Over the past few years, individual competencies for sustainability have received a lot of attention in the educational, sustainability and business administration literature. In this article, we explore the meaning of two rather new and unfamiliar moral competencies in the field of corporate sustainability: normative competence and action competence. Because sustainability can be seen as a highly complex or ‘wicked’ problem, it is unclear what ‘normativity’ in the normative competence and ‘responsible action’ in the action competence (...) actually mean. In this article, we raise the question how both these moral competencies have to be understood and how they are related to each other. We argue for a virtue ethics perspective on both moral competencies, because this perspective is able to take the wickedness of sustainability into account. It turns out that virtue ethics enables us to conceptualize normative competence and action competence as two aspects of one virtuous competence for sustainability. (shrink)

In “Tracking, Competence, and Knowledge,” Ernest Sosa notes that in attempting to account for the conditions for knowledge, externalists have proposed that the justification condition be replaced or supplemented by the requirement that a certain modal relation be obtained between a fact and a subject's belief concerning that fact. While assessing attempts to identify such a relation, he focuses on an account labeled “Cartesian‐tracking”, which accounts for the relation in the form of two conditionals. If a person S believes (...) a proposition P → P P → S believes P. Sosa suggests that be abandoned as a requirement, and that, equipped with his modifications, can offer promising results in connection with skepticism. He argues that modified coupled with the requirement that S's belief be “virtuous” can illuminate the nature of propositional knowledge. (shrink)

This book combines the insights of a seasoned journalist with those of an expert on philsophical ethics to provide a penetrating and comprehensive guide to the ethics of news reporting. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the role the press plays in influencing social, economic, and political choices in modern society. Drawing on a wealth of real-life cases, The Virtuous Journalist melds for the first time a conceptual analysis of the critical moral problems in journalism with a (...) solid understanding of the constraints and possibilities faced by the print and electronic media. The authors are not First Amendment absolutists but believe nonetheless that, in a democracy, the media should be subjected to minimal legal restraint. They also argue that freedom from legal restraint requires increased moral responsibility. Among the specific topics treated in the book are notions of morality and fairness, journalistic competence, standards of objectivity and accuracy, avoiding bias, avoiding harm, notions of public service, and maintaining public trust. Specific cases discussed include the controversy surrounding the CBS documentary "The Uncounted Enemy" and recent reporting on the AIDS epidemic. (shrink)

The primary explanatory items of Nietzsche’s philosophical psychology are the drives. Such drives, he holds, are arranged hierarchically in virtue of their entering dominance-obedience relations analogous to those obtaining in human societies. This view is puzzling for two reasons. First, Nietzsche’s idea of a hierarchical order among the drives is far from clear. Second, as it postulates relations among subpersonal items that mimic those among persons, Nietzsche’s view seems to trade on the homunculus fallacy. In this paper, I argue that (...) a Hume-inspired dispositional reading of the drives’ order successfully addresses these two problematic issues. Moreover, I argue that my reading is superior to the two main competing interpretations, which I call the vitalistic reading and the normative reading, for these ascribe to Nietzsche a view committed to the homunculus fallacy. (shrink)

Virtue epistemology has been divided into two camps: reliabilists and responsibilists. This division has been attributed in part to a focus on different types of virtues, viz., faculty virtues and character virtues. I will argue that this distinction is unhelpful, and that we should carve up the theoretical terrain differently. Making several better distinctions among virtues will show us two important things. First, that responsibilists and reliabilists are actually engaged in different, complementary projects; and second, that certain responsibilist critiques of (...) reliabilism miss the mark. With these distinctions on the table, we can see that the virtue reliabilist project is in some ways more fundamental than the responsibilist project, since the latter importantly depends on the former. I argue that the distinctively epistemic value of the responsibilist’s character virtues is derived from their connections to the reliabilist’s constitutive virtues. While this will give us a unified account of the epistemic value of intellectual virtues, it is not a reduction of the responsibilist project to the reliabilist one; rather, it as a way of securing the separate importance of each project by clarifying how they relate to one another. (shrink)

This chapter presents an account of an angrily virtuous, or patient, person informed by research on emotion in empirical and philosophical psychology. It is argued that virtue for anger is determined by excellence and deficiency with respect to all three of anger’s psychological functions: appraisal, motivation, and communication. Many competing accounts of virtue for anger assess it by attention to just one function; it is argued that singular evaluations of a person’s anger will ignore important dimensions of anger that (...) bear on virtue and vice. Thus, possessing excellence with respect to only one function of anger is insufficient for virtue. The account is also extended to the characteristic vices of anger: wrath and meekness. (shrink)

I extend my direct virtue epistemology to explain how a knowledge-first framework can account for two kinds of positive epistemic standing, one tracked by externalists, who claim that the virtuous duplicate lacks justification, the other tracked by internalists, who claim that the virtuous duplicate has justification, and moreover that such justification is not enjoyed by the vicious duplicate. It also explains what these kinds of epistemic standing have to do with each other. I argue that all justified beliefs (...) are good candidates for knowledge, and are such because they are exercises of competences to know. However, there are two importantly different senses in which a belief may be a good candidate for knowledge, one corresponding to an externalist kind of justification and the other corresponding to an internalist one. I show how the account solves the new evil demon problem in a more satisfactory way than existing accounts. We end up with a view of knowledge, justification, and rationality that is plausible, motivated, and theoretically unified. (shrink)

A difficult question in the philosophy of sport concerns how winning athletes should perform in uneven contests in which victory has been secured well before the competition is over. Nicholas Dixon, the protagonist in the ongoing debate, argues against critics who urge following an 'anti-blowout' thesis that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with running up the score. We engage this debate, providing much needed distinctions, and draw on Aristotelian resources to explore a framework by which to understand competing claims found (...) within the literature. (shrink)

In this paper I seek to analyse the following question: how is it that I am able, today, to succeed in fulfilling my goals? My analysis will, I hope, demonstrate that virtues are important because they facilitate this sort of fulfilment. An examination of the classical notion of virtue is thus called for, and this in turn suggests that, at least in certain cases, virtue is connected with luck—that these two belong together. This points towards a new form of contemporary (...) virtue ethics, whose distinctive character will be reflected in the particular significance it invests in the concepts of “qualification” and “competence.” Finally, we are led to Wittgenstein's assertion that “The world of the happy person is other than the world of the hapless person.”. (shrink)

At the end of the Nicomachean Ethics , the most in uential secular ethics text in the West (a set of lecture notes dutifully copied by Aristotle’s son Nicomachus), Aristotle wrote (or taught) that he would next take up politics, which in any case he ought to have done before the ethics. It would have been equally sensible if Aristotle had written (or taught) the Politics rst, that he might have had the reverse a erthought – namely, that he should (...) now turn to moral psychology and ethics, to providing a theory of individual ourishing ( eudaimonia ) as well as a theory of human agency, the virtues, moral development, moral education, and weakness of the will ( akrasia ), which in any case he ought to have done rst, before providing a theory of social or political good. So which really comes rst – or what is di erent, should come rst – ethics, including what we now call moral psychology – moral development, a ective and cognitive components of moral competence, and so on – or politics, including what we now call the theories of justice and social good? e answer to both the descriptive and normative questions is that ethics, moral psychology, and a conception of social and political good typically co-evolve and depend upon each other conceptually. us this messy feature of interdependency is as it should be, as it must be. In the domain of morality, as a lived phenomenon and as an area of inquiry, neither philosophy nor psychology nor social and political theory serves as the foundation for any other. ere is instead massive, and necessary, interpenetration among psychology, ethics, and politics, between the descriptive and the normative, even, as we shall see, between the psychophysical and the metaphysicalError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMap. It follows that the only sensible aim of anyone seriously concerned with the good life, with questions of how we individually and collectively.... (shrink)

BackgroundClinical Ethics Support (CES) services are offered to support healthcare professionals in dealing with ethically difficult situations. Evaluation of CES is important to understand if it is indeed a supportive service in order to inform and improve future implementation of CES. Yet, methods to measure outcomes of CES are scarce. In 2014, the European Moral Case Deliberation Outcomes Instrument (Euro-MCD) was developed to measure outcomes of Moral Case Deliberation (MCD). To further validate the instrument, we tested it in field studies (...) and revised it. This paper presents the Euro-MCD 2.0 and describes the revision process.MethodsThe revision process comprised an iterative dialogue among the authors as Euro-MCD-project team, including empirical findings from six Euro-MCD field-studies and input from European experts in CES and theory. Empirical findings contained perceptions and experiences of MCD outcomes among healthcare professionals who participated in MCDs in various settings in Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands. Theoretical viewpoints on CES, literature on goals of CES and MCD and ethics theory guided the interpretation of the empirical findings and final selection of MCD outcomes.ResultsThe Euro-MCD 2.0 Instrument includes three domains: Moral Competence, Moral Teamwork and Moral Action. Moral Competence consists of items about moral sensitivity, analytical skills and virtuous attitude. Moral Teamwork includes open dialogue and supportive relationships and Moral Action refers to moral decision-making and responsible care. During the revision process, we made decisions about adding and reformulating items as well as decreasing the number from 26 to 15 items. We also altered the sentence structure of items to assess the current status of outcomes (e.g. ‘now’) instead of an assumed improvement over time (e.g. ‘better’) and we omitted the question about perceived importance.ConclusionsThe Euro-MCD 2.0 is shorter, less complex and more strongly substantiated by an integration of empirical findings, theoretical reflections and dialogues with participants and experts. Use of the Euro-MCD 2.0 will facilitate evaluation of MCD and can thereby monitor and foster implementation and quality of MCD. The Euro-MCD 2.0 will strengthen future research on evaluation of outcomes of MCD. (shrink)

Ethics consultation has become an integral part of the fabric of U.S. health care delivery. This article summarizes the second edition of the Core Competencies for Health Care Ethics Consultation report of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities. The core knowledge and skills competencies identified in the first edition of Core Competencies have been adopted by various ethics consultation services and education programs, providing evidence of their endorsement as health care ethics consultation (HCEC) standards. This revised report was prompted (...) by thinking in the field that has evolved since the original report. Patients, family members, and health care providers who encounter ethical questions or concerns that ethics consultants could help address deserve access to efficient, effective, and accountable HCEC services. All individuals providing such services should be held to the standards of competence and quality described in the revised report. (shrink)

In this chapter, we explore Xenophon’s philosophy of management and identify nine dimensions of business management, as well as the competencies that good management requires. The scientific contribution of this chapter does not only consist in the fact that this is the first publications in which Xenophon’s philosophy of management is systematically analyzed. Historical analysis can also help to question the self-evidence of our contemporary conceptualization of management. Xenophon’s philosophy of management enables us to criticize the contemporary focus on profit (...) maximization and to articulate an intrinsic relation between business and society; to criticize the contemporary disconnectedness of business management and to develop a broader set of individual competencies and know-how that is required for business managers; to criticize the contemporary focus on management and control; and to rehabilitate the role of business management as ability and capacity that involves know-how, actual engagement, and virtuous competencies. Finally, this concept of management challenges contemporary conceptualizations of the differences between private and public management in political philosophical debates. (shrink)

The paper explores the main competing interpretations of Aristotle's view of the relation between happiness and external goods in the Nicomachean Ethics. On the basis of a careful analysis of what Aristotle says in the Nicomachean Ethics (and other works such as the Eudemian Ethics, Politics, Rhetoric, etc.) it is argued that it is likely that Aristotle takes at least some external goods to be actual constituents of happiness provided that (1) they are accompanied by virtuous activity and (2) (...) the agent enjoying and using those external goods does so in ways compatible with the continuous aim of acting virtuously. (shrink)

The competent and detailed introduction to this book traces out the origin and rudiments of religions, their essential nature and the causes of their conflicts. It emphasises the truth that all religions are trying to say the same thing in different ways. Religions are meant to bring out the spiritual in man and to make him live a full and virtuous life. Despite the rapid progress in science and medicine, the mysteries of life and death remain as unknown as (...) before. Religions try, in their myriad ways, to explain these and to venture into the unknowable. They bring comfort to human beings in their suffering, and consolation in their bereavement. The author's belief is that if, while following their own religion, men respected the faiths of others too, much of the religious conflicts and bloodshed which debases mankind would be avoided. The fundamental concepts of Hindu religion and philosophy have exhaustively been narrated in a clear manner. This is followed by selected passages from the main scriptures and philosophical books of the Hindu religion-the Vedas, Puranas, Upanisheads, brahma-sutras, Bhagavadgita, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana of Tulsidasa. In each case there is a synopsis of the book giving its subject matter and a reading list consisting of the main texts and criticisms which will be invaluable to those who wish to know more about it. The passages have been selected to provide interesting reading, particularly connected with the problems and conditions of our own times. The book aims at providing a mine of information about Hinduism and is also an in-depth study of religion in general. It has been written in down-to-earth language and is of interest to all those who are wish to know about matters vital to life and living. (shrink)

This paper argues that reliabilist virtue epistemology is mistaken. Descartes supposes a supremely powerful deceiver is determined to trick him into believing falsehoods. Beliefs Descartes cannot rationally doubt, even allowing the demon’s best efforts, count as indubitable knowledge. I give an instance of indubitable knowledge and argue that it is not attributable to an epistemic competence. Since not all knowledge is virtuous, knowledge cannot be identified with virtuous true belief.

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name for (...) threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

There is a concern that the widespread deployment of autonomous machines will open up a number of ‘responsibility gaps’ throughout society. Various articulations of such techno-responsibility gaps have been proposed over the years, along with several potential solutions. Most of these solutions focus on ‘plugging’ or ‘dissolving’ the gaps. This paper offers an alternative perspective. It argues that techno-responsibility gaps are, sometimes, to be welcomed and that one of the advantages of autonomous machines is that they enable us to embrace (...) certain kinds of responsibility gap. The argument is based on the idea that human morality is often tragic. We frequently confront situations in which competing moral considerations pull in different directions and it is impossible to perfectly balance these considerations. This heightens the burden of responsibility associated with our choices. We cope with the tragedy of moral choice in different ways. Sometimes we delude ourselves into thinking the choices we make were not tragic ; sometimes we delegate the tragic choice to others ; sometimes we make the choice ourselves and bear the psychological consequences. Each of these strategies has its benefits and costs. One potential advantage of autonomous machines is that they enable a reduced cost form of delegation. However, we only gain the advantage of this reduced cost if we accept that some techno-responsibility gaps are virtuous. (shrink)

The central question for this book is whether schools should attempt to cultivate patriotism, and if so why, how, and with what conception of patriotism in mind. The promotion of patriotism has figured prominently in the history of public schooling in the United States, always with the idea that patriotism is both an inherently admirable attribute and an essential motivational basis for good citizenship. It has been assumed, in short, that patriotism is a virtue in its own right and that (...) it is a foundational aspect of civic virtue more generally. Through an integrated historical and philosophical approach, this book demonstrates that there have been many and diverse attempts to cultivate patriotism in public schools in the United States and that they have been predicated on different conceptions of patriotism, citizenship, and learning. In order to assess these assumptions and evaluate the various practices of patriotic education, we address the nature of virtue and the motivational foundations of civic responsibility, and we frame a general approach to the ethics of education. We find that the history of attempts to cultivate patriotism in schools offers both cautionary and positive lessons. We argue that there is a virtuous form of patriotism and that an inclusive and enabling just school community may contribute to its development. Yet, we conclude that patriotism is not a virtue as such. We argue that civic virtue is what schools should aim to cultivate, and that civic education should be organized around three components of civic virtue, namely civic intelligence, civic friendship, and civic competence. We hold that virtuous patriotism is an appropriate responsiveness to a country’s value, and that such responsiveness is part and parcel of civic virtue that is also responsive to what has value beyond one’s own country. The book concludes with a defense of global civic education, arguing that it should promote global civic friendship and cooperation. The book situates its understanding of patriotism in the context of nationalist, populist, and authoritarian movements in the United States and Europe, and it mounts a spirited defense of democratic institutions that should be of interest to anyone concerned about the polarization of public life and future of democracy. (shrink)

... With those who identify happiness [faring happily or well] with virtue or some one virtue our account is in harmony; for to virtue belongs virtuous activity. But it makes, perhaps, no small difference whether we place the chief good in possession or in use, in state of mind or in activity. For the state of mind may exist without producing any good result, as in a man who is asleep or in some other way quite inactive, but the (...) activity cannot; for one who has the activity will of necessity be acting, and acting well. And as in the Olympic Games it is not the most beautiful and the strongest that are crowned but those who compete, so those who act win, and rightly win, the noble and good things in life. (shrink)

You care about what others believe about you. What others believe about you determines whether you have a good reputation, whether you have the respect of your peers, and whether your friends genuinely like you. Your caring about others’ beliefs makes sense, because others’ beliefs bear directly upon your level of well-being. Your beliefs can influence others’ well-being, as much as their beliefs can influence yours. How your beliefs influence another’s well-being is a different matter from whether your beliefs are (...) supported by the evidence. Sometimes you can benefit another person by regulating your beliefs in response to considerations of her well-being, not of the evidence. Usually, you do not have strong reasons to regulate your beliefs in response to considerations of the interests of others. But it can be different when the person in question is your friend. Within some perfectly good friendships, the support that each friend provides for the other extends as far as their being willing to regulate their beliefs with the goal of benefiting the other, even if that makes it less likely that their beliefs will be supported by the evidence. Within our friendships, we then have reasons for belief that do not arise directly from, and sometimes compete with, reasons provided by evidence. This claim conflicts with the widespread Aristotelian view that good friendship is oriented to virtue. But it fits with a more plausible view about friendship, on which the function of friendship is to help us cope with the fact that we are not fully virtuous, and to serve needs that we have because we are not fully virtuous. (shrink)

Aristotle famously held that there is a crucial difference between the person who merely acts rightly and the person who is wholehearted in what she does. He captures this contrast by insisting on a distinction between continence and full virtue. One way of accounting for the important difference here is to suppose that, for the genuinely virtuous person, the requirements of virtue "silence" competing reasons for action. I argue that the silencing interpretation is not compelling. As Aristotle rightly saw, (...) virtue can have a cost, and a mark of the wise person is that she recognizes it. (shrink)

Aristotle famously held that there is a crucial difference between the person who merely acts rightly and the person who is wholehearted in what she does. He captures this contrast by insisting on a distinction between continence and full virtue. One way of accounting for the important difference here is to suppose that, for the genuinely virtuous person, the requirements of virtue “silence” competing reasons for action. I argue that the silencing interpretation is not compelling. As Aristotle rightly saw, (...) virtue can have a cost, and a mark of the wise person is that she recognizes it. (shrink)

This paper defends the claim that there is deontic knowledge - knowledge of rightness and wrongness - which can be inferred from aretaic knowledge - knowledge of the possession of virtue-attributes. In doing so, it seeks to address two forceful objections, identified at the outset. The first is that the only way of making the claim appear plausible is by assuming a practice of virtue-ascription which actually makes the reverse inference. The second objection is that there is that "aretaic cognitivism" (...) will face a familiar non-cognitivist challenge - that the cognitivist must choose between an "intuitionism" and a "naturalism", against both of which there are well-known attacks - and that there is no reason to believe that this challenge can be met any more readily than by a direct deontic cognitivism. After a first section in which I outline a certain weak sense of the term "norm" in which our actions are often normatively guided, the defence of aretaic cognitivism begins with a schematic expression of the practical norms which are central to a number of important moral virtues. Guidance by any one of the schematized norms is not sufficient to guarantee the virtuousness of an action, because there may be countervailing applications of competing practical norms. However, aretaic knowledge does not require knowledge that there are no such countervailing considerations - and what it does require can apparently be satisfied. Therefore, I argue, both objections can be met: there are at least some circumstances in which our possession of aretaic knowledge does not depend on the possession of deontic knowledge, and since it does not, there is a way between the horns of the non-cognitivist's dilemma. (shrink)

In recent discussions of the Humean Theory of Motivation (HTM), several authors – not to mention other philosophers around the proverbial water cooler – have appealed to the simplicity of the theory to defend it. But the argument from simplicity has rarely been explicated or received much critical attention – until now. I begin by reconstructing the argument and then argue that it suffers from a number of problems. Most importantly, first, I argue that HTM is unlikely to be simpler (...) than even close competing theories, and second, it is unlikely that a plausible version of the theory will be very simple. Moreover, I argue that a convincing case for HTM is likely to have to show that it is more virtuous than defenders have done so far. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:25 MORALITY AS A BACK-UP SYSTEM: HUME'S VIEW? The sense of duty is a useful device for helping men to do what a really good man would do without a sense of duty..... Nowell-Smith A certain picture of morality — arguably a Humean one — has come to have a prominent place in contemporary philosophy. On this picture, morality, as Richard Brandt asserts, is "a back-up system, which operates (...) when spontaneous personal caring fails 2 to motivate us to do as we ought." Morality — at least in the form of moral principles, whose force is felt through one's sense of duty — is, on this view, ideally superfluous. As a guide for one's own conduct it is needed only insofar as the agent's affective network is deficient. If one only spontaneously desired a, cared about b, cared for c, felt aversion towards d as, ideally, one should, moral principles and a sense of duty would be of no use. There are good reasons for supposing that this is Hume's view. After all, his characterization of acting from duty is more than a little disparaging: When any virtuous motive or principle is common in human nature, a person, who feels his heart devoid of that motive, may hate himself upon that account, and may perform the action without the motive, from a certain sense of duty, in order to acquire by practice, that virtuous principle, or at least, to disguise to himself,,as much as possible, his want of it. I will argue, however, that there is tension in Hume's ethics between two lines of thought. According to the first line of thought, and the one 26 usually associated with Hume, good conduct is conduct which is spontaneously prompted by virtuous desires. Unless our desires either are not what they should be or are motivationally weak, there is no need for mediation or tempering by a sense of duty or moral principles. According to the second line, the very good desires of a very good person may nonetheless need to be filtered, tempered, redirected or checked. This line is most evident in "Of the Origin of the Natural Virtues and Vices." Before arguing that these strains of thought are in tension in Hume's ethics, I need to clarify what is at issue and to develop the two competing pictures of moral motivation. First the issue. The issue is not 'Who is better: someone with a sense of duty but corrupt desires or someone with no sense of duty but ideal desires?' Nor is the issue one of the moral worth of actions ('Can an action have moral worth if it is not performed out of duty?') The issue, rather, is how to characterize morally good (or right) conduct. What role, if any, does a sense of duty or a Butlerian principle of reflection, i.e., an overarching, guiding conception of what is right or good which is 'juridically' supreme within the self, play in good conduct? Is morally good conduct ideally a matter of acting as one should from the proper desires? Or should the desires be governed and guided by moral principles? Consider two models of moral conduct. Model I: Morality as a Back-Up System On this picture, wrongness in conduct is traceable to an affective deficiency. The claim underlying this picture seems to be as follows: One 27 acts wrongly because one's passions are not quite what they should be. One person cheats in her business dealings because she cares too little about the welfare of others (and too much about her own); another is harsh and abrupt to a student because he cares too little about his students' concerns and is jealous and possessive when it comes to 'his time.' In each case the problem can be traced to an affective deficiency. Hume appears to be supporting this view when he asserts, "it may be establish'd as an undoubted maxim, that no act can be virtuous, or morally good, unless there be in human nature some motive to produce it, distinct from a sense of its morality' (T 479). A few pages later he writes, "[E]very immorality... (shrink)

For many, striving to attain first place in an athletic competition is explicable. Less explicable is striving to attain first place in a virtue (aretē) competition. Yet this latter dynamic appears in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. There is 4.3’s magnanimity, the crown of the virtues, which seemingly manifests itself in outdoing one’s peers in virtue. Such one-upmanship also seems operant with 9.8’s praiseworthy self-lover, who seeks to get as much of the fine (to kalon) as possible for herself. Contrary to many (...) interpreters, this paper argues that praiseworthy self-love and magnanimity involve one-upmanship. The relevant exemplars are not simply striving to be the best that they can be in respect to virtue (in virtuous activity), but to be better than others. The paper argues that Aristotle’s axiology, which sets activity (energeia) above state (hexis) and potentiality (dunamis), engenders one-upmanship. For only the level of activity substantially differentiates individuals, settling for inferiority is obviously objectionable, and equal achievement for Aristotle is not static but involves matching and surpassing the achievements of others. The paper concludes that modern discomfort with these dynamics is due to an axiology Nietzsche attributes to Christianity, one that bases human value fundamentally on non-differentiating potentiality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Narcissism A Focal Point for Examining the Interrelatedness of Psychology and PhilosophyLydia Amir, PhD (bio)In a groundbreaking article, Aleksandar Fatic challenges the view that mental health is to be dissociated from morality or ethics. His argument targets cluster B personality disorders, such as Borderline and Narcissistic Personality Disorders, but focuses mainly on narcissistic disorders, whether diagnosed or not. Although these persons are not exempt of moral and legal responsibility, (...) they are diagnosed by and relegated to the mental health system, which is often ineffective in treating them. Fatic suggests that addressing their faulty morality is the best policy. In my commentary of his article, I further probe the viability and desirability of doing so. I point to narcissism as a focal point for examining the necessary impact of psychology and philosophy insofar as psychologists may be considered experts in emotions and philosophers in normative ethics. I question the interest in any ethics that does not also supply the means of its implementation and suggest that narcissists may have a morality of their own, ethical egoism.As psychiatrist Bennett Simon notes, Socrates did not inquire into the mental health field; his presence is missed as the questions, “what is mental illness?” and “what are psychiatry and psychiatrists?” are not addressed. It follows that it is up to us, as Simon attempts to do in the first chapter of Mind and Madness in Ancient Greece: The Classical Roots of Modern Psychiatry (1978), to define the psychiatrist’s proper area of professional competence (p. 28). That which makes matters even more confusing, he notes, is that psychiatrists are only one group of professionals who deal with the “mentally ill” and that they are “far from unanimous” about which problems “pertain to their particular sphere” (Simon, 1978, p. 29). He thus lists a variety of problems which “a glance at both popular and professional literature…reveals that at one time or another, psychiatrists have claimed [End Page 169] (sometimes by public demand) for their proper sphere” (Simon, 1978, p. 29). Among them is the issue that Fatic’s break grounding article tackles: “Psychiatrists at times consider it their proper task to deal with people who are excessively selfish and self-centered (narcissistic personality disorder)” (Simon, 1978, p. 29).Thus, Simon sees as a matter of controversy whether narcissism is a psychiatric issue, and defines the disorder in moral terms (“selfish,” “self-centered”). Fatic broadens the argument: he questions the validity of the psychological approach not only to narcissism as a personality disorder, but also to narcissistic traits, and the effectivity of this approach given that this is an area in which therapists usually do not have much success even if the patients look for help, which is rare. Fatic suggests that these personalities, either those with narcissistic traits or those with full-fledged narcissistic personality disorder, should be better understood (and maybe also addressed, although this point is not explicitly made) when viewed through moral lenses. In doing so, Fatic not only questions the validity of one form of personality disorder––still a controversial category––but re-kindles the view that correlates aspects of mental health with virtue, a view that was valid up until the nineteenth century and that made of philosophers (and priests) doctors of the soul.1That which made of philosophers’ teachings an important part of one’s life before the advent of scientific psychology has been often associated with this view, that the virtuous are also the healthy. Without going as far as to suggest that philosophers should teach virtue to narcissists, which could be a further argument in favor of the new field of philosophical practice and a broadening of its legitimate concerns, Fatic notes that moral categories are better suited to approach those who are plagued by narcissism.One way to explain the historical role that psychology played in relation to the traditional one upheld by morality is that psychology stepped in to explain the origins of failures in morality. If the narcissist is to be judged according to moral categories (a judgment that he necessarily fails in so far as right emotions as relevant to morality), what might be the consequences?Ascribing... (shrink)

This paper proposes laying the groundwork for principled moral reasoning as a seminal goal of ethics interventions in higher education, and on this basis, makes a case for educating future specialists and professionals with a foundation in philosophical ethics. Identification of such a seminal goal is warranted by the progressive dissociation of scientific practice and ethical deliberation since the onset of a problematic relationship between science and ethics around the mid-19th century, and the extensive mistrust of integrating ethics in science (...) and engineering curricula beyond its “applied,” “practical,” or “professional” implications. Although calls by international scientific and educational bodies to strengthen ethics teaching in scientific education over the past quarter century have brought about a notion of combining competence in a certain field with competence in ethics, this is neither entrenched in the academic community, nor fleshed out as regards its core or instruments to realize it. The legitimate goals of ethics teaching in higher education, almost settled since the 1980s, can be subsumed under the proposed seminal goal, and the latter also would safeguard content and methods of ethics interventions against the intrusion of indoctrinative approaches. In this paper, derivation of the proposed seminal goal rests on an interpretation of the Kohlbergian cognitive-developmental conception of moral adulthood consisting in autonomous principled moral reasoning. This interpretation involves, based on Kant’s conception of the virtuous person, integrating questions about the “good life” into the domain of principled reasoning. (shrink)

John McDowell argues that for virtuous agents the requirements of virtue do not outweigh competing considerations, but 'silence' them. He explains this claim in two different ways: a virtuous agent (a) will not be tempted to act in a way which is incompatible with virtue ('motivational silencing'), or (b) will not believe that he has any reason to act in a way which is incompatible with virtue ('rational silencing'). I identify a small class of cases in which alone (...) McDowell's claims about rational silencing are true. He draws his claims from Aristotle's assertion that a life of virtue is 'self-sufficient'. I offer an alternative reading of Aristotle's assertion, which does not imply the truth of McDowell's. But McDowell's claims about motivational silencing are true. (shrink)

In the Treatise, Hume focuses on pride as an “indirect passion,” one indicative of self-valuing and moral virtue and contributing positively to our sense of who we are and, in particular, to our moral identity. This essay examines those features of pride that make Hume’s account of the indirect passions so distinctive, beginning with an examination of his application of the experimental method to explain the origin of the indirect passions and the double relation of ideas and impressions as the (...) efficient causes of these passions. Also examined is the relationship Hume draws between the principle of sympathy, pride, and the causes of pride; the relations among pride in virtuous character, moral confidence and, competence; and Hume’s account of pride in the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals. Finally, the author considers the view of Humean moral agency as heteronomous in nature. (shrink)

In the Aristotelian tradition, the psychological difference between virtue and continence is commonly understood in terms of inner harmony versus inner conflict. Virtuous agents experience inner harmony between feeling and action because they do not care to do other than what their circumstances call for, whereas continent agents feel conflicted about doing what is called for because of competing concerns. Critics of this view argue, however, that when the circumstances require sacrificing something of genuine value, virtuous agents can (...) indeed feel conflicted about acting well. But if this is so, what differentiates virtuous from merely continent agency? This essay argues that the traditional distinction conflates two aspects of virtue as well as two species of continence. And distinguishing between them provides resources for making sense of the complex relationship between inner conflict and good moral agency. (shrink)

In the Aristotelian tradition, the psychological difference between virtue and continence is commonly understood in terms of inner harmony versus inner conflict. Virtuous agents experience inner harmony between feeling and action because they do not care to do other than what their circumstances call for, whereas continent agents feel conflicted about doing what is called for because of competing concerns. Critics of this view argue, however, that when the circumstances require sacrificing something of genuine value, virtuous agents can (...) indeed feel conflicted about acting well. But if this is so, what differentiates virtuous from merely continent agency? This essay argues that the traditional distinction conflates two aspects of virtue as well as two species of continence. And distinguishing between them provides resources for making sense of the complex relationship between inner conflict and good moral agency. (shrink)

At the heart of Plato’s Protagoras is a lengthy interlude in which Socrates is compelled to offer an interpretation of a poem by Simonides. Protagoras, a notable sophist, challenges Socrates to explain away an alleged inconsistency: Simonides claims that it is hard for someone to become good or virtuous, but then criticizes another poet for saying what seems to be the same thing. In taking up this challenge, Socrates offers a protracted exegesis of the poem. While this so-called ‘poetic (...) interlude’ has long attracted the attention of commentators, I uncover new and important ways in which it is connected to broader Platonic arguments and themes. I begin by marking a threefold distinction between ignorance, competence, and expertise, which both Protagoras and Socrates seem to utilize, but which has not been noted in the literature. I argue that this distinction helps to explain why Socrates is concerned to distinguish ‘being’ good from ‘becoming’ good in his own exegesis of the poem. I also argue that it helps to explain the significance of the preamble Socrates offers to his own interpretation, since it reveals the kind of knowledge that he believes is required for ‘being’ good or virtuous. The dialogue concludes with an explicit dilemma about virtue, but the resources I uncover allow for a satisfying resolution to it. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Confucian Sentimental Representation: A New Approach to Confucian Democracy by Kyung Rok KwonStephen C. AngleKWON, Kyung Rok. Confucian Sentimental Representation: A New Approach to Confucian Democracy. New York: Routledge, 2022. vi + 128 pp. Cloth, $128.00; eBook, $39.16Two facts have driven much of the recent theorizing about Confucian democracy. First, even in robust democracies like South Korea and Taiwan, East Asian citizens hold distinctive views about the relation (...) between leaders and led. Two-thirds of South Korean respondents and a third of those from Taiwan agreed with the statement "If we have political leaders who are morally upright, we can let them decide everything." Second, it is uncontroversial to say that traditional Confucianism advocated for rule by the virtuous. Most observers believe these two facts are linked but disagree about their normative upshot. Some regret the lingering authoritarianism polluting East Asian democracies, while others—primarily based in less democratic [End Page 146] countries—call for an embrace of "meritocracy" instead of democracy. A third group, to which Kwon Kyung Rok and I both belong, believe that properly understood "rule by virtue" can be better realized in a democracy. This means that modern Confucians should be democrats, and it suggests a distinctive way of conceptualizing democracy that both may be more apt for East Asia and may even offer lessons applicable worldwide. For Kwon, the key to all this is rethinking how we understand political representation.Kwon argues that we should look to representation rather than directly at democracy because representation is both central to modern conceptions of democracy and yet makes a more constructive dialogue partner for Confucian virtue-based politics. Democracy, says Kwon, is at its core concerned with the equal distribution of political power, whereas representation concerns "a special relationship and psychology" between the representer and the represented that he understands in terms of "authorization," the making of "sound judgments," and "accountability." Chapters 1 and 2 of the book explore the primarily "rationalist" notion of representation found in the Western tradition and the more "sentimentalist" version of representation that can be constructed out of Confucian virtue politics. The latter chapter is the creative core of the book. Kwon argues that for one to count as a representative in a modern Confucian context, one needs to make sound judgments of the true interests of society and share emotions with the people—in the process of transforming them into more morally cultivated people. This sense of "representing" the people builds on what it is to be a virtuous exemplar. Along the way Kwon makes a detailed case that direct caring rather than empathy is core to the idea of humaneness (or benevolence; ren) that is so central to Confucianism; this is a good example of how he engages with interpretive literature to clarify aspects of his picture.The final two chapters engage with alternative accounts of modern Confucian political theory. Chapter 3 provides a negative defense of democratic sentimental representation by demonstrating that various "meritocratic" alternative arguments fail. One of the key points here is that Daniel Bell and Tongdong Bai are overly concerned with the instrumental value of a ruler's competence, missing the intrinsic value of a ruler's virtue and its contribution to the ethically good life of the community; as a result, their views fail to be distinctively Confucian. Chapter 4 takes Sungmoon Kim's influential idea of "public reason Confucianism" as its point of departure. Kwon is quite sympathetic to Kim's framework and defends Kim against certain misunderstandings, but perceptively argues that there is a gap in Kim's account between citizens, understood primarily in affective terms, and the state, which in Kim's account is exemplified by the high court and is understood primarily in rationalist terms. What is missing is the bridging role of leaders. Kwon writes that mediating between formal and informal decision-making processes, leaders should "make ordinary citizens feel respected and make them focus on public issues in appropriate ways." He believes that a caring and competent [End Page 147] leader can "broaden the horizon of mutual understanding by exhorting [citizens] to think of all as belonging to an extended family." In short... (shrink)

The political philosophies of Kongzi, Mengzi, and Xunzi can fruitfully be understood as focusing substantially on politically relevant merit – and as having conceptions of politically relevant merit intertwined with their conceptions of morality and virtue. In short, on their account, politically relevant merit finds its necessary foundation in morally relevant merit. In critiquing this position, Han Fei questions four positions that must be true in order for the early Confucian position to succeed: 1) Politically relevant merit is necessarily tied (...) to moral merit; 2) Virtuous individuals who possess the relevant moral merits can reliably be identified even by those who are not themselves virtuous; 3) Moral cultivation is actually possible; and 4) Those qualities that make someone virtuous can reliably be ascertained. This paper examines the worries that Han Fei has with these positions and offers up an account of Han Fei’s own account of politically relevant merit – a non-moral alternative tied to task specific competencies. (shrink)

How do social media affect interpersonal relationships? Adopting a Strawsonian framework, I argue that social media make us more likely to adopt the objective attitude towards persons. Technologically mediated communication tends to inhibit interpersonal emotions and other reactive attitudes. This is due to a relative lack of the social cues that typically enable us to read minds and react to them. Adopting the objective attitude can be harmful for two reasons. First, it tends to undermine the basis of interpersonal relationships. (...) In particular, I argue that friendship is a relationship between persons that requires the participant stance. Second, it is a morally risky attitude that makes us more likely to treat persons in problematic, thing-like ways. Some philosophers have rightly urged that social media are compatible with virtuous, Aristotelian friendship. Notwithstanding, I argue that the harms associated with the objective attitude are more pressing than they might appear if we restrict our focus to relatively virtuous people with the social competence to flourish in morally risky online environments. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Christian Consumer: Living Faithfully in a Fragile World by Laura M. HartmanDavid CloutierThe Christian Consumer: Living Faithfully in a Fragile World LAURA M. HARTMAN New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 256 pp. $29.95Laura Hartman has written an elegant, graceful, and gentle book about a topic often inspiring jeremiads: consumer society. Setting out to provide “an effective and explicitly practical ethics of consumption” (5), she develops an ethical (...) language that goes beyond sociological generalizations about “consumerism.” She structures her study by engaging ancient and contemporary theological sources to discuss “four primary considerations” (21): avoiding sin, embracing creation, loving the neighbor, and envisioning the future. Each represents a “node” of “theological reflection: sin, creation, love, and the reign of God” (25). In each area, she is unusually careful to point out the limitations of any one consideration without the others. Avoiding sin, for example, can become “a self-focused pursuit of holiness” (52); embracing creation can ignore justice concerns or, worse, lead to prosperity theology. Such limitations are less apparent when considering the final two areas. In loving the neighbor, the challenge is balancing considerations between close and distant neighbors. Finally, Hartman makes an impassioned case for Sabbath-keeping and Eucharist as practices of our destined eschatological fullness, even while recognizing that an overemphasis on these can lead to escapism and bickering over “vague and idiosyncratic” differences among Christians (167). By attending to all four notions, Hartman is able to offer a much richer picture of the conceptual field in which our consumption choices should be made. A closing chapter imagines a dinner conversation among three of her frequent interlocutors, Shannon Jung, Elizabeth Theokritoff, and James Nash, as well as applying the concepts to concrete choices of transportation and meat-eating.The book goes a long way toward its stated goal. Hartman has a skillful grasp of the complexities of both contemporary consumption practices and theological description. She displays a remarkably generous attitude toward a variety of voices, engaging positively figures as disparate as the severe abolitionist John Woolman and the prosperity televangelist Creflo Dollar. Her generosity works well; I can imagine this book being especially effective with students or church groups who might be alienated by a stronger anticonsumerism screed. As a work [End Page 247] of constructive ethics, though, the generosity leaves open a lot of questions. Hartman describes her methodology as “using a blend of methods,” owing some debts to “principalism” and to virtue ethics, explaining her four considerations “as diverse lenses on one holistic vision of virtuous consumption” (28). The four “considerations” are described as “not principles” but “actions that produce virtue” or “a school of virtue” (27)—neither are they moral rules, despite their being phrased in the form of verbal commands to action. This methodological looseness enables her to voice multiple harmony lines, which “form a chorus of perspectives on consumption” (5). But this approach can slip from generosity to vagueness. How does one determine what is off-key? The application section seems to have difficulty adjudicating particular actions; there is in effect a nonrational “weighing” that goes on, one that sometimes seems to reduce to a consideration of (incommensurable) competing consequences.The project could be furthered in two ways. First, Hartman could consider some way of ordering the considerations—not strictly ordinally but rather, for example, by recognizing that avoiding sin is a prelude to a proper embrace of creation and that creation is ordered to communion. The sequencing of her chapters hints at such an ordering, but she does not make use of it. While not reducing everything to love of God and neighbor, certainly sin, creation, and even eschatology point to this telos. Second, Hartman could go further in developing the language of virtue—for example, temperance and prudence—as a way of specifying more clearly what both avoiding sin and embracing creation mean. But her template is a valuable orientation to further needed work on this important topic. It should find a wide audience. [End Page 248]David CloutierMount St. Mary’s UniversityCopyright © 2014 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Responsibilist epistemic virtues, such as intellectual humility, thoroughness, and inquisitiveness, motivate and inform behaviour to acquire, assess, and share epistemic goods. While existing accounts primarily emphasise the virtues' role in knowledge acquisition, I argue for casting a wider net by redefining responsibilist virtues in their connection to wisdom. I draw upon Sosa's AAA structure of competence – which he employs to support the direct and constitutive relation between reliabilist virtues (e.g., memory and perception) and knowledge – proposing that the (...) same structure can be applied to responsibilist virtues, establishing their direct and constitutive relation to wisdom. The resulting framework provides us with an account of how epistemic agents can responsibly engage with our current sociotechnical environment. The first half of the thesis establishes this framework, arguing for its implementation. The value of this framework is, in part, its ability to uphold the claim that responsibilist virtues are admirable traits of character that aid one’s epistemically responsible engagement with the environment. The AAA structure of competence entails that a performance is Adroit, i.e., resulting from a reliable competence, Accurate, whereby the performance hits the intended target or the functional goal given the competence, and Apt, whereby it is Accurate as it is Adroit. Applying this to responsibilist virtue, an act is adroit when it results from an acquired, admirable, epistemically motivated, and stable disposition to perform behaviour characteristic of the relevant intellectual virtue. This act is accurate when it is successfully virtuous, i.e., admirable. Within this framework, an act from an admirable, virtuous disposition (i.e., an adroit act) can fail to be virtuous by undermining another virtue, or successfully virtuous when it does not. An apt act of intellectual virtue is thereby an act performed from an intellectual virtue (e.g., attentiveness or intellectual humility), that is admirable because it is adroit (e.g., as it was performed from a virtuous disposition to be attentive or intellectually humble, without the act undermining another virtue). The second half of the thesis applies this framework to various phenomena within the digital epistemic environment. It explores how increasingly prevalent epistemic emotions, such as an epistemic fear of missing out (epistemic FOMO) and morbid curiosity, can shape epistemic behaviour to be unwise, despite the knowledge one may acquire through acts motivated by these emotions. For example, ‘doombehaviour’ – entailing the frequent or long-lasting consumption of distressing news – is examined in light of its impact on mental health and other prudential concerns. Moreover, our digital environment supplies us with novel epistemic responsibilities in relation to consuming attention-grabbing information, as well as inadvertently distributing misinformation. By applying the framework of apt intellectually virtuous action on these and similar phenomena, we can give an account of wise engagement with our sociotechnical environment. (shrink)

My main aim in this paper is to examine whether gossip should be categorized as an epistemically valuable character trait. Gossip satisfies the necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for an acquired character trait to be classified as an intellectual virtue under the responsibilist understanding of the concept of virtue. The excellent gossiper is motivated to acquire epistemic goods through gossiping, reliably successful in acquiring epistemic goods through gossiping, competent at the activity of gossiping and good at judging when, with whom (...) and what to gossip. Nonetheless, I show that the excellent gossiper inflicts epistemic wrong on others. The excellent gossiper comes to intentionally acquire another person’s private information without their consent. This leaves virtue responsibilists with three options: resist my argument that gossip qualifies as a responsibilist virtue and/or that excellent gossiping inflicts epistemic wrong, bite the bullet and argue that the intellectually virtuous agent sometimes inflicts epistemic wrong on other agents intentionally, develop a no-wrong principle that disqualifies gossip from being categorized as an intellectual virtue. (shrink)

Is anger at another person ever a morally excellent thing? Two competing answers to this question can be found in the Christian intellectual tradition. JohnCassian held that anger at another person is never morally virtuous. Aquinas, taking an Aristotelian line, maintained that anger at another person is sometimes morally virtuous. In this paper I explore the positions of Cassian and Aquinas on this issue. The core of my paper consists in a close examination of two arguments given by (...) Aquinas in support of his view. The first involves the usefulness of anger in the moral life; the second focuses on the nature of the human being as a composite of soul and body. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Virtue Ethics for the Real World: Improving Character without Idealization by Howard J. CurzerBenjamin HoleCURZER, Howard J. Virtue Ethics for the Real World: Improving Character without Idealization. New York: Routledge, 2023. 272 pp. Cloth, $160.00The development of virtue ethics has been in a lull. This book is a welcome treatise in theory-building, developing a novel Aristotelian approach to virtue ethics that, first, avoids idealization and, second, provides a (...) method for character improvement. It is divided into two parts reflecting these themes.The front matter before the title page brandishes a "No Don Quixotes" sign, warning the reader the following pages are no place for a misguided idealist. Part 1, "Against Idealization," contains six chapters. Chapter 2 argues that idealization is not a useful guide, but an impediment to virtue, since ideals can be misleading, psychologically damaging, and used for nefarious purposes. Chapters 3 through 7 construct a virtue ethical theory without idealization. Idealization may seem central to a virtue-oriented approach to ethics. For example, Rosalind Hursthouse's famous biconditional claims that an act is right if and only if it is what the virtuous person would characteristically do in the same circumstances. By contrast, chapter 3 provides counterexamples separating virtuous action from what the virtuous person would characteristically do, and separating virtuous action from right action. Sacrificing Hursthouse's biconditional is a fundamental change to the way many conceive of Aristotelian virtue ethics, demanding revisions to the rest of the theory. For instance, to address moral dilemmas, chapter 4 defends two psychological mechanisms under which there are virtuous, morally wrong acts that are admirably immoral, and vicious, morally right acts that leave the agent with dirty hands.Chapter 5 provides the grounding for contemporary Aristotelian virtue ethics without idealization, by answering what makes character traits [End Page 541] virtues and what makes acts virtuous. Two-level eudaimonism involves a thin theory, where virtue consists in responding well to different spheres of human activity, and a thick theory, where responding well contributes to the agent's eudaimonia. Since virtuous people may characteristically perform nonvirtuous actions, virtuous actions are not necessarily what virtuous people characteristically do but actions that are endorsed by virtuous people from the perspective of virtue. The "Perspectives Doctrine" claims that virtuous people decide how to respond from the perspective of different virtues, and those perspectives offer incomplete and sometimes incompatible ways of responding. For instance, a temperate person endorsing an action as temperate from the perspective of temperance makes it temperate, but would not make it courageous, and an endorsement from the perspective of courage would not make her action temperate. Agents determine what is virtuous by asking virtuous people to consider, from the perspective of virtue, what should be done; when virtuous people are unavailable, agents can consult philosophers and social scientists who research the responses of virtuous people. Chapter 6 rejects the "Reciprocity of the Virtue Doctrine," which claims possessing one virtue entails possessing the rest, in favor of the "Unevenly Virtuous People Doctrine," on which people can have some but not all of the virtues; character typically improves at different paces in different areas of life. Chapter 7 rejects Philippa Foot's "Corrective Doctrine" of virtue as implausible idealization in favor of a traditionally Aristotelian "Doctrine of the Mean," and argues that the virtues of integrity, forgiveness, tolerance, open-mindedness, and civility are governed by that doctrine.Although character improvement seems to depend on idealization, by striving to achieve some end, part 2's five chapters paint an alternative picture. Chapter 8 defends a medical analogy over competing models philosophers typically employ to understand character improvement, including skill (Aristotle and Julia Annas), stage or path (Aristotle and Wouter Sanderse), self-cultivation (Mengzi), and self-construction (Xunzi) analogies. To improve character, one must look to a fine-grained list of possible character flaws, diagnose deficits in character, and then heal character flaws by employing targeted strategies, including "inculcation strategies, rehabilitation strategies, and strategies to improve society's ethical climate." Character improvement is complex and becomes more so when considering all of the ways one might err. Chapter 9 introduces an Aristotelian model for moral decision-making within each... (shrink)