Bonus Discussion: Virtue Ethics and Explanatory Power Or Force

a short extra discussion in the Ancient Virtue Ethics online course

One interesting issue was raised by an interlocutor that I didn’t discuss in our first online session in the Ancient Virtues Ethics: Three Main Traditions course. I’ve been mulling it over, and thought that I would address it in a separate, shorter video, which I recorded earlier today.

In what I think was a comment on one of my YouTube videos, the issue that was wondered about was the “explanatory force” of virtue ethics. I take it that the person was referring to what usually gets called the “explanatory power” of some type of theory or account. That’s an unusual but not entirely unexpected concern for a person to have front and center, when thinking about participating in a course exploring ancient virtue ethics perspectives in depth, but I thought it might be of interest to say a bit about it.

There were three main things I decided to focus upon.

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