After Aristotle: Virtue Ethics, and the Obligation of the Educated
By Michael Kelman Portney
I. Introduction
In the beginning, there is a question so old it predates the institutions that now pretend to answer it:
“What kind of person should I be?”
It’s the question that opens the study of ethics—not as a legal discipline, not as a compliance tool, not as a series of hypotheticals to be debated in airless classrooms—but as the foundation of what it means to live, to choose, to act, and to account for the consequences of one’s character.
This article is about that foundation, and what happens when it’s abandoned.
It is about what is required of someone who has studied philosophy and ethics—not what they claim in professional bios or campaign flyers, but what they know, deep in the structure of their intellect. What they learned when they were still idealistic enough to write essays about the good life. What they once admired in Aristotle, Kant, or Mill before they discovered the comfort of red tape, committees, and plausible deniability.
This is not a legal argument. This is a moral charge:
If you have studied ethics, you no longer get to pretend you haven’t.
There is a burden that comes with understanding virtue. And it’s not to quote it when convenient—it’s to live by it, especially when inconvenient. That is the obligation of the educated.
II. Why We Teach Virtue Ethics First
There’s a reason the ethics curriculum almost always begins with Aristotle. Before we get to Kantian imperatives or utilitarian calculus, we begin with virtue. Why?
Because the earliest, simplest, and most enduring ethical insight is not about rules or results—it’s about who you are.
Aristotle didn’t ask what actions you should take. He asked: what kind of person takes the right action in the first place? That question undergirds every other ethical system. Without character, law is just text. Without virtue, even good outcomes are accidents.
You begin with virtue because you begin with the self.
And once you’ve begun there—once you’ve been taught that courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom are habits to be cultivated—you can’t un-know that. You don’t leave that understanding in a classroom. If you do, you were never studying ethics. You were studying performance.
Virtue ethics doesn’t ask whether something is technically legal. It asks whether it was worthy. It doesn’t ask if your actions could be justified later. It asks if they were taken with intention, conscience, and care.
That’s why it’s taught first: because everything else is scaffolding. If you’ve studied it—and you abandon it—you haven’t forgotten it. You’ve betrayed it.
III. Studying Ethics Is a Moral Contract
To study ethics is to enter into a kind of vow. It is not a license. It is not a bullet point on a résumé. It is a contract with conscience.
And once you’ve signed that contract—once you’ve demonstrated understanding of the frameworks, the traditions, the principles—you are forever barred from claiming ignorance as your defense.
You can no longer say:
“I was just following procedure.”
“I didn’t think it was my job to act.”
“No one told me I had to do something.”
Those are the words of the ethically untrained. But if you studied philosophy—if you’ve ever passed a class on ethics or written an essay about justice—you don’t get to say those things. Not anymore.
Studying ethics means you know the frameworks:
Virtue ethics: Are you acting courageously? Justly? With integrity?
Deontology: Are you fulfilling your duty, regardless of outcome?
Utilitarianism: Are your choices minimizing harm and maximizing good?
Once you know those tools, they become part of your lens. You may not apply them perfectly, but you can’t claim they’re not there. You can’t pretend ethics is something that happens to other people.
To study philosophy is to choose a life of reflection and responsibility. It doesn’t make you morally superior. But it does make you morally accountable.
IV. The Lie of Ethical Neutrality
There is a widespread fantasy in modern professional life: that neutrality is a shield. That as long as you stay within your role, follow the handbook, and keep your voice low, you’re innocent of harm.
But ethics doesn’t recognize that kind of neutrality.
Neutrality in the face of injustice is cowardice.
Neutrality in the presence of corruption is complicity.
Neutrality after you’ve studied virtue is self-betrayal.
The lie is that people can segment their lives. That they can be ethical in theory but not in function. That they can learn about moral frameworks and then abandon them in the field, under the weight of political convenience, careerism, or institutional comfort.
But ethics—real ethics—is not reactive. It’s preparatory. It is what you carry with you so that when the moment comes, you’re not asking “what can I get away with?”—you’re asking “what must I do?”
To be ethically trained and remain neutral is not to stay clean. It is to refuse to get your hands dirty doing the work you were trained to do.
V. Betrayal by the Educated
There’s something uniquely galling about watching someone who has studied virtue act as though it was optional. As though Aristotle were a TED talk. As though they never knew better.
Worse than ignorance is selective application. Worse than not knowing is pretending you forgot.
Those who study ethics but abandon it become the most dangerous professionals in any institution—not because they are untrained, but because they are unaccountable. Because they are the ones who pass for ethical while behaving with indifference. Because they can quote virtue while practicing evasion.
It is one thing to fail. We all do. It is another to consciously discard what you’ve been taught and call that failure “procedure.”
VI. Virtue Is a Compass, Not a Mirror
People like to look back and ask, “Did I do the right thing?” That’s mirror ethics. It’s backwards-looking, retrospective, and too often, self-forgiving.
Virtue ethics demands something harder: compass ethics. You look forward. You anticipate harm. You avoid dishonor. You choose integrity before it’s obvious, before it’s popular, before someone forces you to.
Virtue is not a set of trophies. It is not what you point to after the fact to justify your actions. It is what you use to decide in advance how to act when no one is watching.
That’s why it’s hard. That’s why it’s first. And that’s why once you’ve studied it, you no longer have the moral right to claim you were “just doing your job.”
VII. There Is No Going Back
The moment you studied ethics, you gave up your ability to pretend you didn’t. That knowledge lives in you now, whether you use it or not. And if you abandon it—if you choose cowardice, self-interest, or silence—you don’t just fail a test. You forfeit a part of your identity.
You are not neutral.
You are accountable.
Not because someone expects you to be perfect, but because someone—you—once cared enough to learn how to be better. And the world needs that version of you far more than it needs your caution.
VIII. Conclusion
The obligation of the educated is not to be right. It’s to try to be good—with eyes open, with frameworks understood, with conscience activated.
If you’ve studied ethics, philosophy, law, or virtue, then you’ve already stepped into the arena. You’ve said:
“I want to understand what it means to live well.”
That is not a casual declaration.
It is a vow.
And those who abandon that vow—those who wield ethics as ornament, or leave it behind when it’s inconvenient—deserve to be reminded, publicly and forcefully, that education is not a loophole. It is a burden. And if you can’t carry it, you don’t get to wear it.
After Aristotle, there is no innocence.
There is only the obligation to try to be just.
Or the cowardice of pretending you never learned how.
