Adorno on Modesty as a Virtue

Reviewed by: Moral Philosophy and the Confucian Tradition ed. by Fang Xudong Li Guangxiao (bio) and Liu Liangjian (bio) Fang Xudong 方旭東, editor. Moral Philosophy and the Confucian Tradition 道德哲學與儒家傳統. Shanghai 上海: Huadong Shifan Daxue Chubanshe 華東師範大學出版社, 2010. i + 388 pp. Paperback ¥78, isbn 978-7-5617-8325-2. Moral Philosophy and the Confucian Tradition (MPCT hereafter), edited by Fang Xudong, aims to introduce to mainland China the significant findings on Chinese philosophy made by scholars overseas. The book consists of twenty-one essays, which draw upon Confucianism as they work through various issues within moral philosophy. All essays are selected from the well-known journal Philosophy East and West. Since its establishment in 1951, Philosophy East and West has been a key English-language journal for the study of Chinese philosophy. Therefore, the publication of MPCT is undoubtedly a new achievement in translating overseas study on Chinese philosophy. Roughly speaking, essays in MPCT can be divided into three groups. Group 1 examines core concepts in Confucian ethics such as ren (仁), li (禮), jing (敬), cheng (誠), zide (自得), and gewu (格物). The examination involves many novel readings. For instance, Karyn Lai claims that li plays different roles and exhibits different degrees of flexibility in the three stages of moral development (pp. 145–159). However, Lai’s treatment of moral development as a process of skill training easily reminds us of the Dreyfus fivestage model of adult skill acquisition: novice, advanced beginner, competence, proficiency, and expertise.1 We could safely say that Lai is implicitly drawing upon Western philosophy to study ancient Chinese philosophy. Group 2 engages in a comparative study of Chinese and Western philosophy on more particular subjects, including the ethics of respect in Confucius and Kant; the public good in Confucius, Dewey, and Rorty; and the issue of finding the Way in Kierkegaard and Confucius. [End Page 264] Since the Indian scholar Brajen-dranath Seal (1864–1938) began to advocate comparative philosophy in his Comparative Studies in Vaishnavism and Christianity in 1899, which the French philosopher Paul Masson-Oursel (1882–1956) echoed in his La philosophie comparée in 1923, the comparative study of philosophy has made significant contributions to the mutual understanding of Western and Eastern philosophy traditions. However, comparative study as a methodology is not satisfactory, since it easily leads to a so-called objective and detached observation of the objects compared (for instance, Confucius and Kant) in order to discover their similarities and/or differences. For instance, David B. Wong tells us: “The contrast between reason and emotion has played a crucial role in the moral psychology of the Western ethical tradition.” To the contrary, “Mencius held a picture of the role of emotion in moral motivation that militates against a general separation of reason from emotion”2 (p. 262). Although this finding is not uninteresting, David B. Wong has to go beyond comparison if he attempts to develop a “third alternative to Humean and Kantian theories of practical reason”3 (p. 272). Moreover, if there is an announced or tacit rank between objects compared, a comparative study will be too enthusiastic to understand the object of the lower rank from the perspective of the higher. In a global age, it is necessary for us to go further from comparison to dialogue, which is exactly the approach that other essays in group 3 take. They discuss the significance of traditional Confucianism in attempts to solve contemporary ethical and political issues such as moral education, morality and human nature, biological control, proceduralism, liberal rights, and the balance between community and liberty. Group 3 contains quite a few brilliant ideas. For example, Seung-hwan Lee raises the problem of the danger of a liberal morality, which has resulted in the immoderate practice of rights: “[A]n individual’s bullheaded insistence on rights under some inappropriate circumstances may bring about the danger of ‘a right to do wrong’ or ‘rights damnably insensitive’”4 (p. 59). To solve the problem, he suggests a coordination of a right-based morality of liberalism and Confucianism, which advocates a morality based on communitarian virtues. This suggestion is really appealing despite the fact that his argument is not absolutely beyond dispute. By “Confucian virtues,” Lee mainly means “the virtues of modesty...

This chapter will examine the moral philosophy that framed discussions of English colonial projects in their first hundred years. That moral philosophy was characterised by two impulses. On the one hand, the projects were promoted as a duty, a means for the citizen to employ his virtues in the pursuit of an active life. Virtue was needed to hold the citizen to the pursuit of the common good and to keep him from using his position to serve his own selfish interests. The active life was framed in the context of the foundation of new commonwealths and so offered the glory, honour and profit that were portrayed as the reward of virtuous public service. On the other hand, this impulse to the active life was constrained by the fear of corruption. The profit which could be generated by colonies could also divert men from virtue and threaten the commonwealth through the creation of an ‘Asiatic’ and effeminate wealth and luxury. This tension was central to Roman and humanist moral philosophy. Cicero's De officiis was one of the more optimistic representations of the possibilities of the active life. He stressed that the basis of citizenship was the employment of the virtues in political participation. But anxiety about corruption is also central for Cicero. He emphasises that the four cardinal virtues (wisdom, justice, courage and temperance) are necessary for the citizen to place private profit below the common good, and he is acutely sensitive to the possible conflict between these ends.

This chapter is devoted to the dealings with the cardinal virtues in LatinChristian literature from the sixth to the eleventh centuries. The cardinal virtues were mostly considered in this period as genuine Christian concepts. Few early medieval authors evoked, or indeed seem to have remembered, the classical origin of the quartet. The work of Christianizing the virtues having been done and ancient moral philosophy being dead and buried, most authors further assimilated the virtues to the faith in the diverse genres of writing where the fathers introduced them-moral and spiritual literature, exegesis, preaching, and hagiography. The chapter considers the religious dealings with the virtues in the early medieval period , one devoted tomoral and spiritual literature, the other to exegesis and hagiography. It examines the scarce use of the cardinal virtues in the context of philosophy and political ethics.Keywords: cardinal virtues; exegesis; hagiography; LatinChristian literature; tomoral

The mind of compassion is a very importance concept in Mencius' moral theory. It is the mind which manifests itself as the compassionate feeling towards others' sufferings and what distinguish men from beasts. It is the origin of morality, what makes man human. With the famous illustration of an innocent child falling into a well (Mencius: 3A: 6), Mencius argues that every human being is born with such a mind of compassion. He then ramifies the manifestation into the mind of commiseration, the mind of shame, the mind of courtesy and the mind of right and wrong. They constitute the four cardinal principles or virtues of yen, yi, li and chi.However, as the four are but manifestation of the mind of compassion upon different occasions, they are in fact the same one mind. This paper analyses the nature of the mind of compassion and its relation with the four minds.

This article examines the role and place of virtues in early modern English grammar schools (ca. 1558 – 1640). It argues that schoolboys were exposed to the questions of moral philosophy and virtues throughout their time in the grammar school. From their elementary classes in Latin grammar to moral philosophy and rhetoric classes in the uppermost forms, students received training in the four cardinal virtues. The training took place, however, in an overwhelmingly linguistic and rhetorical context. It follows that early modern schoolboys learned that virtues were not so much intrinsic values of morality as much as instrumental values of rhetoric. This has important consequences for our understanding of early modern educational and intellectual culture.

Adam Smith’s thoughts on the actual concept of justice are given in his book on moral philosophy,The Theory of Moral Sentiments,first published in1759. The main discussion comes in Part II, which is concerned with the notions of merit and demerit, reward and punishment. Smith relates justice to desert and pays special attention to criminal justice. There is also a brief review of the different senses of the term ‘justice’ in the last part of the book (VI in editions 1 – 5, VII in edition 6). The sixth edition, published in 1790, contains a substantial new Part VI on the character of virtue. There Smith specifies four cardinal virtues, one of them being justice, on which he adds just a little to what he had written before.

The patristic appropriation of the virtues initially worked very well. The view of Julian Pomerius that all virtues were gifts of God appears to have constituted early medieval orthodoxy. In the course of the twelfth century, the situation changed dramatically. Most authors discussing or mentioning the virtues considered even the cardinal virtues as genuine Christian concepts. Scholars who debated the virtues turned with renewed interest to ancient moral philosophy and started to take its non-Christian perspective seriously, asking themselves if human beings could attain goodness and virtue by natural means, unaided by grace and revealed truth. This chapter analyses this development and determines in particular to what extent natural virtues found recognition in Christian thought by the end of the twelfth century. As for the early twelfth century, two authors enjoy today an undeserved reputation as promoters of natural ethics: Hildebert of Lavardin and Peter Abelard. Keywords: Christianity; Hildebert of Lavardin; medieval orthodoxy; natural ethics; Peter Abelard

ALTHOUGH THE DOCTRINE of the four cardinal virtues cannot be documented in a formal sense earlier than Plato's Republic in the first quarter of the fourth century B.C., it is commonly assumed to have been supported by a tradition which went back perhaps two centuries into the archaic period.' The priority of dikaiosune in the Platonic canon needs no demonstration. Its proposed definition constitutes the formal hypothesis of the treatise and though the first book in the manner of the other early dialogues on virtue ends aporetically, the treatise as a whole devotes itself to completing the definition with meticulous exactitude.2 The effect of the eloquent argument offered in Plato's written masterpiece has been to rivet on the minds of scholars and laymen alike the presumption that the English terms justice and righteousness represent what had always been a general idea available to the Greeks throughout their earlier cultural history, a concept lying at the back of their minds and taken for granted. If one asks, Is this presumption based on fact?, the answer will depend on how fact is defined. Is it a datum supplied by the intuitions of moral philosophy, which has always been prone to assume for its own purposes that the notion of the moral law as idea or ideal informs our common humanity and must exist as a realized concept in the minds of all men who share such a culture as the Greeks possessed? Or is it

Reviewed by: Justice as a Virtue: A Thomistic Perspective by Jean Porter Jason Heron Justice as a Virtue: A Thomistic Perspective by Jean Porter (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016), xiii + 286 pp. Students of Thomistic moral philosophy will be grateful to Jean Porter for her contribution to conversations regarding justice's place in both the virtue ethics tradition and modern liberal thought. It is gross understatement to say that justice is complex. But the complexity is amplified in our context, where justice is imagined as fairness in the organization of institutions and distributed goods. Add to this the effort one must spend when we attempt to speak in Aristotelian terms of the mean or when we try to describe justice as a personal perfection of the will, and one discerns Porter's motivations in offering us a Thomistic account of justice. Porter exposits Aquinas's account of justice as a virtue perfecting the will and rightly ordering our social relations. The upshot of this analysis is a rich treatment of justice as both an external moral ideal and the relationship of that ideal to the perfection of the person's will. Porter's objective in chapter 1 is twofold. First, to demonstrate the coherence and relevance of Aquinas's account of the virtues. And second, to set up the problem animating her inquiry: the fact that justice as a virtue stands apart from the other cardinal virtues, especially as an ideal. We typically conceive of virtues as habitual dispositions, internal to the agent and judged praiseworthy or blameworthy according to a "rational mean" that, while potentially functioning normatively, is also internal to the agent and her circumstances. Thus, the courageous or temperate person acts courageously or temperately according to very specific—maybe even unrepeatable—contingencies that require prudence, practice, and knowledge of what other courageous or temperate persons have done in similar situations. But when it comes to justice, we judge agents and their acts according to the "real mean" of the right (jus), which is necessarily external to the agent, her circumstances, her knowledge, and so on. In other words, the tension between justice's relationship to a "real mean" and the other virtues' relationship to a "rational mean" seems to throw us into unhelpful binaries: law/virtue, rules/ideals, universals/particulars, and the right / the good. But as Porter demonstrates, the tension between these binaries lessens when we recognize that the tension is not between two different ways of evaluating action. Rather, the divisions characterizing these binaries "track the fundamental division between the virtues of the passions, which observe a rational mean only, and justice, which observes a real mean" (41). The concept of a rational mean guiding our evaluation of courage and temperance is relatively straightforward (as a concept!), and is squarely at home in a conventional account of virtue. But the concept of a [End Page 608] real mean guiding our evaluation of justice is decidedly more complex and requires careful attention to the faculty perfected by the virtue. Thus, chapter 2 exposits the Thomistic doctrine of the will as the causal principle of voluntary action. The hope here is that if we adequately represent the faculty of the will, then we will have some insight into the virtue that is supposed to perfect it, even if that virtue seems oddly out of place among the rest of the perfective habits. Aquinas's account provides valuable insight into the rational agent's participation in the appetitive orientation of all natures toward their perfection. But in humans, we see this appetite exercised in a distinct way that makes action susceptible to personal and social reflection and evaluation. Human actions are susceptible to such evaluation because they are voluntary—the result of complex processes of deliberation and choice among myriad goods proposed to the rational appetite. At this point, Porter considers whether the will is completely subject to the dictatorial intellect. Her treatment of the issue unsurprisingly defends the liberty of the will. But in attempting to make this case without recourse to theology, one may wonder about the significance of her contribution to the infinite regress inherent within the question. Porter then asks: why must the...

Consistency is usually seen as one of the hallmarks and a cardinal virtue of moral theory, as well as of any defensible real-life moral perspective. In everyday life a consistent set of moral beliefs is conductive to moral clarity, communicability, responsibility and responsiveness. But this is just one side of the story. In this paper I argue that inconsistency, properly understood, is a productive and constructive aspect of both moral philosophy and our moral lives. After an introductory glance at Ralf Waldo Emerson and Hannah Arendt, the argument proceeds in three main steps. First, I discuss the philosophical importance of paying heed to inconsistencies in our moral lives, which often are prematurely pruned from moral philosophy. Second, I discuss the positive moral roles of inconsistency in terms of responsiveness to different situations, values, needs and concerns that call upon our attention in everyday life. Third, I argue that moral inconsistencies contribute to the necessary adaptability of our moral understandings to changing conditions. Fourth, in the place of a conclusion, I revisit the issue of consistency, clarity and accountability.

Moral behaviour, and more recently wisdom and prudence, are emerging as areas of interest in the study of business ethics and management. The purpose of this article is to illustrate that Cicero—lawyer, politician, orator and prolific writer, and one of the earliest experts in the field recognised the significance of moral behaviour in his society. Cicero wrote 'Moral Duties' (De Officiis) about 44 BC. He addressed the four cardinal virtues wisdom, justice, courage and temperance, illustrating how practical wis- dom, theoretical/conceptual wisdom and justice were viewed in Rome of the first century BC. 'Moral Duties' is a letter admonishing his son, Marcus. It refers to personal behaviour, business practice and analyses terms such as good faith and criminal fraud. In addition, it contains material which would be suitable for tutorials/seminars and discussions, particularly in the areas of critical thinking in business ethics and general management. A study of De Officiis in respect to present day management and business practice could give a wider perspective to business ethics and management students. If concepts such as moral virtue, moral propriety and moral goodness, many of which seem to be ignored in business situations today, are to be embedded in business leaders of the future, it is reasonable to expect that these qualities will be analysed and discussed by business students today. Further, a study of Cicero's six- step approach, when preparing an address/speech, could be useful and productive for practitioners and students in this area.

Aristotle defined the ethical and intellectual virtues which are recognized as fundamental even today. Contemporary virtue ethics still takes into account Aristotelian virtues. The modern moral philosophers have tried to find new ethical values in a society in which religions are in decline and the old values lost their meaning. The starting point of their research has been Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics” which has remained the most important work in ethics influencing the philosophical thinking until nowadays. This paper seeks to explain the actual importance of the cardinal Aristotelian virtues and how they are seen today.

This chapter expores the similarities and differences between the virtue theories of Mencius (372–289 BCE) and David Hume (1711–1776 CE). Their individual explications of virtue, the main topics of their moral philosophies, focus on the sentiments. Mencius, concerned with teaching moral self-cultivation, believes that the sentiments are the grounds for achieving virtue. Hume, who aims at an empirical theory of moral evaluation, maintains that we determine a character trait as virtue through the moral sentiments. Given their moral foundation of sentiments, two frameworks of comparison are available:epistemic and structural comparisons. The former examines the philosophers’ views of the epistemic characteristics of sentiment as they relate to virtue and morality. The latter investigates how their virtue theories have a parallel structure based on the general characteristics of sentiment. I argue that a structural comparison deepens our understanding of Mencius’s views about the virtues and their cultivation. Next, I suggest that Hume’s scientific inquiry into moral evaluation informs us of another aspect of Mencius’s sentiment-based virtue. Considering the causal process involved in the arousal of sentiments, Mencius’s heart of compassion should be regarded as a mental cause that renders human nature inherently good and not as a mental effect of an aroused sentiment. Moreover, I argue that, because virtue-related sentiments take two sorts of intentional objects—one’s self and others—we can classify Mencius’s and Hume’s virtues into other-regarding and self-regarding virtues. Mencius’s cardinal virtues of Ren and Yi correspond to Hume’s humanity and dignity.

Economics and moral philosophy have in recent years been considered to be distinct and separate fields. However, behavioural economics has started to reconcile various aspects of morality and economics, which has offered new conceptual opportunities to advance economics ethics and business ethics. This book aims to advance economic ethics and business ethics by combining normative principles and empirical evidence grounded on the key motivational forces in economic decision making. It has three core objectives: to assess order ethics as a theory of both economic ethics and business ethics, using behavioural economics methods and evidence; to identify cardinal virtues for modern business ethics; to to set up valuable guidelines for the implementation of economic ethics and business ethics.

I will begin by stating three theses which I present in this paper. The first is this: that virtue ethics, insofar as it remains a valuable new approach in moral philosophy, is misleadingly so described. The description fails to single out what is of interest. The second is that the difference between this new approach and other so-called moral theories is not at all to be called a mere difference in emphasis or focus. Again I must add: insofar as the approach remains of value. For it was intended to be something radical, and only as such was it worth anything at all. The third is that the cardinal virtue of justice, once thought ‘more glorious than the morning or the evening star’, has become damagingly marginalized. It no longer has a starring role. I shall point out some consequences.