The purpose is to stage a dialogue between a pre-liberal conception of justice, represented by Aristotle as revived with the help of ideas of Lucas, Jouvenel and G. A. Cohen, and a liberal conception, as founded in Kant and refurbished, renewed and worked out in A Theory of Justice by John Rawls. Among the questions at issue are the roles of habit, disposition and formation; the nature of the dependency between the justice of the citizen of a polity and the (...) justice of the constitutional arrangements of the polity; the superior prospects of a piecemeal, bottom-up approach to justice or of a top-down, contractual approach; the remedial/restorative conception of justice versus more than merely remedial/restorative conceptions; tolerance of contingency; the propensity of liberal regimes to replace by managerial procedures more and more of the arrangements that previously entrusted important matters to the practical judgement of individuals; the multiplicity and diversity of the neo-Aristotelian requisites for a good polity versus the rather simpler demands of liberalism, which relate mostly to legitimacy; the idea of equality proper to a just and good polity; the closed, open enough, or completely open character of such a polity. (shrink)

Aristotle says that no human achievement has the stability of activities that express virtue. Ethical situationists consider this claim to be refutable by empirical evidence. If that is true, not only Aristotelianism, but folk psychology, contemporary virtue ethics and character education have all been seriously infirmed. The aim of this paper is threefold: (1) to offer a systematic classification of the existing objections against situationism under four main headings: ‘the methodological objection’, ‘the moral dilemma objection’, ‘the bullet-biting objection’ and ‘the (...) anti-behaviouristic objection’; (2) to resuscitate a more powerful Aristotelian version of the ‘anti-behaviouristic objection’ than advanced by previous critics; and (3) to explore some of the implications of such resuscitation for our understanding of the salience of character and for future studies of its nature. (shrink)