ABSTRACT
According to Aristotle, who is the inspiration for much modern virtue ethics, a virtue is a tendency or disposition, cultivated by habit, to have appropriate beliefs and feelings and to act accordingly. The fully virtuous person feels anger, pity and other feelings “at the right times, about the right things, towards the right people, for the right end, and in the right way”. Aristotle thought that the right time, target, and so on, for most virtues is at the mean between two extremes. Courage, for example, is the state of character in which one has appropriate fear: too much fear makes you a coward and too little fear makes you rash. Temperance is the mean between insensibility and intemperance. Finally, virtues are supposed to be deeply entrenched in the person who has them, not fickle or wavering. A person who has the virtues will tend to feel, think, and act correctly in different situations and at various times.
