ABSTRACT
The main candidates have been deontological theories, consequentialist theories and virtue ethics theories. On any understanding, virtue ethics emphasizes the importance of moral virtue, where this is taken to be a rich, multifaceted concept encompassing attributes of human beings such as dispositions, thoughts, attitudes, motives, intentions, emotions, desires and actions. Advocates of virtue ethics often maintain that moral theory should consider a person as a whole. However, virtue ethics is often understood as an alternative in a rather different sense, not as another theory of right action, but as an approach to normative ethics in which the main concern is not to explain morally right actions but to explain more broadly what it means to be—and to become—a morally good or virtuous person. Moreover, several recent interpreters have argued that at least some expressions of Buddhist ethical thought may be understood in terms of one of the standard Western theories of right and wrong action.
