In this paper I argue that Leibniz's ethics is a kind of virtue ethics where virtues of the agent are explanatorily primary. I first examine how Leibniz obtained his conception of justice as a kind of love in an early text, Elements of Natural Law. I show that in this text Leibniz's goal was to find a satisfactory definition of justice that could reconcile egoism with altruism, and that this was achieved through the Aristotelian virtue of friendship where friends treat each other as “other selves.” Following this decisive moment, Leibniz adopted an Aristotle‐inspired ethical framework where the virtuous agent is central for moral evaluations. I then show that, despite certain developments, Leibniz's ethics retained this essential feature throughout his career. In Leibniz's later writings, God constitutes the foundation of the moral realm, and the fundamental moral endeavor of human beings consists in the imitation of God.

中文翻译：

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莱布尼茨作为美德伦理学家

在本文中，我认为莱布尼茨的伦理学是一种美德伦理学，其中主体的美德在解释上是首要的。我首先研究莱布尼茨如何在早期文本中获得作为一种爱的正义观念，自然法的要素。我在本文中表明，莱布尼茨的目标是找到一个令人满意的正义定义，可以调和利己主义与利他主义，而这是通过亚里士多德的友谊美德实现的，即朋友们彼此视为“另一个自我”。在这一决定性时刻之后，莱布尼茨采用了受亚里士多德启发的道德框架，其中有德行的主体是道德评价的核心。然后我表明，尽管取得了某些发展，莱布尼茨的伦理学在他的整个职业生涯中保留了这一基本特征。在莱布尼茨后期的著作中，上帝构成了道德领域的基础，而人类根本的道德努力在于对上帝的模仿。