Virtue ethics

Virtue ethics is an idea in philosophy. It is part of moral philosophy, which is ideas about right and wrong. Instead of telling people which things are good to do, virtue ethics tells people to become good on the inside. Then they will do good things because they are good people.
Virtue ethics talks about virtues, or good things to be. For example, courage, kindness, wisdom, and honesty are virtues. The virtue on the inside means the person does good things on the outside. For example, an honest person tells the truth and does not lie.
Virtue ethics also talks about "practical wisdom," or being wise in real life. A person needs practical wisdom to use their virtues in the real world. For example, people with the virtue honesty does not want to lie, and people with the virtue kindness don't want to hurt people's feelings. Sometimes telling the truth hurts people's feelings. An honest and kind person must use practical wisdom to tell when to tell the truth and when not to.
Virtue ethics says that people must practice to become virtuous. It says people can learn to be brave or wise by making good habits.
Virtue ethics is different from consequentialism and deontology. Consequentialism says an action is good if it causes good things to happen or stops bad things from happening. Deontology says an action is good if it follows the right rules.
History.
In Western Civilization, Plato and Aristotle started virtue ethics. In Eastern Civilization, Confucius and Mencius did.
In the West, virtue ethics was the main form of ethics for more than one thousand years. In the Enlightenment, which started in the 1700s, people began to use other types of ethics more. Then virtue ethics came back in the 1950s. Anscombe wrote "Modern Moral Philosophy" in 1958.
Criticism.
Philosophers in other kinds of philosophy say virtue ethics has these problems:
In popular culture.
Virtue ethics is on the television show "The Good Place".