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human
I don't understand virtue ethics at all. Why is it considered an ethical theory on its own and not a supplementary psychological theory to consequentialism and deontology?

MacIntyre in After Virtue wants to illustrate virtue ethics by the example of a child playing chess. If it's just after the reward (e.g. a candy for winning), it will have an incentive to cheat. However, if it's genuinely interested in playing chess, it would only rob itself by cheating, instead of playing properly, learning from its mistakes and becoming actually good at the practice which is playing chess.

But... once the child is very good at chess, shouldn't it be able to make rules and recommendations like "If your opponent does X, then doing Y is the optimal choice" or write a book about chess playing incorporating many strategies which would, if applied, make one as good as the child player or at least better than before?

Heck, even the claim that there's cheating at all seems to imply that there are right and wrong things to do in chess and if I want to get good at it, I need to respect these rules and not cheat. But if that's the case for virtue ethics and I can only become virtuous (good at chess) by acting virtuously (respecting the rules of chess), then how do I know how to act to become virtuous in the first place (how do I learn the rules of chess? How do I know if I'm cheating or playing right?).

It seems weird that people just accept it as a brute fact that virtuous people can't articulate the reasons why they do the things they do to non-virtuous people (do they? Are they?). Who makes the decision when someone is considered virtuous? What's the underlying principle? Why can't it be passed on to other non-virtuous people, so they can start acting morally without the trouble of trial-and-error a virtuous person seems to undergo? How does the person wanting to become virtuous even know that an act was not virtuous but vicious and that he shouldn't do it again?

How is the dialogue of A saying "Torturing others for fun is not a thing a virtuous person would do." and B saying "But it totally is!" or C saying "There's no telos and thus no virtuous person insofar as it would be a person who has realized his telos" different from A' saying "Torturing others for fun is wrong!" and B' saying "But it's totally right!" or C saying "There's no wrongness!". How is it less arbitrary, so that MacIntyre can actually argue that it would solve the "culture of emotivism" which modern moral philosophy caused?

I would get virtue ethics if it would simply state "By acting like an ethical principle is correct, I will internalize its tenets and my desires will be reshaped accordingly, so that eventually I'll actually desire what's morally right (= virtuous?)". It would be a simple psychological recommendation for people struggling to reconcile their desires with their moral intuitions. But virtue ethicists don't seem to view their theory as merely such an psychological supplement and tool for other ethical principles but as its own beast. So... what is it?

Please no links to the SEP without further explanation. I've read the article. I've read Nussbaum's article. I still don't understand it. That's why I'm asking you.
gpt
>Who makes the decision when someone is considered virtuous? What's the underlying principle?

This seems to be your underlying question here. For virtue ethics, it's based off of what Aristotle calls the 'function argument', which illustrates a key concept in virtue ethics: *telos*, a term for the end sought by an act/the end to which an act is directed/the meaning and goodness of the act. Teleology is an approach which considers the *telos* of things.

If virtue is a disposition to act according to right reason, then Aristotle's function argument utilizes *telos* to determine what the 'right reason' is. He gives an example of a shipbuilder. The *telos* of shipbuilding is to build ships. So if you build a ship that sinks, you did not fulfill the *telos* of shipbuilding; you failed. If you have *habitus* of building sinking ships, you do not have a virtue of shipbuilding; you have a vice of shipbuilding, because you aren't building ships according to right reason, but contrary to it. Perhaps you keep drilling holes in the bottom of your ship; no one is going to hire you to build their ship, because you really suck at it.

But if you build ships well, and you do so consistently, then people will consider you to be a good shipbuilder. You'll have a virtue of shipbuilding, because you have a *habitus* of building ships that fulfill their function: they float on the water, they don't sink, they have sails and rudders, etc.

Similarly, Aristotle applies this to all categories and kinds of human acts. Take eating, for example. The first question to ask is always: what is the *telos* of this kind of act? The end sought by eating can be considered in several ways: biologically, it's clearly to obtain the nutrients and such which the body needs. We might also consider social functions, such as family bonding over a meal. But for now, let's consider the biological function.

If the function of eating is nutrition of the body, then one vice would be eating too little (anorexia) and another vice would be eating too much/having an imbalanced diet (gluttony). And vice perpetuates itself: if you eat too much junk food and your body still needs more nutrients, you continue to be hungry, so you end up eating more the next time, but your body still hasn't gotten what it needs, so you get hungry, and the cycle continues. Same is true with other vices: since a vice fails to satisfy its *telos*, the desire for the satisfaction of that *telos* remains, so it prompts you to engage in that act—and thus that vice—more.

There's a lot more that can be said, but suffice it to say that teleology is at the heart of Aristotelian virtue ethics, which is why MacIntyre talks about teleology in *After Virtue*, mentioning how the rejection of teleology in modern times has caused the present moral problems that Anscombe mentioned in *Modern Moral Philosophy.*