What Are the Virtues?

There is at least one major problem which the new Aristotelians have to solve. What will the virtues be? Do virtues exist that we can derive from the “wisdom of the ages” and consequently encourage?

Other postmodernist philosophers would be very doubtful of such a “search”. Different cultures would undoubtedly insist on different “virtues” that they felt were appropriate for their members.

A fundamentalist muslim might suggest that children should be habituated into the notion that adulteresses should be stoned to death, for example. The kinds of virtues necessary to a frontier society, E.G. Ruthless courage, would be inappropriate to a more civilized society. And a marxist critic might say that the “Wisdom of the ages” is much more ideologically contaminated than macintyre seems to think.