Ethics for Rational Animals brings to light a novel account of akrasia, practical wisdom, and character virtue through an original and comprehensive study of the moral psychology at the basis of Aristotle's ethics. It argues that practical wisdom is a persuasive rational excellence, that virtue is a listening excellence, and that the ignorance involved in akrasia is in fact a failure of persuasion. Aristotle's moral psychology emerges from this reconstruction as a qualified intellectualism. The view is intellectualistic because it describes (...) practical wisdom as the sort of knowledge that can govern desire and action and akrasia as involving a form of ignorance. However, Aristotle's intellectualism is qualified because practical wisdom goes beyond grasping the truth about the human good, for it must also be able to convey the truth persuasively to non-rational cognition and desires. (shrink)

Habits figure in action‐explanations because of their distinctive force. But what is the force of habit, and how does it motivate us? In this paper, I argue that the force of habit is the feeling of familiarity one has with the familiar course of action, where this feeling reveals a distinctive reason for acting in the usual way. I do this by considering and rejecting a popular account of habit's force in terms of habit's apparent automaticity, by arguing that one (...) can do something out of habit and from deliberation, before going on to defend The Familiarity View. (shrink)

That character virtue is produced, according to Aristotle, through a process of moral habituation is a familiar feature of his ethics. And yet our feeling of familiarity with the notions of habit and habituation can engender a like feeling of familiarity with the process Aristotle describes, and encourage us to conceive of this process in an overly narrow way. In this chapter, I examine Aristotle’s notion of ethos and ethismos (habit, habituation) in the Nicomachean Ethics to better understand what Aristotle (...) means to convey when he claims that character virtue ‘arises from habit’. I argue that to characterise habituation as ‘non-rational’ is misleading, particularly when this characterisation forecloses questions about what kinds of activity may be involved in the process of habituation, and what kind of states can be produced as a result. Habituation, I argue, is not characterised as a non-rational process, but a process that involves action and activity. This allows that the process of habituation may be understood in a relatively broad way and as potentially involving a range of activities which engage and develop a variety of psychological capacities. It also raises interesting questions about what a learner’s activity affords and how this contributes to her successful habituation. (shrink)

Aristotle famously distinguishes between merely doing a virtuous action and acting in the way in which a virtuous person would. Against an interpretation prominent in recent scholarship, I argue that ‘acting virtuously,’ in the sense of exercising a virtue actually possessed, is prior to ‘virtuous action,’ understood generically. I propose that the latter notion is best understood as a derivative abstraction from the former, building upon a reading of a neglected distinction between per se and coincidentally just action in Nicomachean (...) Ethics 5, and thus shed light on the meaning and philosophical significance of the priority of acting from virtue. (shrink)

In anticipation of updating annotated bibliographies on Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics for Oxford Bibliography Online, I have sought to keep a running tabulation of all books, edited collections, translations, and journal articles which are primarily devoted to Aristotle’s ethical and political writings (including their historical reception but excluding neo–Aristotelian virtue ethics). In general, criteria for inclusion in this bibliography are that the work be: (1) publication in a peer–reviewed or academic/university press between 2011–2020; (2) “substantially” devoted to one of Aristotle’s (...) ethical or political works (e.g., Pol, EN, EE, MM, Athenian Constitution, Protrepticus); and/or (3) devoted to ethical or political concepts examined elsewhere in Aristotle’s corpus (e.g., Rhetoric, Poetics, zoological treatises, etc.). I encourage scholars to alert me about published works that I have omitted or listed incorrectly. (shrink)

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)

In Nicomachean Ethics 2.4 Aristotle distinguishes between virtuous action and acting virtuously: a virtuous action counts as virtuously performed if done with knowledge, chosen for its own sake, and from a stable character. Since the ‘same’ action can be performed virtuously or non-virtuously, interpreters have concluded that these ‘agential conditions’ are indifferent incidental features with no bearing on the virtuous character of the action. I propose that they are instead ‘perfections,’ i.e., constitutive features of virtuous action as such, admitting of (...) degrees. Unlike the alternative interpretation, my proposal fully harmonizes with three important Aristotelian doctrines: that action from virtue is prior to action merely in conformity with virtue; that character virtue is a perfection of human beings; and that practical life is not properly characterized in transitive, productive terms. My proposal still allows for a generic sense of ‘sameness’ in which the ‘same’ action may be virtuously or non-virtuously performed. (shrink)

This book presents a novel interpretation of Aristotle's account of how shame instils virtue, and defends its philosophical import. Shame is shown to provide motivational continuity between the actions of the learners and the virtuous dispositions that they will eventually acquire.

This chapter explores the topic of self-knowledge in ancient thought, asking in particular what the ancient concept (or concepts) of knowing oneself amounts to. The chapter begins by contrasting the issues which occupy ancient and contemporary discussions of self-knowledge, and the obvious points of continuity and discontinuity between the two. The author isolates two forms of self-knowledge: cognitive self-knowledge or knowledge of one’s own mental states, and dispositional self-knowledge or knowledge of one’s moral or intellectual dispositions, and traces the treatment (...) of these forms of self-knowledge in the works of Plato, Aristotle, Hellenistic philosophers, and Plotinus. In the course of discussing the texts of each thinker or school, and the relevant scholarship, this chapter also canvasses the ways in which the chapters in the rest of this volume seek to engage with some of the problems or issues that have emerged. (shrink)

The concept of imitation is both ubiquitous and curiously under-analysed in theoretical discussions about the cognitive powers and capacities of machines, and in particular—for what is the focus of this paper—the cognitive capacities of large language models (LLMs). The question whether LLMs understand what they say and what is said to them, for instance, is a disputed one, and it is striking to see this concept of imitation being mobilised here for sometimes contradictory purposes. After illustrating and discussing how this (...) concept is being used in various ways in the context of conversational systems, I draw a sketch of the different associations that the term ‘imitation’ conveys and distinguish two main senses of the notion. The first one is what I call the ‘imitative behaviour’ and the second is what I call the ‘status of imitation’. I then highlight and untangle some conceptual difficulties with these two senses and conclude that neither of these applies to LLMs. Finally, I introduce an appropriate description that I call ‘imitation manufacturing’. All this ultimately helps me to explore a radical negative answer to the question of machine understanding. (shrink)

Moral virtue is, for Aristotle, a state to which an agent’s motivation is central. For anyone interested in Aristotle’s account of moral development this invites reflection on two questions: how is it that virtuous motivational dispositions are established? And what contribution do the moral learner’s existing motivational states make to the success of her habituation? I argue that views which demand that the learner act with virtuous motives if she is to acquire virtuous dispositions misconstrue the nature and structure of (...) the habituation process, but also obscure Aristotle’s crucial insight that the very practice of virtuous actions affords a certain discovery and can be transformative of an agent’s motivational states. Drawing attention, in Aristotle’s account, to an asymmetry between the agential perspective and the observation of others, I consider what the agential perspective affords the learner, and offer a novel interpretation of the role a learner’s existing motives play in her habituation. (shrink)

Among the educative games of Plato’s Cretan city, choral performances have a prominent role. This paper examines the function of play (παιδιά) in the choral education in virtue in Plato’s Laws. I reconstruct the notion of play as it is elaborated throughout this dialogue, and then show how it contributes to solving the problem of virtue acquisition in the Athenian’s account of moral education through songs and dances. I argue that play in the Laws is best understood as an imitative (...) activity that is intrinsically pleasurable, ordered by rules and patterns of repetition, and undertaken for its own sake by a player whose psychic condition is childish. Thus interpreted, we are in a better position to see why choruses must be engaged in playfully. Because the self-likening process (ὁμοίωσις) choral performances aim at requires pleasure and because pleasure normally obtains when there is a concordance between one’s character and the imitations, virtue acquisition is best secured if the imitations of virtue in choruses are performed or spectated playfully. (shrink)

In Nicomachean Ethics 2.4 Aristotle raises a puzzle about moral habituation. Scholars take the puzzle to concern how a learner could perform virtuous actions, given the assumption that virtue is prior to virtuous action. I argue, instead, that Aristotle is concerned to defend the necessity of practice, given the assumption that virtue is reducible to virtuous action.