ABSTRACT
This chapter is written in the spirit of Abraham Ede’s several discussions of modern trends in ethics. At least since Ethical Judgment and Method in Ethical Theory, Edel has been an insistent wholist. Ethical theory isolated from history, science, and culture cannot, Edel contends, be a useful enterprise. Utilitarian and Kantian formulae may possibly best be understood as approaches to macro-ethical problems—to institution-building and criticism—rather than to micro-ethical, or personal, problems. To suggest, as Edel does, that philosophical ethics might do well to reinstate Virtue to full citizenship among the Big Three is not to suggest that it is to be given special hegemony. It is not to suggest an ethical theory to the effect that if we attend to virtue, institutional arrangements and the proper conception of the good will take care of themselves.
