Virtue ethics – whether secular or Christian – raises some curiosities which are only just beginning to emerge. For example, there is much discussion today about the importance of ‘communities’ as carriers of moral virtues, but an odd vagueness about the actual communities involved. Amongst Christian ethicists there is a renewed emphasis upon churches as moral communities, but little empirical analysis of the moral effects of churchgoing. There is an enthusiasm about ‘character’ and ‘identity’, yet little corresponding interest in those sociological methods which have usually been concerned to measure and analyse community, character and identity. In short, too much is too vague and ill grounded in social reality.

Virtue ethics, the very discipline which has challenged moral philosophy to take history, traditions and local communities seriously – the discipline which has argued that there is more to morality than the individualistic, narrowly rational concern about moral decision-making as construed by so many post-Enlightenment moral philosophers – has been curiously bashful about putting forward actual moral communities that can be analysed and measured. If anything, Christian ethicists have recently been even more bashful and reluctant to admit that sociology has any constructive role to play in their discipline. It is rare to find a Christian ethicist prepared to examine data about the moral effects of church-going. Instead Christian communities have become far too idealised.

This book sets out to challenge and reverse this situation. It starts with a theoretical issue, namely that posed by virtue ethics.