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Criticisms

Other proponents of virtue theory, notably Alasdair MacIntyre, respond to this objection by arguing that any account of the virtues must indeed be generated out of the community in which those virtues are to be practiced: the very word ethics implies ethos. That is to say that the virtues are, and necessarily must be, grounded in a particular time and place. What counts as a virtue in 4th-century BCE Athens would be a ludicrous guide to proper behaviour in 21st-century CE Toronto and vice versa. To take this view does not necessarily commit one to the argument that accounts of the virtues must therefore be static: moral activity—that is, attempts to contemplate and practice the virtues—can provide the cultural resources that allow people to change, albeit slowly, the ethos of their own societies.