Abstract

I defend a broadly Aristotelian account of the virtue of magnanimity against the objection that Aristotelian magnanimity is an expression of the vice of pride and so cannot be a virtue. I identify the essential features of magnanimity on Aristotle’s account and argue that Aquinas preserves these essential features while identifying additional necessary conditions of the virtue of magnanimity that illuminate the virtue and show it to be incompatible with pride. I also show where two other attempts to defend Aquinas’s development of Aristotelian magnanimity against the pride objection fail.