How Virtue Reforms Attachment to External Goods: The Transformation of Happiness in the Analects
Journal of Confucian Philosophy and Culture 33:9-39 (2020)
Abstract
After distinguishing three conceptions of virtue and its impact on ordinary attachments to external goods such as social status, power, friends, and wealth, this paper argues that the Confucian Analects is most charitably interpreted as endorsing the wholehearted internalization conception, on which virtue reforms but does not completely extinguish ordinary attachments to external goods. I begin by building on Amy Olberding’s attack on the extinguishing attachments conception, but go on to criticize her alternative, resolute sacrifice conception, on which the virtuous retain their ordinary attachments to external goods but are able to master them and willingly settle for virtue. I argue that we should reject this view because, unlike the wholehearted internalization conception, it cannot capture the facts that virtue silences or attenuates attachment to viciously obtained external goods and that virtue grounds positive emotional and cognitive self-assessments that are incompatible with some ordinary attachments to external goods.Author's Profile
My notes
Similar books and articles
External Goods and the Complete Exercise of Virtue in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.Sukaina Hirji - 2021 - Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 103 (1):29-53.
Happiness and the External Goods.Timothy Roche & T. D. Roche - 2014 - In Ronald Polansky (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. New York, USA: pp. 34-63.
Aristotle on Virtue and Happiness.Julia Annas & Hsin-li Wang - 1989 - Philosophy and Culture 35 (4):157-170.
The external goods approach to environmental virtue ethics.Ronald Sandler - 2003 - Environmental Ethics 25 (3):279-293.
The External Goods Approach to Environmental Virtue Ethics.Ronald Sandler - 2003 - Environmental Ethics 25 (3):279-293.
Virtue and the Good Life in the Early Confucian Tradition.Youngsun Back - 2018 - Journal of Religious Ethics 46 (1):37-62.
Virtue and Proper Use in Plato’s Euthydemus and Stoicism.Dimitrios Dentsoras - 2019 - Peitho 10 (1):45-64.
Aristotle's Basic and Non-Basic Virtues.Stephen M. Gardiner - 2001 - Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 20:261-95.
The Role of Epistemic Virtue in the Realization of Basic Goods.Baril Anne - 2016 - Episteme 13 (4):379-395.
Analytics
Added to PP
2020-03-10
Downloads
232 (#54,021)
6 months
28 (#44,055)
2020-03-10
Downloads
232 (#54,021)
6 months
28 (#44,055)
Historical graph of downloads
Author's Profile
References found in this work
The Geography of Morals: Varieties of Moral Possibility.Owen Flanagan - 2016 - New York: Oxford University Press.