We live with the remnants of a moral universe that has passed away; we think we have a morality that works, but are deluded. These are the key ideas of one of the seminal books of philosophy of the late twentieth century, After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre. Its publication, in 1981, gave impetus to a revival of interest that continues to this day in a much older system of morality that goes back to the ancient Greeks, a movement known as “virtue ethics”. Though MacIntyre’s tone was utterly pessimistic, there is at least a chance that virtue ethics could prove the essential idea whose time has come, our best chance of bringing about the moral revival that our civilisation urgently requires. In similarly desperate times, Aristotle asked himself what were the qualities ne