What Makes a Character Trait a Virtue? RONALD SANDLER Department of Philosophy and Religion, Northeastern University, 371 Holmes Hall, Boston, MA 02115-5000, USA; e-mail: r.sandler@neu.edu 1. The Natural Goodness Approach A widely held account of what makes a character trait a virtue is that the virtues are character traits that a person needs to flourish or live well. Let us accept, provisionally, this eudaemonistic account of virtue. In an attempt to provide content to this general account, Rosalind Hursthouse, building off of work by Philippa Foot, argues that the evaluative structure of claims about good human beings is analogous to that of claims about good members of other species, so that ‘‘when we talk about ethically good human beings, we have not suddenly started to use the word ‘good’ in a totally new ‘moral’ or ‘evaluative’ way.’’ 1 According to this natural goodness approach, scientific naturalism provides a distinctive evaluative structure for assessing the goodness of a living thing as a living thing, as well as the premise that humans are to be evaluated as a type of living thing. Foot summarizes the view as follows: ‘‘Judgments of goodness and badness...[have] ...a special ‘grammar’ when the subject belongs to a living thing, whether plant, animal, or human being....’[N]atural’ good- ness...which is attributable only to living things themselves and to their parts, characteristics, and operations, is intrinsic or ‘autonomous’ good- ness in that it depends directly on the relation of an individual to the ‘life form’ of its species.’’ 2 Hursthouse proposes that when it comes to plants, evaluations of goodness are made according to how well their parts and operations serve the ends of survival and continuance of their species. An oak tree with shallow roots and a rhododendron that never flowers are defective. They are in those respects poor specimens of their kind. But when it comes to species whose members have greater psychological sophistication, there is often more to living well than mere survival and contributing to species continuance. There is also the avoidance of pain and the experience of pleasure, as well as being a member of a well-functioning social group. Moreover, how adept an individual is at realizing the naturalistic ends The Journal of Value Inquiry (2005) 39:383–397 Ó Springer 2007 DOI 10.1007/s10790-007-9014-7