Essay Topic for Virtue Ethics – Feedbacks needed!

Probably, the most celebrated work among all the children’s stories Arnold Lobel wrote is The Letter at the end of Frog and Toad Are Friends. Its focus is on friendship, but with the use of friendship as the central figure involves the moral stories about discernment of emotions and experiences of the others, ultimately leading the readers to the cultivation of empathetic feelings. Aristotle discusses that virtues are cultivated through habituation, a conscious repeated performance of noble deeds. Since it is more difficult to habituate oneself with a certain action at a later stage in one’s life, the development of a proper emotional response with regards to particular situations should be made at the earlier stage in life. If this is the case, and I believe it is, then the seeds of virtue theories should be found in children’s stories more often than in theories-driven books for adults.

Frog and Toad Are Friends series is intended for the first graders to the third graders, and my first encounter with Frog and Toad was in my second grade. These books are what taught me the importance of emotions and consideration for others at the very early stage in my childhood, and ever since I met them the foundations for my ethical views have always been able to be traced back to these collections of books. My own experience attests that the books we read when we are young have so much influence in the formation of ethical views as well as cultivation of emotions and values in others. In this paper, I wish to explore how much of moral concepts held in virtue ethics are actually depicted in some of the great books in children’s literature, and discuss in detail how these stories can be viewed as promoting virtue theories rather than other ethical theories. In doing so, I will examine how the views from the articles we have read in the class are expressed in forms accessible to children. I will then conclude that Frog and Toad series as a whole comprises a larger project of prompting virtue theories in children’s minds.