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)

According to a prominent narrative, the problem of recognition arises in the modern period in opposition to premodern notions of honor. This chapter invites us to reconsider this narrative by examining two views of honor in ancient Greek thought. I first show that Homeric honor includes contestable norms of reciprocal respect and esteem for individual virtue. I then show how Plato appropriates the Homeric view in his ethical psychology yet articulates a competing view of the nature and value of honor. (...) By showing that ancient Greek honor is more continuous with theories of recognition than has been appreciated, this chapter offers fresh perspectives on a central strand of ancient Greek ethics and its relevance to social and political thought. (shrink)

This paper argues that Aristotelian thumos is a non-reducible mental phenomenon that plays a central role in Aristotle’s theory of the mind, motivation, and action. For Aristotle, thumos is not primarily, as others have argued, a desire for the noble, social appraisal, or retaliation; rather, it is an inner drive or impulse to act. More precisely, it is an executory urge to implement or enact one’s ends or goals, whatever they are. Thumos accounts for someone’s proneness to spring into action (...) and can contribute to bringing about rational or non-rational, first-order desires. It is a second-order motivation, which both human and non-human animals have and that comes in degrees: we can be more or less thumotic, which amounts to being more or less disposed to making first-order desires effective so that they issue in actions. Aristotelian thumos, then, anticipates features of the modern notion of the will. Along the way, I argue that thumos is key to Aristotle’s efforts to differentiate and hierarchically organize species, characters, genders, and peoples. (shrink)

There are many reasons to worry about shame in moral development. Shame can be employed for bad ends, such as manipulation and making others feel powerless. Shame is often associated with denial and hiding behaviors, social phobia, and anxiety. It is also not a motivation suitable for performing virtuous actions. This article argues that, nevertheless, well-ordered shame plays an indispensable and constructive role, as part of a mixed-methods approach in the development of moral character. This article assesses various reasons why (...) shame has fallen out of favor among Western moral educators and demonstrates why each of these reasons falls short of providing a compelling case against employing shame. It defends shame on epistemic and virtue developmental grounds. Moreover, it proposes ways to employ shame in character education, while mitigating potential damages and avoiding the concerns raised by social scientists. (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)

Seit Dodds’ Anwendung des Begriffs „Schamkultur“ auf die griechische Kultur genießt das Thema Scham die besondere Aufmerksamkeit der Gräzisten. Basierend auf einer detaillierten Analyse der relevanten Belegstellen im gesamten platonischen Corpus und einer kritischen Auseinandersetzung mit den vorherigen einschlägigen Forschungen, versucht die vorliegende Arbeit Platons Konzeption der Scham systematisch zu erläutern, und zwar thematisch unter den folgenden vier Perspektiven: dem sokratischen elenchos, der Wahrheitsliebe, dem Moralverständnis sowie der Moralerziehung im Staat. Die Studie zielt einerseits darauf ab, aufzuzeigen, dass Platons Verständnis (...) von Scham nicht so unreif ist, wie man bislang dachte; andererseits möchte sie vor Augen führen, dass Platon Scham nicht, wie traditionell angenommen, als nur negativ erachtet, sondern ihre positive Rolle in verschiedenen Gebieten durchaus anerkennt. Es wird gezeigt, dass Scham und die ihr verwandten Emotionen von Bedeutung sowohl für den platonischen Sokrates als auch für die platonische Philosophie im Ganzen sind, auch wenn der Begriff „Schamkultur“ wohl keine zutreffende Bezeichnung für seine Zeit darstellt. (shrink)

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). Criteria for inclusion in this bibliography are: (1) published after January 1, 2021 (including pre-publication articles assigned a DOI); (2) 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)

Aristotle’s conception of vice is notoriously problematic. On the one hand, it appears as the antithesis of virtue; as such, it may seem, like virtue, to rest on principles, except that in the case of vice the principles are bad ones. On the other hand, vice may be something more like the privation or absence of virtue: not the negative pole or opposite of virtue but the condition of not being at all guided by rational principles or logos. As a (...) way of approaching Aristotle’s notion of vice, I propose to examine two disapproved qualities that Aristotle mentions briefly in his Rhetoric, and which are adduced as the opposites of emotions. The two qualities are ingratitude, which is represented as the opposite of feeling grateful, and shamelessness, the opposite of the emotion shame. Both ingratitude and shamelessness have the appearance of vices, even though they are contrasted here not with virtues but with passions or pathê. Examining the logic of these pairings will, I hope, shed light not only on ingratitude and shamelessness but also on the complex and unstable nature of vice itself. (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 paper is about the relationship between leadership, organisational morals, and temporality. We argue that engaging with questions of time and temporality may help us overcome the overly agentic view of organisational morals and leadership ethics that dominates extant literature. Our analysis of the role of time in organizational morals and leadership ethics starts from a virtue-based approach to leading large-scale moral endeavours. We ask: how can we account for organizational morality across generations and independently of the leader? To address (...) this question, we studied the leadership model of the Jesuits, a Catholic Religious Order. Our case reveals that a virtue-based model of leadership does not necessarily imply that those who are selected to lead the organization are themselves virtuous, but that the processes underpinning the exercise of leadership are cyclical and repeated as truthfully as possible. Virtuous leadership, for the Jesuits, is therefore about the construction of an ideal type of leadership against which the processes which sustain it were designed. Our theoretical contribution is twofold. First, we propose an habitual understanding of moral forms of leadership, in which the procedural is constitutive of moral forms of organising; second, we explain how “timelessness”, understood as the quality of not changing as years go by, allowed the Jesuits to centre the processes which sustain their ethical model on the repetition, across space and time, of said processes, rather than on their outcome. We conclude that the search for virtue might be more relevant for large-scale moral endeavours than virtue itself. (shrink)