is important to establishing the priority of virtue ethics over other normative theories.1
