Incommensurability and tragic conflict -- The business of order -- The real thing -- Virtue and the twofold order -- Practical reason and final ends -- Natural hierarchy and moral obligation -- Conflict -- The virtues of conflict.

A hallmark of Western culture is a massive moral confusion, rendering the very idea of virtue "exotic and incomprehensible." McInerny here drags the conversation back to the beginning, establishing the terms and the tools of what it means to think and to do what is moral. As he asserts, the virtuous life and the moral life are one and the same. To be moral is to be good, and the goodness of one's acts reflects the fundamentals of thought placed in (...) the service of a pursuit of a virtuous life. Why is the concept of a virtuous life so foreign to many? We do not know the basics of a moral life. As McInerny states, "To be good we have to know what that means." The two biggest judgments one will make during life pertain to knowing what is good, what is bad, and the difference between the two. This bleeds into a study of morality and ethics when it pertains to concrete acts, but in reality all aspects of our lives bear on these judgments. "Being ethical is not simply a state of mind, it is a state of being, a way of living one's life that reflects the fundamental principles of ethics [...] [it is one] who lives in a certain way." Nevertheless, the subject of this book focuses on ethics--namely, the goodness or badness of human acts. McInerny's great reason for writing this work is to teach the reader that he or she cannot properly tackle ethical questions (even if they are not identified as such) if one is not himself or herself actually ethical (living virtuously). Writing very much as a teacher of teachers, McInerny relies on the foundations of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, as well as his late brother, Ralph McInerny, to reiterate the principles of ethics that inform both thought and act. To speak of ethics, then, is to admit a commitment to virtue and how the theoretical distinction of good and bad is necessarily practical. Acting well will lead to thinking better, but McInerny notes that culture has lost sight of the former and thereby the coherency to address ethical questions. Being Ethical aims to correct this disconnect in forty-eight cogent lessons. Being Ethical is fundamentally intended to serve as a sequel to D. Q. McInerny's Being Logical (Random House, 2004), which has remained in print and has been translated into six languages. Its style lends itself to being used as a textbook in liberal studies. More generally, it is a refreshing presentation of this topic and timely and timeless exhortation to readers of the necessity of a love of virtue for ethical thought. For friends and students of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and Ralph McInerny, this book bears a style and manner that is both familiar and much loved. (shrink)

Robert McKee, in his widely-esteemed screenwriting manual, Story , speaks of storytelling in general, and the screenplay in particular, as 'the creative demonstration of truth.' But what could it mean to think of the screenplay as a 'demonstration,' that is, as an argument? In this article I explore this question, taking my cue from McKee's own description of screenplay narrative as 'dramatized dialectical debate.' McKee's reference to dialectic suggests a connection to the dialectical inquiries in Aristotle's major treatises, especially the (...) dialectical inquiry into the nature of human happiness found in the first book of the Nicomachean Ethics . I argue for an analogy between this dialectical inquiry in Aristotle's ethics, and the dialectical trajectory of popular screenplays. Such an analogy helps us understand how films do work as kinds of argument, arguments that aim at the truth of what it means for human beings to achieve their good. (shrink)

Concerned with the trendy, technocratic, and at times sophistical character of contemporary education, the authors seek to reinvigorate a Thomistic approach to ...

As Aquinas makes explicit, the argument of the Summa contra gentiles is ordered according to the twofold mode of truth in what we profess about God. The first three books thus concern the wisdom which revelation announces but which nonetheless is available to natural human reason, while the fourth is devoted to that revealed wisdom incommensurate with human rationality. Interpreters of the SCG have been divided, however, on the question of how these two modes of truth are related in regard (...) to the structure and method of the work. Thomas Hibbs's provocative and engaging new study of the SCG proposes that the unity between them is found primordially in God Himself ; it is found, more precisely, in God as Author of the narrative of Christian revelation which orders the wisdom of the philosophers to Wisdom strictly considered. (shrink)

What would a theory of practical reason that defended positions taken to be definitive or consonant with the natural law tradition, and that also aimed to be a serious contender within contemporary analytic ethics, look like? The theory put forward in Mark Murphy’s compelling and ambitious book seeks to provide the answer. The character of the theory Murphy defends is summarized by him as naturalist, objectivist, welfarist, antiparticularist, and anticonsequentialist. How this summary cashes out in detail will be recognizable in (...) many ways by those familiar with the work of John Finnis, though Murphy does depart from Finnis in significant respects. (shrink)

Those who associate the name of Joseph Owens only with his magisterial work in Aristotelian and Thomistic metaphysics will, with this issue of his collected ethical writings, be forced to reassess their appreciation of his scholarly breadth. The twenty-seven chapters which make up this book, though humbly put forward by their author as side-paths along his main intellectual road, are no dilettante’s work: they constitute a significant and challenging contribution to many of the central debates in Aristotelian/thomistic ethics.

It may seem odd that our legal culture’s uneasiness with regard to the insanity defense has risen in direct proportion to advancements in the scientific understanding of insanity itself. Yet the most intriguing benefit of Daniel N. Robinson’s short history of the insanity defense is his explanation of why this is not an oddity at all. For as Robinson convincingly argues, Western legal systems at least since the seventeenth century have been influenced by theoretical accounts of insanity which have undermined (...) the very understanding of human agency according to which those legal systems were built. The result has been a mounting incoherency in what it means for a plea of insanity to come before a court of law. (shrink)