Moral philosophy can and ought to be a source of moral wisdom. Wisdom is a special kind of understanding, in particular, an ethical understanding of what it is to be a success as a human being, a healthy and fully formed specimen. Such understanding involves both a delicate grasp of the grammar of moral concepts and an appreciation of their import for a human life, including the philosopher’s. Virtue ethics is an important department of moral philosophy, especially for the philosophical goal of becoming wise. It consists in a careful investigation of the concepts of moral virtues (generosity, justice, the sense of duty, and so forth), both in their conceptual contours and in their importance for a human life.

The sense of duty is a virtue of caring, not directly about the good, or even about justice, but about doing one’s duty. Insofar as doing what one takes to be one’s duty is in fact to do what is good, the sense of duty functions as a backup for the more direct virtues of caring – generosity, compassion, and truthfulness, as well as justice. Being a virtue of caring, the sense of duty can be expressed in emotions: a feeling of satisfaction in having done one’s duties or feelings of guilt or shame at having neglected them. The sense of duty can vary, emotionally, according to how one conceives the authoritative source of duty, on a spectrum from reverence, through respect, to resentful acceptance. Example of the extremes beyond the spectrum are some Hebrew psalmists’ delight in the law of God and the contempt of the utter moral cynic.

‘Truth’ refers to reality – what is, was, will be, and should be – and its aspects, in the context of representations thereof. A true something is the real thing, and a true proposition, belief, hypothesis, exemplar, and so forth is a successful representation of truth in the first sense. The virtue of truthfulness is the judicious love of truth in both senses. From love of reality and correct representations of it, the truthful person tends to tell others the truth as she sees it, but is not fanatical about telling it, because virtues like justice, compassion, and gentleness, which themselves are a kind of truth, can enjoin the withholding or even distortion of truths. Truths can be horrible, and it can take courage and humility to admit them.

To be compassionate is to care about others specifically in opposition to their suffering or deficiency. While the distress of compassion is paradigmatic of the virtue, a wide range of emotion types – gratitude, anger, fear, joy, and so forth – can express it. Aristotle offers an analysis of the emotion of compassion as entailing propositions (1) that the other is suffering, (2) that the other doesn’t deserve the suffering, and (3) that oneself is vulnerable to the kind of suffering one sees in the other. In dialogue with Martha Nussbaum’s exposition and adaptation of Aristotle’s analysis of the emotion of compassion, this chapter compares Aristotelian compassion with the compassion that is commended in the New Testament. Differences between the two turn on differences in the concept of suffering, in the presence of a concept of forgiveness, and in the locus of commonality.

The virtues whose function is to regulate impulses, emotions, thoughts, and habits in the interest of larger purposes, including ethical ones, are courage, patience, perseverance, and self-control. They have a different grammar from the virtues of caring. Because they are not concerns, they are not defined by the motives or reasons for action or emotion that such concerns supply. Instead, they are differentiated by the kind of impulses that they manage. The situations they address are not outward, like the ones to which the virtues of caring respond, but are states of the self. Thus, self-control is the paradigm. They contribute to our integrity, our self-possession, and our freedom as authors of our character. They don’t in themselves have moral worth, are often used for non-moral purposes, and may even be used for evil. But in the context of good character they function in support of the virtues of caring.