The revival of a virtue approach to ethics has been accompanied by a renewed concern with the notion of community and, many assume, a close link between virtue and community. Yet most discussions of virtue proceed without ever mentioning community. The widespread assumption of a link between community and virtue may be due in part to the Aristotelian roots of virtue ethics, and to Alasdair Maclntyre's semi-Aristotelian After Virtue, probably the single most influential contemporary work in virtue ethics. Both Aristotle and Maclntyre emphasize the fundamentally social nature of virtue – the way that particular forms of social life are linked with particular virtues.

Another source of the assumption of a close link between community and virtue may be the moral theory or family of theories that proponents of both community and virtue reject. These theories emphasize the primacy of the rational, autonomous individual in moral agency and in the normative foundations of political structures. Communitarians depart from these theories both in placing value on communal entities – a value not reducible to the value of rational agency – and (sometimes) in according communal entities a more fundamental place in the formation or constitution of the moral self. Virtue theorists see the foundations of virtue as lying not, or not only, in rational agency but also in habit, emotion, sentiment, perception, and other psychic capacities.

I explore here some of the possible links between virtue and community, with two ends in mind.