Virtue and Nature

The relation between virtue and nature, including human nature, depends on the different meanings and uses of the concept of “nature” as well as its change in the history of thought. Under the influence of modern sciences, nature as an object of “value-free” causal explanations increasingly loses its normative significance for ethics and virtues. In contemporary philosophy, there are basically three principal conceptions of their relation: ethical naturalism based on natural science, anti-natural ethics of reason, and virtue-ethics based on evaluative concepts of nature. Only in some versions of the third option have virtues more than just an instrumental value. As such, they provide criteria for the direction of technological transformation of human and non-human nature.