Virtue ethics is the idea that rather than trying to understand virtue or morality as some sort of static intellectual rule-base, and studying it through examination of abstract moral dilemmas, we should strive to become virtuous, improving our character so that it becomes our inclination to act as a virtuous person would act. We find this approach congruent with our emphasis on personal wisdom and action over academic discourse and our understanding of virtue as arising from our innate non-verbal capacities for moral judgment. See Virtue ethics.

We feel that the idea of cultivating personal virtue is a worthy form of self-development, and that it is much more consistent with reality than most of the ethical theories developed by academic philosophy. Two difficult realities of workaday morality vs. philosophic ethics are that psychologically our moral sense is intuitive (see The Righteous Mind) and that our moral character is constituted of countless small acts, few of which rise to the level of the moral dilemmas studied in philosophical ethics. By concentrating on what we can talk about, ethics risks confusing moral argumentation with actual moral behavior. See Evolutionary Ethics.