Professionals, it is said, have no use for simple lists of virtues and vices. The complexities and constraints of professional roles create peculiar moral demands on the individuals who occupy them. Traits that are vices in ordinary life are praised as virtues in the context of professional roles. Should this disturb us, or is it naive to presume that things should be otherwise?

It is natural to turn for guidance on such matters to recent work in virtue ethics. Unfortunately, however, much of this writing suffers from a lack of detail about how the approach is to be applied to practical issues. This book is an attempt to address that problem. In what follows we develop a clear and rigorous account of virtue ethics, which explains how it differs from contemporary versions of rival ethical theories. We show why virtue ethics is to be preferred to those views, and explain how it offers a natural and promising approach to the ethics of professional roles. In doing so, we bring out how a properly developed virtue ethics can offer a promising way to resolve a central issue in professional ethics, in its ability to account for how professional roles can legitimately have their own action-guiding force, without compromising the broader values to which those roles are answerable.