virtue ethic

This is because a virtue ethic focuses on the person-as-agent developing over time, in a learning process often of trial and error.

Broadly speaking, Royce's is a virtue ethic in which our loyalty to increasingly less immediate ideals becomes the formative moral influence in our personal development.

His first book, Projects and Values, argues for a foundationalist virtue ethic, against the background of a structured approach to the cultural relativity of value-concepts and a conception of the human subject that is inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein.