Analyzing Courtesy in Respect to Ideas of Ethics Philosophers in the Contemporary West

One of the important virtues in the field of ethics is “courtesy” and ethics philosophers have widely discussed the nature of courtesy and its components. The contemporary western philosophers’ viewpoints have been analyzed and explained in this paper. Their viewpoints could be classified into four groups: 1. the belief-oriented theory; 2. Ignorance-based theory; 3. Will-oriented theory; 4. Asymmetry-based theory. Analysis of these theories reveals that some of them are not comprehensive and some others fail to justify the fact that courtesy is a virtue. Finally, the belief-oriented theory has been selected as the autonomous theory which seems to be free from the raised problems in the four mentioned viewpoints.