The aim of this paper is to offer a reconstruction of gratitude as an Aristotelian virtue. The account I propose is meant to be essentially Aristotelian although it is clearly not Aristotle’s own account. I start in section “Current Discourses on Gratitude” with an overview of recent discourses on gratitude in philosophy and psychology. I then proceed, in section “Putting the Aristotelian Pieces Together”, to spell out a formal characterisation of gratitude as an Aristotelian emotional virtue. Section “Reappraising Aristotle on (...) megalopsychia and Gratitude” pauses to explore how such a characterisation can be squared with Aristotle’s apparently unambiguous remarks about gratitude as a non-component of the virtuous makeup of the megalopsychoi. Finally, I conclude in section “Gratitude and Poetic Justice” by demonstrating the virtuosity of gratitude—what makes it intrinsically valuable as part of eudaimonia—by elucidating its association with the overarching emotional virtue of nemesis. (shrink)

Moral legitimacy entails intrinsic value and helps executives convince firm’s stakeholders and the general public of the ethical acceptability of an institution or its activities or projects. Social license to operate is the social approval of those affected by a certain business activity, and it is receiving increasing attention, especially in the context of controversial projects such as mining and public works. Moral legitimacy provides ethical support to SLO. Drawing from the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition and taking substantive justice and the common (...) good of society as the key references, this paper applies the Triple Font of Morality Theory and proposes four criteria which serve to evaluate moral legitimacy: contribution of the project or activity to the common good in a better way than other alternatives, morality of the means and procedures employed, ethical evaluation of the situation including stakeholder concerns and needs, and ethical evaluation of reasonably foreseeable consequences associated with the project and how to minimize possible damage or risks, and balance foreseeable negative consequences and benefits. The application of these criteria is illustrated through a project, presented as a case study, which certainly involved controversy and problems with SLO. The project was the construction of a rail tunnel for a high-speed train near the foundations of the Sagrada Familia, the well-known monumental church in Barcelona, Spain. (shrink)

Aristotle’s account of friendship has largely withstood the test of time. Yet there are overlooked elements of his account that, when challenged by apparent threats of current and emerging communication technologies, reveal his account to be remarkably prescient. I evaluate the danger that technological advances in communication pose to the future of friendship by examining and defending Aristotle’s claim that perfect or character-friends must live together. I concede that technologically-mediated communication can aid existing character-friendships, but I argue that character-friendships cannot (...) be created and sustained entirely through technological meditation. I examine text-based technologies, such as Facebook and email, and engage a non-text based technology that poses the greatest threat to my thesis—Skype. I then address philosophical literature on friendship and technology that has emerged in the last decade in Ethics and Information Technology to elucidate and defend my account by contrast. I engage Cocking and Matthews (2000), who argue that friendship cannot be created and sustained entirely through text-based contact, Briggle (2008), who argues that friendship can be created and sustained entirely through text-based contact, and Munn (2012), who argues that friendship cannot be created and entirely sustained through text-based contact but can be created and sustained entirely in immersive virtual worlds. My account discusses a certain kind of friendship, character-friendship, and a certain kind of technology, Skype, that these accounts do not. Examination of these essays helps to demonstrate that character friendship cannot be sustained entirely by technologically-aided communication and that character-friends must live together. (shrink)

Virtue ethics is widely recognized as one of three major approaches in contemporary moral philosophy and arguably the most influential normative theory in business ethics. Despite its rich pedigree in Western and Eastern philosophy, most work in contemporary virtue ethics is part of the Western tradition. The purpose of this Thematic Symposium is to foster dialogue between Western and Eastern conceptions of virtue in business and engage them with questions about the nature, justification, and content of the virtues in each (...) tradition. This Editorial offers a brief introduction to the problem, a summary of Western and Eastern varieties of virtue ethics, an overview of the six articles included in this Thematic Symposium, and a section with five common themes for further exploration and future collaborative research. (shrink)

The paper offers an account of luck, fate, and fortune. It begins by showing that extant accounts of luck are deficient because they do not identify the genus of which luck is a species. That genus of properties, the tychic, alert an agent to occasions on which the external world cooperates with or frustrates their goal-achievement. An agent’s sphere of competence is the set of goals that it is possible for them to reliably achieve. Luck concerns occasions on which there (...) is a mismatch between attempt and result; in bad luck the external world thwarts goal-achievement within the agent’s sphere of competence, in good luck the external world assists goal-achievement beyond the agent’s sphere of competence. Fateful events are those where, more passively, the agent finds the external world achieving or frustrating their goals. Fortune concerns the contraction and expansion of the agent’s sphere of competence. Eight reasons are given for accepting the account; its theoretical virtues and various things it explains. Lastly, three objections are answered; that the tychic properties relate to well-being rather than agency, that there are alternative theories of fortune available in the contemporary literature, that the account draws arbitrary distinctions between synonyms. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of why democracy is desirable in terms of a relational theory of democracy. The theory draws on concepts from Aristotelian, critical realist, and psychoanalytic theory. From Aristotle it takes the concepts of human flourishing and human virtues; from critical realism it takes the concepts of relational subjects and relational goods; from psychoanalysis it takes the concept of mutuality. The relational theory argues that democracy, particularly deliberative democracy, is desirable because it requires and facilitates the development (...) of citizens with the relational capacity of mutuality. The theory is developed sequentially in the following four theses. (1) The function of government is to promote the flourishing of its citizens. (2) Human flourishing results from citizens having access to relational goods. (3) Access to relational goods requires that citizens possess the relational capacity of mutuality. (4) Deliberative democracy is desirable because it both requires and facilitates mutuality. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to offer a mitigated moral justification of a much maligned emotional trait, pity, in the Aristotelian sense of ‘pain at deserved bad fortune’. I lay out Aristotle's taxonomic map of pity and its surrounding conceptual terrain and argue – by rehearsing modern accounts – that this map is not anachronistic with respect to contemporary conceptions. I then offer an ‘Aristotelian’ moral justification of pity, not as a full virtue intrinsically related to eudaimonia but as (...) a positive moral quality that has instrumental value in developing and sustaining a certain intrinsically valuable state of character – namely compassion. The justification offered is mitigated in the sense that it does not elevate pity to a virtuous disposition, constitutive of the good life; yet it does offer a crucial counterweight to Aristotle's own denunciation of pity. (shrink)

This article begins by tracing two issues to be kept in mind in discussing the theme of love as far back as Aristotle: on the one hand the polysemy of the term philia in Aristotle, and on the other hand the fact that there is a focal or core meaning of philia that provides order to that polysemy. Secondly, it is briefly suggested that the same issues are, mutatis mutandis, central for understanding the discussion of love or Liebe by Hegel, (...) the central classic reference in debates on recognition. Thirdly, by pointing out a certain ambiguity in Harry Frankfurt’s recent work on love, the article focuses more closely on the thought that love in the simple sense which Aristotle had pinpointed as the focal meaning of philia, which is arguably at the core of Hegel’s discussion of Liebe, and which still forms at least one of the core senses of the term, is a ‘personifying’ attitude of recognition. Finally, drawing on the above points the article addresses the question whether love as a form of recognition is restricted to intimate relations such as those between family-members, ‘lovers’, close friends and so on, or whether it has applications in interhuman relations more broadly. The answer to this question, it is suggested, is essential for the viability of ethically substantial notions of solidarity beyond circles of close acquaintances, whether within the civil society, across nations, or towards future generations. (shrink)

This article traces the history of the concept of dignity in Western thought, arguing that it became a formal Catholic theological concept only in the late nineteenth century. Three uses of the word are distinguished: intrinsic, attributed, and inflorescent dignity, of which, it is argued, the intrinsic conception is foundational. The moral norms associated with respect for intrinsic dignity are discussed briefly. The scriptural and theological bases for adopting the concept of dignity as a Christian idea are elucidated. The article (...) concludes by discussing the relevance of this concept of dignity to the spiritual and ethical care of the dying. (shrink)

Aristotle's doctrine of the mean is expressed in quantitative terms, but this has been hard for some people to take literally, its more elaborate versions sometimes being described as “extremely silly.” Roughly two books of the Nicomachean Ethics are permeated with talk of character traits which are either deficient or excessive, however, and the aim of this paper is to examine how the doctrine might meet the objections of its critics.

We answer the title question with a qualified “No.” We arrive at this answer by spelling out what the proper place of the concept 'happiness' is in a neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics: (1) Happiness in the sense of personal well-being has only a loose relation to virtue; it doesn't deserve any prominent place in virtue ethics. (2) Happiness in the sense of flourishing is impossible without virtue, but that doesn't imply that individual actions should aim at flourishing. (3) Instead, flourishing sets (...) the standard of good practical reasoning; it is hardly ever the proper aim of a practical inference. This paper begins with a common (mis)interpretation of neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics, on which it is a form of rational egoism. We then develop our alternative understanding against this foil. (shrink)

This paper offers a theory of filial piety on which piety is the ethical virtue that responds to the action of person-creating. Piety is the virtue of a creature qua creature. I begin by identifying the action of person-creating as the action of a parent. I then offer some points from the philosophy of action to delineate the action of person-creating. Next, I explain the metaphysical states that this action gives rise to and their value. Parent and child fall in (...) the category of relatives, discussed by Aristotle in his Categories. More specifically, Aristotle says that parent and child are relatives as creator and created. Agreeing with but going beyond Aristotle, I show how parent and child are creator and created as paradigm and image. A pious child is one who images their paradigm well. A child does this by participating in and perfecting the person-creating action of their parent, that is, by being a good person. I argue for the theory’s acceptance on the grounds that it better explains common intuitive judgments about filial piety than do the gratitude theory and the special goods theory (the two most influential and plausible competing theories of filial piety in the philosophical literature). (shrink)

In this paper I argue that both defence and criticism of the claim that humans act ‘under the guise of the good’ neglects the metaphysical roots of the theory. I begin with an overview of the theory and its modern commentators, with critics noting the apparent possibility of acting against the good, and supporters claiming that such actions are instances of error. These debates reduce the ‘guise of the good’ to a claim about intention and moral action, and in so (...) doing have become divorced from the theory's roots in classical and medieval philosophy. Aristotle and Aquinas’ ‘guise of the good’ is primarily a metaphysical claim resting on the equivalence between actuality and goodness, from which conclusions about moral action are derived. I show the reasoning behind their theory and how it forms the basis for the claims about intention and action at the centre of the modern debate. Finally, I argue that the absence of its original foundation is apparent in recent attacks on the ‘guise of the good’. It is unsurprising that modern action theory and ethics have not always been able to comfortably accommodate the ‘guise of the good’; they are only telling half of the story. (shrink)

The harmony thesis claims that a virtuous agent will not experience inner conflict or pain when acting. The continent agent, on the other hand, is conflicted or pained when acting virtuously, making him inferior to the virtuous agent. But following Karen Stohr’s counterexample, we can imagine a case like a company owner who needs to fire some of her employees to save her company, where acting with conflict or pain is not only appropriate, but necessary in the situation. This creates (...) a problem for virtue ethicists because the virtue/continence distinction cannot easily be drawn in the case. One solution offered by Stohr is to claim that a virtuous agent will respond with an intensity of feeling corresponding to her correct judgment, whereas a continent agent will miss the mark: he will feel too much or too little pain in response to his correct judgment of value. This demarcation, I argue, is too strict because it entails something like a mean resembling a moral virtue or vice regarding pain, being inconsistent with our ordinary understanding of continence. In dealing with the difficulty, I argue that Aristotle’s virtue of endurance is better suited to account for the problem case. The following move explains why the case of the company owner is problematic: the company owner was missing a virtue on which we did not have the conceptual resources to elaborate. This points to a deeper problem in virtue ethics that needs to be addressed. (shrink)

The thesis of this paper is that Platonic Forms are angels. I make this identification by claiming that Platonic Forms have the characteristics of angels, in particular, that Platonic Forms are alive. I offer four arguments for this claim. First, it seems that engaging in self-directed action is a sufficient condition for being alive. The Forms are, as teleological activities, self-directed actions. Second, bodies receive their being from their Forms, and some bodies are essentially alive. Third, in the Good, all (...) the types of goodness, including life, are identical. The Forms are appearances of the Good. Fourth, since the Good imparts as much goodness as it can, the Forms are alive unless there is some bar to their being alive. There are good reasons to think that there is no such bar. I then show that ethical vices do not give body to human form, but give body to other forms—those that are evil angels. Lastly, I provide a survey of the relationships that various religious traditions posit between ethical vice and the demonic. (shrink)

ABSTRACTTaking its starting point in an ancient understanding of hospitality and guest friendship, the paper offers a philosophical interpretation of the ethical dimension of alliances. Entering in...

This article argues, from a critical realist perspective, that it would be beneficial to extend thinking on how personal and social education could become more central to students’ learning. We explore how constructive-informed arrangements which emphasize cognitive skills and affective qualities could be realized through experiential approaches to learning. Our theorizing is informed by neo-Aristotelian thinking on the importance of identifying mutually acceptable value commitments which can cultivate practical wisdom as well as generally benefit society. Thereafter, we outline how the (...) recent writings of Tiberius could inform thinking on how, epistemologically and ethically, a first person perspective on learning and personal growth could connect with normative decision making on how to make good life choices. We conclude by briefly highlighting the methodological potential of using outdoor learning environments to help students make informed and wise judgements which show evidence of discernment, deliberation and effective decision making. (shrink)

This paper studies the connections between the notions of prolonging life and a good death in Antiquity. It is demonstrated that while prolonged life generally meant forestalling the human constitution’s death, ancient philosophers also pointed to the limitations of prolongation. The paper shows how philosophers welcomed prolonged life when it was shown to foster movement toward the good, such as self-realization and social usefulness. Yet, they rejected prolongation when it led to the perpetuation of evil, such as social uselessness and (...) suffering. We ask whether a contemporary good death is a mercy killing or an improvement of prolonged life, as the ultimate end of “goods practicable for man”. (shrink)

The research reported in this paper set out to investigate ethics in the initial stages of construction projects. Briefing is the first real contact stage between the commissioner (client/employer) of a project — at this stage a potential project — and those involved in project realization — the designers and, subsequently, the constructors. It is well known that early decisions are of greatest impact and so, the importance of the initial contacts, communications and consequent decisions are paramount. Different project participants (...) are known to pursue individual objectives to varying degrees as well as possessing different perspectives and perceptions and operating/behaving in different ways. Hence, determination of the appropriate form, content etc. of a project is, inevitably, a matter of exercising value judgements and compromises and so, involves ethical considerations. A case study of a project through the briefing stage is reported and analysed, from initial contacts to scheme approval. It is apparent that a number of ethical concerns are manifest through the various actions of the major participants. (shrink)

Mimesis and the portrayal of reflective life in action : Aristotle's Poetics and Sophocles' Oedipus the King -- The portrayal of reflective life in action in poetry : Shakespeare's dramatization of the poet in Sonnets 1-126 -- The portrayal of reflective life in action in music : Bach's Prelude and Fugue in B flat minor (The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1) and Beethoven's String Quartet in A minor, opus 132 -- The portrayal of reflective life in action in painting : discovery (...) of the inner life of sensory perception in watercolours by Turner and oil paintings by Cézanne. (shrink)

The paper offers an account of co-parenthood according to which co-parents are parent and child to one another. The paper begins by reviewing extant theories of the value of being a parent, to see whether the value of co-parenthood is reducible to this. Finding that it is not, I briefly elaborate a theory of parenthood on which parents are those who create persons. Using Aristotle’s four causes as a helpful prism, I outline how parents are the cause of their child, (...) and how in causing a child together co-parents become parent and child to one another. For instance, since parents create children by offering themselves as models to be copied, co-parents should enjoy the best type of friendship with one another, each treating the other’s flourishing as a human person as their end. I suggest that co-parenthood contains parenthood virtually, that the co-parents’ love of their child is a manifestation of their love for one another, that the teleological fulfilled state of the friendship between parent and child exists in the friendship of co-parents. (shrink)

Anger, far from being only a personal emotion, often signals a breakdown in existing societal structures like the justice system. This does not mean we should uncritically submit to our angry impulses, but it does mean that anger can reveal larger issues in the world worthy of attention. If we banish anger from the socio-political landscape, we risk losing its insights. To defend that claim, I turn to a range of sources from ancient China and Greece—philosophy, poetry, drama, and political (...) theory—that depict and analyze anger in a variety of situations and people. My basic claim is not that anger is simply “good” or “bad” but rather that it helps reveal and clarify our values, often pointing us towards real situations deserving of our ethical scrutiny. I situate the project amidst ongoing debates in analytic philosophy of emotions and feminist philosophy, joining the conceptual precision and clarity of the former with the latter’s attention to lived experience. Such cross-cultural, multidisciplinary conceptual analysis of anger parochializes Aristotelian understandings of anger by introducing different types and functions of anger. What role does anger play, for example, in a minister rebuking the king in an ancient Chinese court? How do Greek sources depict female anger differently than male anger, and why? By using ancient and comparative sources, I show how deeply anger is shaped by particular cultural and social structures, whilst remaining recognizably anger. (shrink)

This open access book presents a comparative study of two classics of world literature, offering the first sustained study of what unites and divides the Nicomachean Ethics and the Bhagavad Gita. -/- Asking what the texts think is the nature of moral action and how it relates to the highest good, Roopen Majithia shows how the Gita stresses the objectivity of knowledge and freedom from being a subject, while the Ethics emphasizes the knower, working out Aristotle’s central commitment to the (...) idea of substance as the primary building block of the world. Yet both the Gita and the Ethics explain variety in human behaviour in terms of three driving forces. Both agree moral agency is a construct that is a function of background, education and habit, presupposing a cultural, political and economic infrastructure. -/- What distinguishes the texts is how the content of right action is generated. Reading them together, alert to their individual accounts of how the practical relates to the reflective dimensions of life, Majithaia enriches our understanding of two cornerstone texts in the Greek and Indian philosophical traditions. -/- The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollectionsdotcom. Open access was funded by The Marjorie Young Bell Faculty Fund and The Hart Almerrin Massey Endowment. (shrink)