How Aristotelians Can Make Faith a Virtue

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 20 (2):393-409 (2017)
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Abstract

Neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics identifies the virtues with the traits the fully virtuous person possesses. Further, it depicts the fully virtuous person as having all the cognitive perfections necessary for possessing practical wisdom. This paper argues that these two theses disqualify faith as trust, as construed on contemporary accounts of faith, as a virtue. For faith’s role as a virtue depends on limitations of its possessor that are incompatible with the psychological profile of the fully virtuous person on the neo-Aristotelian picture. I argue that because of tensions internal to the standard neo-Aristotelian view and the compelling arguments in recent literature that faith is a virtue, the neo-Aristotelian has good reason to revise her account of virtue and picture of the fully virtuous person.

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Author's Profile

Anne Jeffrey
Baylor University

Citations of this work

Testimony, Faith and Humility.Finlay Malcolm - 2021 - Religious Studies 57 (3):466-483.

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References found in this work

On virtue ethics.Rosalind Hursthouse - 1999 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Virtue and Reason.John McDowell - 1979 - The Monist 62 (3):331-350.
Mind, Value, and Reality.John Henry McDowell - 1998 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Practical intelligence and the virtues.Daniel C. Russell - 2009 - New York: Oxford University Press.

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