For Aristotle, in making the deliberate choice to incorporate the extensive requirements of the young into the aims of one’s life, people realise their own good. In this paper I will argue that this is a promising way to think about the ethics of care and parenting. Modern theories, which focus on duty and obligation, direct our attention to conflicts of interests in our caring activities. Aristotle’s explanation, in contrast, explains how nurturing others not only develops a core part of (...) the self but also lead to an appreciation of the value of interpersonal relationships. (shrink)

Aristotle’s views on the choiceworthiness of friends might seem both internally inconsistent and objectionably instrumentalizing. On the one hand, Aristotle maintains that perfect friends or virtue friends are choiceworthy and lovable for their own sake, and not merely for the sake of further ends. On the other hand, in Nicomachean Ethics IX.9, Aristotle appears somehow to account for the choiceworthiness of such friends by reference to their utility as sources of a virtuous agent’s robust self-awareness. I examine Aristotle’s views on (...) the utility and choiceworthiness of friends, and offer a novel reading of Nicomachean Ethics IX.9. On this reading, Aristotle accepts a version of instrumental conditionalism about final value, that is, the thesis that goods (including friends) can be choiceworthy for their own sake (i.e., possess final or end value) at least partly on account of their instrumental properties. In articulating what sort of instrumental conditionalism it is reasonable to attribute to Aristotle, I argue that Aristotle appeals to the utility of perfect friends as part of a broadly material causal account of why such friends are choiceworthy for their own sake. On this reading, perfect friends are not choiceworthy for the sake of their utility in eliciting self-awareness; rather, their choiceworthiness for their own sake is (at least partly) realized in, or constituted by, their conduciveness to the virtuous agent’s self-awareness. This reading, I argue, frees Aristotle from the charge of inconsistency: Aristotle can appeal to the conduciveness of perfect friends to the virtuous agent’s self-awareness as a way of explaining why such friends are choiceworthy for their own sake. (shrink)

This article explores in greater depth the historiographical traditions concerning Herennius Pontius, a Samnite wisdom-practitioner who is said by the Peripatetic Aristoxenus of Tarentum to have been an interlocutor of the philosophers Archytas of Tarentum and Plato of Athens. Specifically, it argues that extant speeches attributed to Herennius Pontius in the writings of Cassius Dio and Appian preserve a philosophy of “extreme proportional benefaction” among unequals. Greek theories of ethics among unequals such as those of Aristotle and Archytas of Tarentum, (...) which aim for moderation, can be distinguished from that attributed to Herennius Pontius, which is circumstantial and stipulates extreme responses to extremes. Romans, in particular Appius Claudius Caecus and Sulla, celebrate and espouse proverbial wisdom strikingly similar to the theory of “extreme proportional benefaction” associated with Herennius Pontius, and in contrast to Greek ethics of moderation. Such comparisons suggest that starting in the late fourth century BCE, Romans and Samnites may have held shared ideological principles, as defined against Greek cultural paradigms. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung: Freundschaft ist ein wichtiges Thema der aristotelischen Moraltheorie. Aristoteles versteht unter Freundschaft die optimale Form der Beziehung, in der sich die Beteiligten gegenseitig schätzen und Wohltaten leisten. Im Rahmen seiner Freundschaftstheorie hat Aristoteles auch eine Auffassung der Freundschaft zwischen Eltern und Kindern entworfen. Im Vergleich zu seiner allge-meinen Freundschaftstheorie haben seine Ansätze zur Freundschaft zwischen Eltern und Kindern sowohl in der historischen als auch in der systematischen Forschung wenig Aufmerksamkeit gefunden. Das Ziel dieses Artikels ist es, die Auffassung dieser (...) speziellen Beziehung im Kontext seiner Moral- und Freundschaftstheorie darzustellen, zu interpretieren, aber auch weiterzuentwickeln bzw. zu vervollständi-gen. Zudem wird eine kritische Beurteilung sowie Korrektur einiger Aspekte dieser Theorie, insbesondere der Gläubiger-Schuldner-Auffassung der Eltern-Kinder-Beziehung, vorgenommen. Diese Auseinandersetzung mit Aristoteles’ Theorie führt zu einer klareren, systematischeren, aber auch attraktiveren und angemesseneren aristotelischen Theorie der Eltern-Kinder-Freundschaft, als sie in den Schriften des Aristoteles vorliegt. -/- Summary: Friendship (philia), the optimal form of a relationship, in which the friends love and do good things for each other, is an important theme of Aristotle’s ethics. In the framework of his friendship theory, Aristotle also outlined an account of the specific friendship emerging within the relationship between parents and their children. In comparison to his general theory of friendship, which has been widely discussed both by historians of philosophy and by ethicists, has this account received little at-tention. The objective of this article is to present and interpret, but also to develop and qualify, this account of parent-child friendship in the context of Aristotle’s general friendship theory. I shall also suggest that some aspects of this theory, in particular the debtor-creditor account of filial duties, need to be reassessed. This interpretation and discussion should yield a clearer, more systematic but also more attractive and adequate Aristotelian account of the optimal parent-children relationship than the one we find in the texts of Aristotle. (shrink)

This paper reconsiders Aristotle’s arguments inNicomachean Ethics9.9 concerning the claim that a virtuous friend is naturally desirable. The paper demonstrates that a virtuous friend, according to Aristotle, is naturally desirable not only because he is good, but also because he is one’s own. Although the two are different ways of being desirable, the paper shows that Aristotle takes being one’s own to consist in a distinctive kind of being good. This enables him to extend the grounds of virtue-friendship beyond the (...) good character narrowly conceived, and thus explain why a friend is preferable to other virtuous people. (shrink)