Language Of Virtue Research Articles

The Language of Managerial Excellence: Virtues as Understood and Applied

Who a manager is, as a person of moral character, has been only of tangential interest in social science definitions of management, which have focused on functions, roles, behaviors, and environmental influences. But how do managers themselves speak of managerial excellence? This paper answers this for a particular corporation, based on a three-phased research process that deliberately imposes no descriptive or normative categories, but allows the answer to emerge, listening to what managers themselves say when discussing excellent managers and their behaviors. This approach finds that: (1) virtue ethics and virtue language is fluently used by practicing managers, (2) virtue language is important to understanding managerial excellence, and (3) whereas the set of virtues defining the excellent manager can be expected to be dependent on the societal, industry, and organizational context, such a set of manager virtues can be identified and prioritized within a particular organizational milieu. The implication is that, once an organization's management better understands the meaning of the excellent manager in terms of the virtue language already used by its own employees, it is better equipped to implement a practical ethic of virtues, one helpful toward recognizing and developing excellent managers. Ethics researchers are challenged to increase their understanding of extant virtue language as the basis for a renewed development of virtue ethics theory and applications.

Socratic Political Philosophy and the Problem of Virtue

Plato's Meno deserves careful examination today because it highlights two facets of the concern for virtue neglected or obscured by the current revival of virtue among liberal theorists: the devotion to a good that cannot simply be reduced either to individual flourishing or to communal well-being—what Plato calls “nobility” or “the noble”; and the complex relation of virtue so understood to the concern for religion or piety. If the sought-for incorporation of virtue into liberal thought and practice today fails to grapple with these profound human concerns, in the first place by recognizing their existence, the language of virtue and its attendant moral sentiments will remain a matter more of scholarly debate than of lived practice.

Heroic Incoherence in James Macpherson's The Poems of Ossian

When in 1805 Walter Scott characterized Fingal, the hero of Macpherson's The Poems of Ossian (1760-63), 1 as combining "all the strength and bravery of Achilles, with the courtesy, sentiment, and high-breeding of Sir Charles Grandison," he put his finger on the ethical and aesthetic compromise which it has become increasingly fashionable to see at the heart of Ossian. 2 Building on revisionist accounts of Macpherson's endeavors which stress the influence and assistance of the Scottish Enlightenment literati in the Ossian project, a coherent critical perspective has developed over recent years to explain the fascination exerted by Ossian over some of the greatest literary and philosophical minds of the age. 3 This view suggests that Ossian was in large part generated as a response to the fact that "the language of virtue in the eighteenth century was still tied to the essentially civic and masculine realm of the active and patriotic warrior-citizen" and that "on the face of it this language had little in common with the emerging discourse of passion, benevolence, and humanity." 4 In fact, "little in common" seems an understatement, given that the civic tradition at this time has been seen as explicitly oriented itself in contradistinction to the virtues of a refined society that it characterized as being "artificial, selfish, and effete." 5

Virtue rewarded? Women and the politics of virtue in 18th-century France. Part I

Etude de la relation des femmes a la politique de la vertu traditionnellement attribuee aux hommes, dans la France du XVIII e siecle. Mesurant le role des femmes dans la vie publique de la monarchie absolue, l'A. montre que la question de la vertu politique releve de la conception des genres et de la distinction entre masculin et feminin, public et prive, vice et vertu, heritees de l'Antiquite classique et de la morale chretienne.

Two Kinds of Intellectual Virtue

Linda Zagzebski argues that knowledge should be understood in terms of intellectual virtue. The kind of she has in mind is on the model of Aristotle's account of moral virtue: A virtue, then, can be defined as a deep and enduring acquired of a person, involving a characteristic motivation to produce a certain desired end and reliable success in bringing about that end. (137) Examples of such virtues are open-mindedness, fair-mindedness, intellectual thoroughness and intellectual courage. Zagzebski calls her theory of knowledge a true theory, distinguishing it from reliabilist theories of Sosa and Goldman.' These latter authors use the terminology of intellectual and but in a way that, according to Zagzebski, misuses the language of virtue. In what follows below I will argue for two theses. First, there is an important way of dividing up the landscape so that the theories of Sosa and Goldman are indeed theories. On this understanding, all three of our authors are in the same broad camp; one which can appropriately be labeled virtue epistemology, and which can be distinguished from other broad alternatives concerning the nature of knowledge. The real disagreement between Zagzebski on the one hand, and Sosa and Goldman on the other, is over the nature of intellectual virtue, or that kind of which is required for knowledge. Once the question is put this way, it is possible to argue for my second thesis. Namely, reliabilists such as Sosa and Goldman are correct in rejecting Aristotle's account of the moral virtues as the model for understanding intellectual virtue. Contra Zagzebski, the cognitive character that grounds knowledge need not be acquired, need not include the strong motivational component of an Aristotlean moral virtue, and need not be an excellence in Aristotle's sense. Rather, the essential aspect of an intellectual is its success component, or in Sosa's and Goldman's terms, its reliability.

Seeds of Virtue and Knowledge

Illustrations Ch. 1 Stoic Seeds of Virtue and Sparks of Divinity Ch. 2 The Challenge to Christian Theologians Ch. 3 Medieval and Renaissance Vegetative Images Ch. 4 Ficino: Neo-Platonic Ascent through Love and Education Ch. 5 Italian Renaissance Humanism: Rebirth and Flowering of the Seeds of Virtue and Knowledge Ch. 6 Vegetative Language of Virtue and Vice in Discourses on the Dignity or Depravity of Humankind Ch. 7 Northern Renaissance Humanism: Cultivating and Transplanting the Seeds of Virtue and Knowledge Ch. 8 Bodin: All the Ancient Hebrews and Academics Have Held Ch. 9 Montaigne: Seeds of Virtue in Peasants and Amerindians Ch. 10 Charron: Seeds of Virtue for Virtue's Own Sake Epilogue Notes Index Nominum Index Rerum

The Language and Logic of Virtue in 2 Peter 1:5–7

Abstract Although the polemical development of 2 Peter mirrors interaction between Stoic and Christian moral thought-worlds, the moral grammar of the Stoa employed by the writer in 2 Peter 1 expresses a distinctly Christian qualification. The readers are reminded that a profession of faith without ethical fiber is wholly incommensurate with their gracious calling. The rhetorical effect created by the progression and climax of the catalog of virtues in 2 Pet 1:5–7 can be understood to reflect a concrete situation in which there has been a fundamental ethical breakdown. In addressing this crisis the writer appropriates paraenesis and a standard hortatory device to underscore the necessity of the moral life.

The Language and Logic of Virtue in 2 Peter 1:5–7

AbstractAlthough the polemical development of 2 Peter mirrors interaction between Stoic and Christian moral thought-worlds, the moral grammar of the Stoa employed by the writer in 2 Peter 1 expresses a distinctly Christian qualification. The readers are reminded that a profession of faith without ethical fiber is wholly incommensurate with their gracious calling. The rhetorical effect created by the progression and climax of the catalog of virtues in 2 Pet 1:5–7 can be understood to reflect a concrete situation in which there has been a fundamental ethical breakdown. In addressing this crisis the writer appropriates paraenesis and a standard hortatory device to underscore the necessity of the moral life.

Algernon Sidney and the republican heritage in England and America

Alan Houston introduces a new level of rigor into contemporary debates over republicanism by providing the first complete account of the range, structure, and influence of the political writings of Algernon Sidney (1623-1683). Though not well known today, Sidney's Discourses Concerning Government influenced radicals in England and America throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To many, it was a textbook of revolution. Houston begins with a masterful intellectual biography tracing the development of Sidney's ideas in the political and intellectual context of Stuart England, and he concludes with a detailed study of the impact of Sidney's writings and heroic martyrdom on revolutionary America. Documenting the interdependence of what have previously been regarded as distinctly and theories, the author provides a new perspective on Anglo-American political thought. Many scholars have assumed that the republican language of virtue is distinct from and in tension with the liberal logic of rights and interests. By focusing on the contemporary meaning of concepts like freedom and slavery or virtue and corruption, Houston demonstrates that Sidney's republicanism and Locke's liberalism were not rivals but frequently complemented each other. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Virtue, Obligation and Politics

This paper presents a conceptual analysis of the terms “virtue,” “obligation,” and “politics,” a project suggested by similar analyses currently underway in the field of ethics. The essence of the study is the contrast between politics understood in terms of virtue (as by Plato, Aristotle, and, in a way, Rousseau) and politics understood in terms of obligation (as by Hobbes, Locke, John Rawls and, in a way, Rousseau). The paper argues that obligation and virtue form the center of two separate languages or paradigms for the formulation and discussion of basic political questions, and discusses the theoretical grounds for the neglect of the language of virtue by the greater part of modern political thought. This discussion, while pointing to the possible weaknesses of the language of virtue, also serves to indicate (directly and by contrast) the limitations of the language of obligation as a way of understanding politics.