The universality of virtue ethics—I—Buddhism

Buddha statue in Thai style, pxhere.com, CC license.

Virtue ethics is one of the three major approaches to ethics developed within Western philosophy, the other two being Kantian-style deontology and Bentham and Miller-style utilitarianism. I think the latter two are good examples of wrong turns in philosophical inquiry, as they are both decidedly less useful (in my opinion) than virtue ethics.

Both deontology and utilitarianism seek to establish a universal, agent-independent criterion for the mo...