Ask and you shall receive ...
RE: VIRTUE ETHICS
I read it and the essence is that it places less emphasis on which rules people should follow and instead focus on helping people develop good character traits, such as kindness and generosity.
But that does not answer the following questions :
1) Given that there is no God, WHY are we bound to be kind and generous and why are the above traits any “better” or “worse” than NOT being kind and NOT being generous ?
2) If people decide NOT to be kind and generous, what rule in the universe (given that we simply are the accidental results of a collision of atoms), tells us that these people are bad or evil ?
3) If someone decides NOT to practice virtue ethics, does that make him a bad person ? Who says so and by what authority ?
Ethics are for people who don’t have morals.
Another problem for virtue ethics, which is shared by both utilitarianism and deontology, is (iv) "the justification problem." Abstractly conceived, this is the problem of how we justify or ground our ethical beliefs, an issue that is hotly debated at the level of metaethics. In its particular versions, for deontology there is the question of how to justify its claims that certain moral rules are the correct ones, and for utilitarianism of how to justify its claim that the only thing that really matters morally is consequences for happiness or well-being. For virtue ethics, the problem concerns the question of which character traits are the virtues.
In the metaethical debate, there is widespread disagreement about the possibility of providing an external foundation for ethics — "external" in the sense of being external to ethical beliefs — and the same disagreement is found amongst deontologists and utilitarians. Some believe that ethics can be placed on a secure basis, resistant to any form of scepticism, such as what anyone rational desires, or would accept or agree on, regardless of their ethical outlook; others that it cannot.
Virtue ethicists have eschewed any attempt to ground virtue ethics in an external foundation while continuing to maintain that their claims can be validated.
Your own link mentions some of the metaethical problems with the accounting for or justification of virtue itself. On a naturalistic world view, without simply presupposing it, there doesn't seem to be any way to account for any such things as for virtue ethics to be about. Why should the chance/necessity of physical processes that constitute the universe produce any such things as virtue or vice? What sense does it make to praise or blame physical processes for anything? If the physical universe is all there is, how is it that there could be something that is not as it ought to be, or is as it should be?
Cordially,