Comparative virtue ethics

In recent years anthropologists have come to rely more and more on ideas that can be described as virtue ethical in their descriptions of value in the lives of the people they study. I will defend this development, but will also urge caution. Through a comparison of the work of an atheist American philosopher, Samuel Sheffler, and a Taiwanese Buddhist professor of life and death studies, Huei Kai, I argue that virtue ethics as developed in modern academic philosophy and social sciences carries ethnocentric assumptions that are likely to mislead us when applied to other traditions. Key among these assumptions is a certain view of the relative timing of character development, the capacity for autonomous agency, and death. In conclusion, I propose a provisional typology of relationships between virtue and time that aims to broaden our understanding of virtue ethics as such, and suggest that the ethnocentric nature of anthropological understandings of ethics can be addressed through further comparative work