I find the consilience between the revival of virtue ethics in moral philosophy and positive and moral psychology (as Haidt depicts it here) interesting. They converge on the belief that moral philosophy as it has developed for the last two hundred years is blinkered and has shuttered itself off into solving dilemmas and quandries, turning ethics into an exercise in abstract reasoning. Whereas Aristotle, and indeed basically any religious tradition ever, saw morality (the “Tao,” as C.S. Lewis might put it) as encompassing one’s entire life; that moral instruction is propagated mostly through exemplars and guidelines, not universal moral laws; and that moral development is not just a matter of reasoning from principles but also the cultivation of good habits.
The analogy of the scientific revolution, where simple universal laws does seem to explain natural phenomena, does not hold for morality. To think otherwise---as Kant did with the categorical imperative, or as Bentham did with the utility principle---is to cut off philosophy from ancient tradition and shutters moral philosophy into an abstract discipline that says nothing about how to live one’s life.