Aristotle's account of external goods in Nicomachean Ethics I 8-12 is often thought to amend his narrow claim that happiness is virtuous activity. I argue, to the contrary, that on Aristotle's account, external goods are necessary for happiness only because they are necessary for virtuous activity. My case innovates in three main respects: I offer a new map of EN I 8-12; I identify two mechanisms to explain why virtuous activity requires external goods, including a psychological need for external goods; (...) and I show the relevance of Aristotle's distinction between wishing and choosing. On the view I attribute to Aristotle, our capacity to choose virtuously requires, first, that we wish for external goods (because virtue requires the right attitudes of evaluation) and, second, that these wishes are generally fulfilled (because the social consequences and psychological pain of unfulfilled wishes undermine our opportunity to act virtuously and to take pleasure in acting virtuously). I close with discussion of how Aristotelians should defend this approach. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 60, Issue 1, pp 60 - 87 Aristotle invokes a specifically human desire, namely wish, to provide a teleological explanation of the pursuit of the specifically human good in terms of virtuous activity. Wish is a basic, unreasoned desire which, independently of other desires, or evaluative attitudes, motivates the pursuit of the human good. Even a person who pursues what she mistakenly believes to be good is motivated by wish for what in fact is good, although she (...) is oblivious of it. (shrink)

In Nicomachean Ethics X.7–8, Aristotle defends a striking view about the good for human beings. According to Aristotle, the single happiest way of life is organized around philosophical contemplation. According to the narrowness worry, however, Aristotle's contemplative ideal is unduly Procrustean, restrictive, inflexible, and oblivious of human diversity. In this paper, I argue that Aristotle has resources for responding to the narrowness worry, and that his contemplative ideal can take due account of human diversity.

This paper argues that Aristotelian practical wisdom (phronêsis) is a state of conviction (pistis) in the goodness of our goals based on proper grounds. This state of conviction can only be achieved if rational arguments and principles agree with how things appear to us. Since, for Aristotle, passions influence appearances, they can support or undermine our conviction in the goodness of ends that are worth pursuing. For this reason, we cannot be practically wise without virtuous dispositions to experience appropriate passions. (...) Along the way, I argue that this reading allows us to explain the shortcomings of self-controlled and akratic agents. -/- . (shrink)

Military ethics seeks to provide practical guidance for the resolution of real ethical problems associated with the conduct of military operations. In doing so, it must reflect how actual persons give and take-up reasons when deliberating what actions to take. The Just War Tradition, for example, provides deontological and consequentialist considerations soldiers should take up when considering how to conduct operations. Sometimes, unfortunately, soldiers may find themselves in tragic situations where principles and consequences provide no clear guidance. To fill that (...) gap, a full account of military ethics requires an account of virtue, which focuses more on the agent than the act and can provide resources necessary to avoid, or failing that, resolve, otherwise unresolvable ethical dilemmas that can arise during military operations. This point does not mean virtue ethics supersedes or assimilates other ethical approaches. Rather it means that in the context of a process aimed at establishing reflective equilibrium, it provides important beliefs, judgments, and ways of thinking about applied ethics that are critical not just to building a robust, maximally coherent equilibrium but also to maintain it. These resources are especially critical when one is faced with the kind of tragic situations soldiers confront in war. (shrink)

One of the most prominent strands in contemporary work on the virtues consists in the attempt to develop a distinctive—and compelling—account of practical reason on the basis of Aristotle’s ethics. In response to this project, several eminent critics have argued that the Aristotelian account encourages a dismissive attitude toward moral disagreement. Given the importance of developing a mature response to disagreement, the criticism is devastating if true. I examine this line of criticism closely, first elucidating the features of the Aristotelian (...) account that motivate it, and then identifying two further features of the account that the criticism overlooks. These further features show the criticism to be entirely unwarranted. Once these features are acknowledged, a more promising line of criticism suggests itself—namely, that the Aristotelian account does too little to help us to resolve disputes—but that line of objection will have to be carried out on quite different grounds. (shrink)

This paper argues that Aristotelian practical wisdom (phronēsis) is a state of conviction (pistis) in the goodness of our goals based on proper grounds. This state of conviction can only be achieved if rational arguments and principles agree with how things appear to us. Since, for Aristotle, passions influence appearances, they can support or undermine our conviction in the goodness of ends. For this reason, we cannot be practically wise without virtuous dispositions to experience appropriate passions. Along the way, I (...) argue that this reading allows us to explain the shortcomings of self‐controlled and akratic agents. (shrink)

This essay reads Hobbes’ account of human action against Aristotle’s accounts of animal motion and human action, thus offering a new perspective for understanding Hobbes’ account and illuminating a neglected aspect of Hobbes’ relationship to Aristotle. I argue that the basic structure of Hobbes’ account is indebted to Aristotle’s account of animal motion, except that Hobbes purges the teleological elements from his predecessor and presents a picture that is mechanistic and explicitly deterministic. Moreover, while Aristotle introduces ‘deliberation’ as a way (...) of explaining the diversity of human actions as their varied attempts at realizing the distinctly human end of the good life, Hobbes’ radically anti-Aristotelian notion of ‘deliberation’ explains that diversity in terms of the fundamental uncertainty of the passions. I conclude with some reflections on two related tensions in Hobbes: between Hobbes’ determinism and his account of human action, and between his ethical project of reducing human life to mere life and his separate ethical project of justifying diverse ways of life. This essay contributes to our understanding of the significance of Hobbes’ account of human action in both the history of the debate on determinism and the history of ethics. (shrink)

Moral particularism is often conceived as the view that there are no moral principles. However, its most fêted accounts focus almost exclusively on rules regarding actions and their features. Such action-centred particularism is, I argue, compatible with generalism at the level of character traits. The resulting view is a form of particularist virtue ethics. This endorses directives of the form ‘Be X’ but rejects any implication that the relevant X-ness must therefore always count in favour of an action.

Bruno Snell has made familiar a certain thesis about the Homeric poems, to the effect that these poems depict a primitive form of mindedness. The area of mindedness concerned is agency, and the content of the thesis is that Homeric agents are not agents in the fullest sense: they do not make choices in clear self-awareness of what they are doing; choices are made for them rather than by them; in some cases the instigators of action are gods, in other (...) cases they are forces acting internally on the agent and over which he has no control. Homeric heroes act in the way Descartes thought an animal acts: agitur, non agit. Such agents ‘handeln nicht eigentlich , sondern sie reagieren’. The model of the agent which we nowadays have is roughly of a self which determines, rather than is determined to, action; the self arrives at this determination by considering available reasons for action in the light of its overall purposes, and it moves to action in full self-consciousness of what it is doing, and why. This model of action, Snell claims, is not met in Greek literature before the tragedians. I think anyone ought to concede that there is some difference between the way Homer portrays decision-making and the way it is portrayed in tragedy ; but has Snell located the difference in the right place? I shall argue in this paper that he has not. (shrink)

The paper develops and contrasts two views about the role of examples in moral education — one based on R.M. Hare's recent “two-level” conception of moral reasoning and one based on Aristotle's conception ofphronesis. It concludes that a Harean view leads to a harmful and impoverished form of moral education by encouraging children to ignore or distort the complexity of particular moral judgments. It also concludes that an Aristotelian view, by emphasizing the importance of rich examples such as those found (...) in literature, enables children to develop and exercise a capacity for moral judgment that is sensitive to the complexities of particular moral judgments. Finally, the role of examples in public moral education in liberal pluralist societies is examined. (shrink)

Is it helpful to model the idea of professional formation on ethical formation?ing from the specifically ethical interest of Aristotle's own doctrine, in the ?narrow?, ?moral? sense of ethical, and aiming at the same time for an inclusive, ?broad? formulation which extends to various types of métiers (occupations/professions), this paper argues that an Aristotelian perspective offers a more robust concept of personal, professional and civic responsibility??responsibleness??than any that our present ?managerial? rationality can promote. Drawing on some Aristotelian texts, I show (...) that the practical knowledge of one with ?formation? (appropriate to the métier in question) enables an agent to find the relevant end and the appropriate act in the name of that end?as if simultaneously. The end and the means to the end are perfectly suited to one another. Crucially, the structure of the agent's practical reasoning is grounded on the telos which guides the agent and this is summoned implicitly from formation. This Aristotelian model of practical rationality stands as a rival to the public rationality that now predominates, a rationality which sees the meeting of explicit, pre-specified outcomes, objectives or targets as the chief way in which the accountability of agents may be secured. (shrink)

Scholars have long debated how exactly Aristotle thinks that agents acquire the distinctivearchai(“principles” or “starting‐points”) that govern their practical reasoning. The debate has traditionally been dominated by anti‐intellectualists, who hold that for Aristotle all agents acquire theirarchaisolely through a process of habituation in the nonrational soul. Their traditional opponents, the intellectualists, focus their argument on the case of the virtuous person, arguing that in Aristotle’s view virtuous agents acquire theirarchaithrough a process of reasoning. I intervene in this debate in two (...) main ways: first, I press a heretofore underappreciated objection against anti‐intellectualism, that it is inconsistent with Aristotle’s account ofakrasia; and second, I urge that all sides in the debate would benefit from more sustained attention to Aristotle’s nonvirtuous character types. In the final section, I suggest that proper consideration of the full breadth of Aristotle’s account of character points in the direction of a new approach that I call “character pluralism,” according to which Aristotle’s moral psychology does not involve a single conception of psychic structure or moral development that is equally applicable to all character types. (shrink)

No net loss approaches to environmental policy claim that policy should maintain aggregate levels of natural capital. Substitutability between natural assets allows losses in some assets to be compensated for by gains in others while maintaining overall levels of natural capital. This paper argues that significant goods that matter to people’s well-being will be lost through a policy of no net loss. The concepts of natural capital and ecosystem services that underpin the no net loss approach to environmental policy cannot (...) capture important dimensions of value that are central to human well-being. (shrink)

Bernadette M Tobin; An Aristotelian Theory of Moral Development, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 23, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 195–211, https://doi.

Within the nursing ethics literature, there has for some time now been a focus on the role and importance of character for nursing. An overarching rationale for this is the need to examine the sort of person one must be if one is to nurse well or be a good nurse. How one should be to live well or live a/the good life and to nurse well or be a good nurse seems to necessitate a focus on an agent's character (...) as well as actions because character is (for the most part) expressed in action (e.g. seeLaird). This paper will give an overview of the reasons for the role and importance of character in nursing practice and explain its relation to nursing's frequent use of virtue ethics in order to recommend caution. While the paper agrees that the role of character is important in nursing caution is needed in both how much moral and thus normative, emphasis is being placed on the psychology of character and on the drift to virtue ethics. The psychological which may be explanatory needs to be linked with the normative, and a justification for the normative is needed. A justification as virtue ethics is contested, and nursing practice does not need to take on this explanatory and justificatory burden.A tentative proposal raised but not discussed in depth in this paper is that when an ultimate explanation or explanatory ground is needed, nursing practice leads quite naturally to a form of consequentialism as well as a realist metaethic. On this account, there are two levels of moral thinking, and nursing practice entails the virtues at one level and leads quite naturally to moral thinking at another more critical level of the criterion of what makes something right and good independently of character. (shrink)

This paper's philosophical ideas are developed from a General Nursing Council for England and Wales Trust‐funded study to explore nursing knowledge and wisdom and ways in which these can be translated into clinical practice and fostered in junior nurses. Participants using Carper's (1978) ways of knowing as a framework experienced difficulty conceptualizing a link between the empirics and ethics of nursing. The philosophical problem is how to understandpraxisas a moral entity with intrinsic value when so much of value seems to (...) be technical and extrinsic depending on desired ends. Using the Aristotelian termspoesisandpraxiscan articulate the concerns that the participants as well as Carper (1978) and Dreyfus (in Flyvbjerg, 1991) among others share that certain actions or ways of knowing important for nursing are being devalued and deformed by the importance placed on quantitative data and measurable outcomes. The sense ofpraxisis a moralized one and most of what nurses do is plausibly on any account of normative ethics a morally good thing; the articulation of the idea ofpraxiscan go some way in showing how it is a part of the discipline of nursing. Nursing's acts aspoesiscan be a part of how practitioners come to havepraxisasphronesisor practical wisdom. So to be a wise nurse, one needs be a wise person. (shrink)