Abstract

I argue that the idea of virtue has become central after the Fifties in both Anglo-Saxon and German moral philosophy and that this revival has come together with recognition of the legitimacy of discussion of issues in normative ethics, something that philosophers both on the Continent and in the Anglo-Saxon world used to overlook in the first half of the twentieth-century. I point at examples such as Stuart Hampshire and Elizabeth Anscombe as proof of the centrality of virtue ethics in the first phase of the normative turn. I also argue that, far from being a radical alternative to ‘modern moral philosophy’ as its proponents believe, virtue ethics is precisely moral argument of the kind both Kantian ethics at its best and less dogmatic versions of utilitarianism have brought to the fore of philosophical discussion.