Przegląd Tomistyczny, t. XXII (2016), s. 411–429 ISSN 0860-0015 Piotr Lichacz Instytut Filozofii i Socjologii Polska Akademia Nauk VIRTUE ETHICS IN SEARCH OF A DECENT NATURALISM 1 New possibilities of studying the activity of the human brain and new technolo- gies of human enhancement have intensified those voices calling for a greater role for natural science in the field of ethics. Tis postulate often implies em- bracing a version of naturalism. Te recent revival of virtue ethics seems to strengthen this trend and make it more promising. Joining contemporary virtue ethics to naturalism, however, is highly problematic. In this paper, I reflect on several conditions for a happy pairing of virtue ethics with naturalism. In the first part, I refer to Jonathan Haidt’s proposal as an example of a couple that is both promising and problematic and focus only on one element that could weaken virtue ethics in an undesirable way. In the second part, I indicate how this element might be modified. Tis modification could be beneficial also to another general problem with contemporary naturalistic ethics, namely, its rela- tion to religion. Scientifically-oriented authors love to denounce prejudices and questionable presuppositions in what some conservative ethicists have written. Tese presuppositions are sometimes identified as religious. A scientific orienta- tion, however, does not necessarily protect anybody from other prejudices and questionable presuppositions — including religious ones. I suggest that reading some older religious texts might help us to detect such influences. . Virtue ethics and naturalism (or: whose virtue ethics? which naturalism?) It might be argued that thinkers working within consequentialist and deonto- logical normative moral theories tend excessively to limit the scope of morality, 1 Work on this paper was financed by the Polish National Science Centre OPUS Grant, under decision DEC-2012/05/B/HS1/03410.