Building Public Civility Through Virtue Ethics: Responding to the Challenges of Irrational Contemporary Lifestyles

Abstract

Contemporary lifestyles increasingly unfold through consumer markets, digital platforms, social comparison, and forms of self-presentation that can encourage decisions oriented toward visibility, status, and immediate gratification. Yet describing contemporary society as simply irrational would overstate the evidence and obscure the conditions under which reflective judgment is weakened. This study examines how technologically mediated consumer pressures may constrain reflective agency and explores how virtue ethics can contribute to public civility. It employs a qualitative conceptual literature review and thematic synthesis, prioritizing peer-reviewed international journal literature published from 2021 to 2026 while retaining the philosophical ideas required to interpret Adler, Marcuse, Baudrillard, Anscombe, MacIntyre, and Aristotelian virtue ethics. The synthesis identifies four related themes: externally cued desire and materialistic social comparison; technological and symbolic mediation of consumption; practical wisdom as a basis for reflective self-governance; and character formation as a bridge from personal virtue to civic conduct. The analysis suggests that the central problem is not technology or consumption in themselves, but patterns in which external validation displaces deliberation about reasons, ends, and common goods. Virtue ethics offers a conceptual corrective by emphasizing practical wisdom, habituated judgment, and socially situated character. Public civility is consequently interpreted as the relational expression of these dispositions in shared life, with value education and critical digital literacy identified as plausible educational pathways. Because the study is conceptual and literature-based, the proposed relationships require empirical examination in future research.