This recent consequentialist vindication of virtue can involve a considerable departure from the paradigmatic picture of virtues and vices as traits of character, however. An Empirical Challenge to Traits of Character Jeremy Bentham, for example, gave a rather rude treatment of virtue in his Deontology, as recently described by Julia Annas (2002). While the attention to virtue among Kantians and neo-Kantians is not too surprising, since much of Kant's later work was devoted to working out the important role that virtue and character play in morality (the weighty concluding section of the 1797 Metaphysics of Morals is rightly titled 'The Doctrine of Virtue'), the consequentialist turn to virtue is, perhaps, more surprising. Thus, two consequentialists (Driver 2001, Hurka 2001) have produced full-length treatments of the virtues, and there has been a growing appreciation of the key role of virtue in Immanuel Kant's ethics (Herman 1993, O'Neill 1996, Wood 1999). Assuming that human agents possess settled dispositions or character traits, some of which are especially deemed worthy of praise while others deserve blame or reproach, moral philosophers have long treated the first sort under the category 'virtue' and their opposites under the general term 'vice.' The fin-de-siecle revival of the virtue tradition in normative ethics as a third force, alongside Kantianism and consequentialism, has resulted in focused attention by theorists of all persuasions on the nature and proper role of virtues and vices in any comprehensive treatment of morality.

Virtue and vice