Abstract

Philosophers and psychologists have recently been focusing on the important question of how positive character traits are developed. Within philosophy, these positive character traits are referred to as virtues. In this chapter, I examine one intuitively appealing proposal concerning virtue development - the idea that the path to moral virtue can begin with the experience of admiration for a moral exemplar. My aim is to provide a model of how this process might work by identifying the different stages it would involve. I then highlight three ways in which admiration might nevertheless fail to result in the development of moral virtue. It is hoped that providing this model, and identifying the potential problems, will be helpful for those interested in virtue education.