But a sixth component of virtue ethics is that it does not just operate at the personal level; in addition, the community occupies a central part. In ancient Greece, for example, where the city (the polis, from which we get our words metropolis and politics) was both a residential and political community, ‘the virtues find their place not just in the life of the individual, but in the life of the city and…the individual is indeed intelligible only as a [political animal]’.
