"The case against Character" Response

This week I read Anthony Appiah's "The case against Character". This reading explains Appiah's opinion on ethics and what makes a persons character supposedly "good" or not. He first explains his idea of virtue ethics. Virtue ethics are committed by virtuous people, and will help lead someone into living a good life. Appiah says that people should be searching for virtues that they have, and virtues that they could have to further improve their life, a term also known as eudaimonia. He includes a list of 3 claims the philosopher Hursthouse stated. He says "The right thing to do is what a virtuous agent would do in the circumstances", "A virtuous person is one who has and exercises the virtues.", and "A virtue is a character trait that a person needs in order to have edaimonia." The second type of ethics talked about is situationalist ethics. Situationalist ethics explores the idea that people help others when they are feeling happy themselves, and want to spread the joy to other people. Situationalist ethics comes from the questioning of whether a truly virtuous person even exists. Overall I found this text to be very confusing and hard to read. Even though I tried my hardest to understand it, I feel like I still misunderstood and misinterpreted some aspects of the reading. I look forward to discussing this in class so I can try and understand it better.