Philippa Foot, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The virtues are character traits whose necessary connection to human good gives them their moral weight. Utilitarianism abstracts to outcomes and treats the act as merely the means to a state of affairs; Kantian deontology abstracts to universal rules and treats the agent as merely the rational legislator; both miss what is concrete in moral life.
The cardinal virtues (wisdom, justice, courage, temperance), with Aquinas as the great medieval systematizer, are concrete dispositions of character whose absence is not merely an absence of good consequences but a deformation of the human form.12 Virtue ethics is not a third theory alongside utilitarianism and deontology; it is the older, fuller, and more concrete account of moral life that the modern theories were a partial reduction of.
The theological virtues (faith, hope, charity) are Aquinas's, not mine — I am a card-carrying atheist — but the cardinal four can be defended without theology, on the natural ground of the human form of life.3
For us there are four cardinal moral virtues: courage, temperance, wisdom and justice. But Aristotle and Aquinas call only three of these virtues moral virtues; practical wisdom (Aristotle's phronésis and Aquinas's prudentia) they class with the intellectual virtues, though they point out the close connexions between practical wisdom and what they call moral virtues; and sometimes they even use areté and virtus very…Virtues and Vices, pp. 22–23
So he sets out to shape a new concept of virtue and one sees how far von Wright is prepared to go in throwing over old doctrines when one realizes that he is happy with a denition which excludes two of the four cardinal virtues of ancient and medieval morality. Why is von Wright so dissatised with the traditional theory of the virtues?Moral Dilemmas and Other Topics, p. 65
W. von Wright and Peter Geach. Von Wright devoted a not at all perfunctory chapter to the virtues in his book The Varieties of Goodness published in 1963, and Peter Geach's book called The Virtues? appeared in 1977. Meanwhile a number of interesting articles on the topic have come out in the journals. In spite of this recent work, it is best when considering the virtues and vices to go back to Aristotle and Aquinas.Virtues and Vices, pp. 21–22
The trinity of Anscombe, Foot, and MacIntyre inaugurates the contemporary virtue ethics revival. Hursthouse's On Virtue Ethics extends and defends the position; McDowell develops a parallel Aristotelian moral realism. The standard consequentialist objection (Singer, the Hare-Smart utilitarian tradition) is that virtue ethics fails to give action-guidance in problem cases. The standard Kantian objection (Korsgaard, O'Neill) is that virtue ethics cannot ground its claims about the human good in pure practical reason. The virtue ethicists reply: the action-guidance demand assumes an algorithmic standard that no moral theory actually satisfies, and the Kantian demand for pure practical reason imports the abstraction the virtue tradition was correcting.