ABSTRACT

This chapter brings virtue ethics into conversation with political philosophy by developing a virtue ethical approach to the problem of political authority. The view consists of three claims. First, political authority is a necessary precondition for virtuous agency. Second, political obligations are determined by one’s membership in a political community. Third, the legitimacy of a political state depends on the opportunities available to virtuous persons for maintaining and reforming their established constitutional order. The chapter begins with an account of eudaimonist virtue ethics and its socially embedded view of virtue as consisting in the exercise of practical wisdom within one’s existing roles and relationships. The chapter also traces the eudaimonist account of political authority to its historical roots in Plato’s Crito.