Virtues and Rules

Until recently, when philosophers thought about the moral life, they largely occupied themselves with rules-asking how moral rules might be distinguished from nonmoral ones, seeking adequate formulations of them, asking how to justify them, proposing some rules (or principles) as foundational for morality (that is, for the remaining rules), asking whether these are best thought of as deriving from culture, a social contract, practical reason, human nature, divine command, and so forth. With the recent turn to a focus on the virtues, rules have lost something of their commanding position. Virtue is sometimes contrasted with rule ethics, suggesting uneasiness of fit between rules and virtues.' I argue in this paper that while virtues are compatible with rules-nay, entail rules-philosophical reflection on the virtues leads to a richer conception of moral rules than ethics has enjoyed in modern philosophy. Virtues do fit uneasily with rules as they have been conceived, but this is owing not to the unruliness of virtues, but to the unvirtuousness of our concept of a moral rule. I wish to present the notion of the grammar of a virtue as a needed enrichment of our concept of moral rules. I do not claim that the grammar of the virtues exhausts the moral rules. I shall not defend any