Virtue ethics (also aretaic ethics, from Greek ἀρετή [aretḗ]) is a philosophical approach that treats virtue and character as the primary subjects of ethics, in contrast to other ethical systems that put consequences of voluntary acts, principles or rules of conduct, or obedience to divine authority in the primary role.

Virtue ethics is usually contrasted with two other major approaches in ethics, consequentialism and deontology, which make the goodness of outcomes of an action (consequentialism) and the concept of moral duty (deontology) central. While virtue ethics does not necessarily deny the importance to ethics of goodness of states of affairs or of moral duties, it emphasizes virtue and sometimes other concepts, like eudaimonia, to an extent that other ethics theories do not.^{[citation needed]}

In virtue ethics, a virtue is a characteristic disposition to think, feel, and act well in some domain of life. In contrast, a vice is a characteristic disposition to think, feel, and act poorly in some domain of life. Virtues are not everyday habits; they are character traits, in the sense that they are central to someone’s personality and what they are like as a person.

In early versions and some modern versions of virtue ethics, a virtue is defined as a character trait that promotes or exhibits human "flourishing and well being" in the person who exhibits it. Some modern versions of virtue ethics do not define virtues in terms of well being or flourishing, and some go so far as to define virtues as traits that tend to promote some other good that is defined independently of the virtues, thereby subsuming virtue ethics under (or somehow merging it with) consequentialist ethics.

To Aristotle, a virtue was not a skill that made you better able to achieve eudaimonia but was itself an expression of eudaimonia

In ancient Greek and modern eudaimonic virtue ethics, virtues and vices are complex dispositions that involve both affective and intellectual components. That is, they are dispositions that involve both being able to reason well about the right thing to do (see below on phronesis), and also to engage emotions and feelings correctly.

For example, a generous person can reason well about when and how to help people, and such a person also helps people with pleasure and without conflict. In this, virtuous people are contrasted not only with vicious people (who reason poorly about what to do and are emotionally attached to the wrong things) and with the incontinent (who are tempted by their feelings into doing the wrong thing even though they know what is right), but also with the merely continent (whose emotions tempt them toward doing the wrong thing but whose strength of will lets them do what they know is right).

According to Rosalind Hursthouse, in Aristotelian virtue ethics, the emotions have moral significance because "virtues (and vices) are all dispositions not only to act, but to feel emotions, as reactions as well as impulses to action... [and] In the person with the virtues, these emotions will be felt on the right occasions, toward the right people or objects, for the right reasons, where 'right' means 'correct'..."