The Demandingness of Virtue (original) (raw)
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Stoic Virtue: A Contemporary Interpretation
Philosophers' Imprint, 2020
The Stoic understanding of virtue is often taken to be a non-starter. Many of the Stoic claims about virtue -- that virtue requires moral perfection and that all who are not fully virtuous are vicious -- are thought to be completely out of step with our commonsense notion of virtue, making the Stoic account more of an historical oddity than a seriously defended view. Despite many voices to the contrary, I will argue that there is a way of making sense of these Stoic claims. Recent work in linguistics has shown that there is a distinction between relative and absolute gradable adjectives, with the absolute variety only applying to perfect exemplars. I will argue that taking virtue terms to be absolute gradable adjectives, and thus that they apply only to those who are fully virtuous, is one way to make sense of the Stoic view. I will also show how interpreting virtue-theoretic adjectives as absolute gradable adjectives makes it possible to defend Stoicism against its most common objections, demonstrating how the Stoic account of virtue might once again be a player in the contemporary landscape of virtue theorizing.
The Routledge Companion to Virtue Ethics
2015
Introduction 1 Virtue, say the Stoics, is the finest of all things, outshining pleasure, wealth, and even life itself, as much as the sun outshines a candle. Indeed, it is the only good thing, and all of the things that we mistakenly value and pursue are merely indifferents, with no tendency to bring us happiness. Virtue is necessary for our happiness, and sufficient for our happiness, and indeed the sole component and contributor to our happiness. Whoever has virtue is perfectly happy, and indeed no less happy than Zeus himself. Alas, that none of us have it! For virtue is so demanding, requires such a pitch of perfection, that no human beings known to us-not even the founders of the Stoic school themselves-are truly virtuous. Not even close. We are all entirely vicious, and entirely wretched and miserable as a result. Nor is any of us more virtuous than another: all vicious people are equally vicious. It is possible to make progress towards virtue, the Stoics insist, but during this progress you are still thoroughly vicious and not even partly virtuous. The person making progress towards virtue is like a drowning man some distance beneath the surface of the sea: whether you are five feet underwater or five miles, you are drowning in either case. You might be getting closer to a place where you will be able to breathe, but that doesn't mean that you are more able to breathe as you get closer. So long as you are vicious, you are also insane, and enslaved, and an enemy of all mankind. Only the virtuous-whom the Stoics refer to as "Sages"-are sane, free, and friendly, and only they are wealthy, good-looking, and lovable. These are some of the extraordinary and counter-intuitive theses that the Stoics maintained about virtue. Considered in isolation from their theoretical context in the Stoic system as a whole, they look laughably implausible. When understood in light of the Stoics' broader commitments and theoretical framework, they do not (in my opinion) gain much plausibility, but they do at least acquire some philosophical motivation and rationale. Whatever philosophical interest the Stoic theory of virtue has, can only be seen through examining its role in the larger structure.
To have a virtue is to possess a certain kind of trait of character that is appropriate in pursuing the moral good at which the virtue aims. Human beings are assumed to be capable of attaining those traits. Yet, a number of scholars are skeptical about the very existence of such character traits. They claim a sizable amount of empirical evidence in their support. This article is concerned with the existence and explanatory power of character as a way to assess the possibility of achieving moral virtue, with particular attention paid to business context. I aim to unsettle the so-called situationist challenge to virtue ethics. In the course of this article, I shall defend four claims, namely, that virtues are more than just behavioral dispositions, that at least some virtues may not be unitary traits, that psychologists cannot infer virtues from overt behavior, and that the situationist data do not account for the observational equivalence of traits. Since it rests on a misconception of what virtue is, the situationist objection remains unconvincing.
Virtue, character and situation
Journal of Moral Philosophy, 2006
Abstract: Philosophers have recently argued that traditional discussions of virtue and character presuppose an account of behaviour that experimental psychology has shown to be false. Behaviour does not issue from global traits such as prudence, temperance, courage or fairness, they claim, but from local traits such as sailing-in-rough-weather-with-friends-courage and office-party-temperance. The data employed provides evidence for this view only if we understand it in the light of a behaviourist construal of traits in terms of ...
The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, 2013
This essay examines the different answers that British moralists gave to the question ‘what does virtue consist in?’ Rather than as a royal road to present-day views in ethics, their answers are best understood when considered against the background of early modern natural law theories and their projected metaphysics of morals. The emerging ‘science of morality’ dealt with the metaphysical problem of determining what sort of thing virtue is. Considered from this vantage point, the British moralists struggled with the problem of deciding whether moral concepts signify laws of nature, rational drives in human beings, irrational drives in human beings, volitions of a legislator, or social institutions. British moral philosophies in the eighteenth century can be divided up according to whether they defended the thesis that moral qualities are artificial, the thesis that they are part of nature, or the thesis that they are the product of historical experience.
Against the Bifurcation of Virtue
Noûs
It has become customary in the virtue epistemological literature to distinguish between responsibilist and reliabilist virtue theories. More recently, certain problems affecting the former have prompted epistemologists to suggest that this distinction in virtue theory maps on to a distinction in virtue, specifically between character and faculty virtue. I argue that we lack good reason to bifurcate virtue in this manner, and that this moreover counts in favor of the virtue reliabilist.