Virtues are standardly characterized as stable dispositions. A stable disposition implies that the virtuous actor must be disposed to act well in any domain required of them. For example, a politician is not virtuous if s/he is friendly in debate with an opponent, but hostile at home with a partner or children. Some recent virtue theoretic accounts focus on specific domains in which virtues can be exercised. I call these domain-variant accounts of virtue. This paper examines two such accounts: Randall (...) Curren and Charles Dorn’s (2018) discussion of virtue in the civic sphere, and Michael Brady’s (2018) account of virtues of vulnerability. I argue that being consistent with the standard characterization of virtue requires generalizing beyond a domain. I suggest four actions the authors could take to preserve their accounts while remaining consistent with the standard characterization. I also discuss how virtue education could be enhanced by domain-variant accounts. (shrink)

In recent decades, the digital age and the Third Industrial Revolution have attracted significant attention in terms of their benefits and risks. Scholars have explored the impact of these changes on autonomy, freedom, human interactions, cognition, and knowledge sharing. However, the influence of the digital communicative environment on civic interactions and public deliberation processes has received limited attention from virtue theorists. This paper aims to address this gap. First, we discuss the challenges posed by the digital communicative environment, and we (...) present recent attempts to revive civility within this context. Then, we propose a twofold account of civility as consisting in the two virtues of civic benevolence and civil deliberation. Finally, we focus on the epistemic side of civility, civil deliberation, and we conduct the first empirical studies on two of its components. (shrink)

This contribution develops a defence of a universalist conception of Global Citizenship Education against three prominent critiques, which are, among others, put forward by postcolonial scholars. The first critique argues that GCE is essentially a project of globally minded elites and therefore expressive both of global educational injustices and of the values and lifestyles of a particular class or milieu. The second critique assumes that GCE is based on genuinely ‘Western values’, which are neither universally accepted nor universally valid and (...) therefore unjustly forced on members of non-Western cultures and societies. GCE, according to this critique, is assumed to be another version of the educational justification of a hegemonic and unjust global Western regime. The third critique focuses on the epistemological preconditions of GCE. It assumes that GCE relies on a particular, culturally embedded ‘Western epistemology,’ which perpetuates historically grown global educational and epistemic injustices by dominating and subjugating alternative epistemological approaches. With respect to the first critique I argue that it is to a certain extent sociologically plausible, but wrong when it is applied to the educational and political legitimacy of GCE. The second critique overestimates the consensus within the ‘Western tradition’ and underestimates the transnational dissemination of universalist ideals and values as well as its own reliance on universalist validity claims. I argue that in order to provide a plausible criticism of historically grown global educational and political injustices, it is imperative for GCE to integrate central insights provided by the postcolonial critique, without giving up on universalist ideals and values. The third critique is, according to my argumentation, based on flawed epistemological assumptions, which do not withstand critical scrutiny. Instead of identifying epistemic and scientific claims as the expressions of a particular ‘culture’ or geographical location, I defend the position that philosophical and scientific research should ideally be conceived as a democratic and universalist project, whose emancipatory potential can only be realized on the basis of a universalist epistemology. (shrink)

Many recent writers on democracy have lamented its decay and warned of its imminent death. We argue that the concerns are focused at three different levels of democracy. The most fundamental of these, celebrated by Tocqueville and by Dewey, recognizes the interactions and joint deliberations among citizens who seek sympathetic mutual engagement. Such engagement is increasingly rare in large-scale political life. In diagnosing and treating the problems, we recommend returning to the debate between Lippmann and Dewey, in which many of (...) the concerns now prominent were already voiced. This inspires the main work of the paper – the reconstruction of Dewey’s conception of democracy as a ‘mode of associated living’. We focus on the thesis that democracy is educative and explicate Dewey’s notion of growth, showing how democratic education contributes to three important functions: the capacity for sustaining oneself, the enrichment of individual experience, and the ability to enter into cooperative discussions with fellow citizens. Dewey’s conception of democratic education is directed at fostering particular virtues and, if citizens come to possess them, the need for Lippmann’s ‘omnicompetent individual’ vanishes. We conclude by suggesting that Dewey’s project of educating democratic character is pertinent for addressing the disaffection of our times. (shrink)