Another even more premature judgement, don't take me seriously, honestly you might wanna skip this one too

I feel like virtue ethics, at least in my mind, has been damaged by 20th century thinkers' attempts to position it against other ethical approaches. Specifically,

it's often cast in a manner so as to fit into a narrative where ethics was good, until the foolish Christian Enlightenment Moralists brought in simplistic views of agency motivated by their trying to save religious ethics while replacing God with Rules (btw talking like this

automatically makes you cool and smart and historically aware). as a result some of the most obviously unproblematic features of agency (e.g. rationality requires acting from duty, practical reason is empirically undetermined) are portrayed as having a lot of baggage

which we can't see just because of our historical bias. and, because such theses are nearly trivial, the interpretations of virtue-based theories end up being implausible, missing the point, and making non-sequiter objections to later theories.

Now, maybe I'm totally wrong and virtue ethics really is just Like That. I haven't read enough to make a strong judgement about that. If so, so much the worse for virtue theories.

On the contrary, however, the more I read, the more it seems there is more similarity and

compatibility than one would expect from the above narrative, and the more virtue-based theories broadly start to look like a usefully distinctive way of investigating the nature of practical reason, still consistent with the self-conscious, free, deliberative,

and *articulable* nature of correct practical reasoning.

Though this, unfortunately, wouldn't give us a way of devising a Big Flaw in later approaches that lets us once and for all dodge the work of actually showing that our putative obligations have authority.