  While various traditions under the 'virtue ethics' umbrella have been studied
extensively and advocated by ethicists, it has not been clear that there exists
a version of virtue ethics rigorous enough to be a target for machine ethics
(which we take to include the engineering of an ethical sensibility in a
machine or robot itself, not only the study of ethics in the humans who might
create artificial agents). We begin to address this by presenting an embryonic
formalization of a key part of any virtue-ethics theory: namely, the learning
of virtue by a focus on exemplars of moral virtue. Our work is based in part on
a computational formal logic previously used to formally model other ethical
theories and principles therein, and to implement these models in artificial
agents.
