Abstract

One of the central notions in accounts of virtue theories is that of “character”. The virtues are understood as character traits and whether one sees their role as central in accounting for morality or as secondary to some other concept, the notion of character is bound to play an important role in one’s theory of virtue. Since the notion of “character” has a significant role to play in virtue theories an immediate question of importance is how we might develop good characters ourselves, how we might avoid negative influences and how we should go about encouraging good characters in others. However, the questions relating to character education are not merely of theoretical significance to those philosophical theories that see a role for character and the virtues in their account of morality.