My main concern in this paper is to develop and defend an account of why we ought to devote our lives to virtue—of the ground or reason for why we ought to do so—according to René Descartes. On my account, the answer is that we thereby, and indeed only thereby, do everything in our power to promote our own degree of intrinsic perfection or goodness. Descartes’s moral philosophy, as I understand it, thus constitutes a form of ethical perfectionism. While I (...) am not the first to interpret Descartes as an ethical perfectionist, there is as of yet no detailed account in the literature of what his particular form of ethical perfectionism would then entail. This is something that I hope to remedy here. (shrink)

Commentators have neglected a tension in Descartes’s virtue theory. In some texts, Descartes seems to argue that there are distinct virtues. In other texts, Descartes seems to argue that there is only a single virtue—the firm and constant resolution to use the will well. In this paper, I reconcile this tension. I argue that Descartes endorses a specific version of the unity of the virtues thesis, namely, the identity of the virtues. Nonetheless, Descartes has the resources to draw conceptual distinctions (...) between various virtues. Distinct virtues are conceptually generated when we regard the firm and constant resolution to use the will well in different ways, that is, based on the different ways this resolution manifests in moral situations. (shrink)

A revisionary reading of Descartes's epistemology has emerged in the literature. Some commentators have argued that Descartes subscribes to passionate epistemology, which claims that epistemic progress in the Meditations requires contributions from the meditator's passions. This paper argues that the passions cannot perform any epistemic work in the Meditations. As such, the meditator's passions do not require us to revise our canonical understanding of the Meditations as an exercise of pure thought. Furthermore, we need not abandon the standard claim that (...) ethical practice emerges in the tree of philosophy only after metaphysics and epistemology have been established. (shrink)