A Theory of Virtue: Excellence in Being for the Good
Abstract
A Theory of Virtue: Excellence in Being for the Good Adams, Robert Merrihew, A Theory of Virtue: Excellence in Being for the Good , Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006, pp. xiii + 249, 25 (cloth). This is an excellent book. It is also for the good: virtue itself, after all, is good, and the book is an expression of its author's close and discriminatingly sympathetic appreciation of the nature and variety of virtue. On the account Adams presents, then, if his book were a person it would itself be virtuous: according to that account virtue is 'persisting excellence in being for the good'[14]. The 'theory of virtue' presented here is not the kind of 'virtue ethical' theory that treats virtue as foundational to the rest of ethics. For Adams, the foundations of ethics lie in the good, and virtue is an excellent responsiveness to that. In the background lies his further, metaethical view (defended in Finite and Infinite Goods ) that the good should be identified with The Good, and The Good should be identified with God. Even for those of us who resist the further Platonism and theism, it is hard not to be attracted to the overall