Chapman University Digital Commons

Searching for Virtue in the City: Bell and Her Sisters

The burden of our claim here is that virtue in the city is to be found not so much in the abstractions and theorizing of higher philosophy but in “vulgar ethics,” Lewis C. Mainzer’s brilliant description of moral education in the classroom and street-level moral practices in the city’s departments and agencies (1991). The hope of virtue in the city is to be found not just in the individual propensity to be virtuous but more so in the development of political and organizational rules and procedures, in virtuous leadership, and in the development of virtuous public cultures.