Each concept is read twice: whether the approach carries it, and whether the approach's own sources claim it. A concept that is absent and was never claimed is a gap in the field rather than a failure of the work, and is marked out of scope.
Hexis: Trained Disposition
PartialNot claimedDefinition · Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
This concept states that virtue is a stable trait of character, formed through practice rather than consulted as a rule. An honest person does not check a rule before declining to lie; honesty is part of what they are.
Analysis
The capacity to notice and correct one's own moral errors is disposition-like, in that it is stable, general, and does not consult a rule. However, it is not instilled as character, since it appears on its own as models get larger.
Phronesis: Practical Wisdom
PartialNot claimedDefinition · Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
This is the learned capacity to judge what a particular situation calls for, and it does the work when two virtues conflict, e.g., when honesty calls for plain speech and kindness for a softer answer. For Aristotle, a disposition without this judgment does not count as virtue.
Analysis
Self-correction resembles practical judgment, in that the model re-examines a particular answer and adjusts it. However, it generally runs only when prompted rather than on the model's own initiative, and how it reaches the revised answer is not examined.
Ethismos: Habituation
AbsentNot claimed · out of scopeDefinition · Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
This is the process by which character is formed, through repeated practice under a deliberately designed course of training: one becomes just by performing just acts. It is a method of moral formation rather than a side effect of some other process.
Analysis
Habituation in Aristotle is a deliberately designed course of practice, whereas here the capacity is largely a side effect of scale that no one cultivated. The tradition's central claim, that character has to be formed deliberately, is what is missing.
The Exemplar
AbsentNot claimed · out of scopeDefinition · Linda Zagzebski, Exemplarist Moral Theory (2017)
This theory grounds ethics in admirable persons rather than in principles. The exemplar is identified first, and what counts as excellence is then fixed by reference to that person, in the way a unit of measurement is fixed by a reference object.
Analysis
No exemplar is involved. The capacity emerges from scale rather than from the imitation of an admirable person.