Virtue Ethics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry)

This is the Virtue Ethics entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, written by Rosalind Hursthouse, a leading virtue ethicist, and later revised with Glen Pettigrove, published and maintained by the Metaphysics Research Lab at Stanford University. Its authority comes from the Encyclopedia's editorial model: named specialist authors writing signed entries that are peer reviewed on publication and then kept current through dated substantive revisions, a stronger process than an open wiki even though both are freely available online. First published in 2003 and revised as recently as May 2026, it tracks an active philosophical debate rather than freezing it at one moment. Its limit is that it summarizes the major positions and their critics rather than arguing a single original thesis, so a claim about one philosopher's specific argument is best checked against that philosopher's own text.