Is Kindness a Virtue?

This article swims against the stream of academic discourse by answer the title question in the negative. This contrarian answer is not meant to undermine the view that kindness is a good thing; neither is it, however, an example of a mere philosophical predilection for word play. I argue that understanding kindness as a virtue obscures rather than enlightens, for the reason that it glosses over various distinctions helping us make sense of moral language and achieving “virtue literacy”. I survey some of the relevant psychological literature before moving on to philosophical sources. I subsequently delineate the alternative ways in which coherent virtue ethicists can say everything that they want to say about kindness by using much better entrenched and less bland terms. I offer a view of kindness as a cluster concept in the same sense as the Wittgensteinian concept of a game. Finally, I elicit some implications of this view for practical efforts at character education.