Virtue Ethical Alternative to Realist and Moralist Theorising in Political Thought

This article challenges the assumption of both political moralists and realists that political disagreement arises primarily from competing moral solutions to shared problems. Instead, it argues that such disagreement often stems from fundamentally divergent conceptions of the problem itself. Politics, therefore, should be reimagined not as the pursuit of stability amid value pluralism, but as a continuous and constructive engagement with failure. By misconstruing the nature of political conflict, both moralist and realist approaches tend to adopt top-down models of theorising that overlook how political actors perceive and experience injustice. In contrast, virtue ethics offers an alternative framework that eschews the pursuit of fully determinate solutions. Rather than prescribing fixed responses, it cultivates moral dispositions attuned to the complexity and specificity of political life. Virtue, then, is not a toolkit for resolution but a means of engaging meaningfully with indeterminate moral and political challenges. The article further proposes empathy as the cardinal political virtue. While empathy is inherently limited and prone to bias, its indeterminacy constitutes its strength. It reorients politics away from ideal or merely feasible outcomes and towards sustained engagement with ambiguity and contestation. Grounded in lived experience, empathy enables a responsiveness to injustice without presuming its complete resolution.