Types Of Virtue Research Articles

Demotic Virtues in Plato’s Laws

Abstract I argue that, in Plato’s Laws, demotic virtues (δημόσιαι ἀρεταί, 968a2) are the virtues that non-divine beings can attain. I consider two related questions: what demotic virtues are and how they relate to divine virtue. According to my interpretation, demotic virtues are an attainable – but unreliable – type of virtue that non-divine beings can improve through knowledge. These virtues are not perfect; only divine beings possess perfect virtue. However, this does not mean that perfect virtue plays no part in the ethical lives of non-divine beings. It serves as a “regulative ideal” for everyone who is not a god.

What can we learn from Plato about intellectual character education?

In the Republic, Plato developed an educational program through which he trained young Athenians in desiring truth, without offering them any knowledge-education. This is not because he refused to pass on knowledge but because he considered knowledge of the Good as an ongoing research program. I show this by tracing the steps of the education of the Philosopher-Kings in Plato’s ideal state, to establish that the decades-long educational regime aims at training them in three types of virtue: (i) Moral Virtue; (ii) the Cognitive Virtue of ion; (iii) the Cognitive Virtue of Debate.Plato’s theory of education has much to teach us about intellectual character education today. The Platonic educational program does not advocate the direct transmission of knowledge from teacher to learner but rather focuses on building the learners’ epistemic dispositions. Building upon the Socratic Method, Plato’s educational program does not ‘spoon-feed’ knowledge to the learners but rather fosters the growth of intellectual virtues through problem-solving.I explain ways in which fostering intellectual virtues through problem-solving could be applied in classrooms today. I conclude that Plato’s rigorous educational program is of definite merit for contemporary virtue education, especially since Aristotle offers us surprisingly little on how to educate for intellectual virtues.

Honesty as a Virtue

AbstractHonesty is widely accepted as a prime example of a moral virtue. And yet, honesty has been surprisingly neglected in the recent drive to account for specific virtuous traits. This paper provides a framework for an increased focus on honesty by proposing success criteria that will need to be met by any plausible account of honesty. It then proposes a motivational account on which honesty centrally involves a deep motivation to avoid deception. It argues that this account satisfies the required success criteria and discusses why (and when) honesty can be accepted as a moral virtue. Finally, it highlights some implications of accepting a motivational account of honesty for future work on encouraging the development of honesty, and on the relationship between different types of virtue.

Avoiding the Conflation of Moral and Intellectual Virtues

One of the most pressing challenges facing virtue theorists is the conflation problem. This problem concerns the difficulty of explaining the distinction between different types of virtue, such as the distinction between moral virtues and intellectual virtues. Julia Driver has argued that only an outcomes-based understanding of virtue can provide an adequate solution to the conflation problem. In this paper, I argue against Driver’s outcomes-based account, and propose an alternative motivations-based solution. According to this proposal, intellectual virtues can be identified by the shared motivation for cognitive contact with reality, while moral virtues are identified by appeal to the characteristic motivations of kindness and justice. I defend the proposal by demonstrating that it produces plausible verdicts concerning the virtue status of candidate moral and intellectual virtues.

Virtues in Entrepreneurship

While virtues are heralded as being fundamental for business conduct in the classic social science literature, contemporary literature in management and entrepreneurship has little to say about what types of virtues may be related to entrepreneurship as well as the potential implications such virtues have for business practice. Drawing on and McCloskey’s theory of bourgeois virtues, this paper explores the importance of virtues in entrepreneurial practice by investigating the decision-making strategies used by expert entrepreneurs. Findings from protocol analysis suggest that several “bundles” of virtues are intimately related to entrepreneurs’ decision making, leading to a set of rule-based versus rational decision heuristics. Such heuristics could explain why entrepreneurs forego business opportunities sometimes but plunge into seemingly risky ventures other times, suggesting an explanation for entrepreneurial decision making that complements predominant socio-cognitive and economic explanations.

Living Together in an Ecological Community

There is perhaps no area of ethical thinking that pushes us to examine the foundations of ethical thought more than environmental ethics. Should we think of the ethical demands placed upon our behavior in terms of the maximization of pleasure over pain? If so, should it be human pleasure and pain or the pleasure and pain of all sentient beings? Should we think of those demands in terms of the maximization of human happiness or of some other notion of human well-being? Should we think of those demands in terms of the promotion of certain types of virtue? Should we think of those demands in terms of rules governing some sort of moral community, perhaps a Kantian kingdom of ends or a Jamesian Ethical Republic? The practical question, of course, is how we are to live our lives. In particular, how are we to conduct ourselves when what is involved is our behavior as it affects the environment in which we and our children, grandchildren, and later descendants will live well into the future? The philosophical question is what kind of analytical framework can help us to think more clearly about how we are to live. To address the philosophical question adequately it is important to keep clear focus on the range of practical problems that arise in our interaction with our environment. Suppose that we adopt an ethical framework according to which we judge our behavior on the balance of pleasure over pain that we produce. As Peter Singer has rightly noted in a large body of work, if pleasure and pain are the key moral criteria, it seems arbitrary to privilege human pleasure and pain over pleasure and pain in other forms of sentient life. At the same time, if we adopt a principle of determining our behavior so as to promote pleasure over pain in whatever forms of sentient life they may arise, we find some seriously counter-intuitive consequences. Suppose that we find ourselves in the wilderness needing food, confronted with a choice of killing a common white-tailed deer or an endangered caribou. If our ethical principle is simply promoting the highest level of pleasure over pain it would seem that we could equally well kill the deer or the caribou. Either would likely experience roughly the same level of pain in its death, and, if we kill efficiently, less pain that either would likely experience later in starvation, as road-kill, or as prey to some hungry wolf. We find ourselves with an ethical principle that has no place for consideration of species membership. Such an ethical approach is unable to support the broadly shared view that preservation of species is a good. A number of philosophers have attempted to frame environmental ethics in terms of the alleged intrinsic goodness of various natural objects. Quite apart from the inadequacy of most of the popular arguments for the position, it also fails to provide an analytic framework for addressing species problems. Perhaps worse yet, it would fail to provide any principled distinction between caribou and broccoli. The species problem would seem to arise with any approach that takes individual entities in the environment, whether human individuals or individuals of other sorts, as the starting point of ethical analysis without understanding those individuals as, in some sense, parts of a larger whole. These considerations lead me to the view that the pressing ethical problems that arise in our interaction with the environment in which we live provide important support for understanding ethical agents centrally as parts of some sort of community of interrelated parts. For reasons that will become clear over the course of this paper, the kind of community in terms of which ethical life should be framed is best rooted in William James's Ethical Republic rather than Immanuel Kant's Kingdom of Ends. In current thinking about the environment, sustainability has become a very fashionable topic of conversation. We are, for example, presently well into what UNESCO has declared as the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. …

Environmentalism and Public Virtue

Much of the literature addressing environmental virtue tends to focus on what might be called “personal virtue”—individual actions, characteristics, or dispositions that benefit the individual actor. There has, in contrast, been relatively little interest in either “virtue politics”—collective actions, characteristics, or dispositions—or in what might be called “public virtues,” actions, characteristics, or dispositions that benefit the community rather than the individual. This focus, however, is problematic, especially in a society that valorizes individuality. This paper examines public virtue and its role in environmental virtue ethics. First, I outline different types of virtue in order to frame the discussion of public virtues and, in particular, a subclass of virtues I will refer to as political virtue. Second, I focus on practical problems and address the inadequacy of personal virtue for effecting social change and, therefore, for addressing most environmental crises. Finally, I argue that public and political virtues are necessary, if under emphasized, conditions for the flourishing of the individual, and that they are important complements to more traditional environmental virtues.

The Voluntariness of Virtue – and Belief

AbstractThis paper examines the relative voluntariness of three types of virtue: ‘epistemic’ virtues like open-mindedness; ‘motivational’ virtues like courage, and more robustly ‘moral’ virtues like justice. A somewhat novel conception of the voluntariness of belief is offered in terms of the limited, but quite real, voluntariness of certain epistemic virtues.

The Conflation of Moral and Epistemic Virtue

Abstract: Accounts of virtue suffer a conflation problem when they appear unable to preserve intuitive distinctions between types of virtue. In this essay I argue that a number of influential attempts to preserve the distinction between moral and epistemic virtues fail, on the grounds that they characterize virtuous traits in terms of ‘characteristic motivation’. I claim that this does not distinguish virtuous traits at the level of value‐conferring quality, and I propose that the best alternative is to distinguish them at the level of good produced. It follows from this that a consequentialist account is best placed to avoid a conflation of moral and epistemic virtue.

Public memorials, private virtues: women on classical Athenian grave monuments

In classical Athens, the graves of the dead, and their accompanying memorials, were sited upon either side of the main roads into the city, where all passers-by must see them. This very public placement contrasts oddly with the private and familial virtues depicted upon these memorials, as has often been noted. In particular, the high proportion of gravestones for women and the types of virtues ascribed to them by grave inscriptions indicate that in memorials, at least, women had a status close to that of men. Women's prominence in this area is all the more paradoxical in that the virtues celebrated in the images and texts belong to private life, one of the areas in which women were more consistently subordinate to male authority. This incongruity can be resolved by a closer look at the evocation of women's role in the family on gravestones, which implicitly places them within a wider city ideology, by emphasizing the private virtues of women as essential for the stability of the household, the maintenance of citizenship, and therefore for the continuity of the community as a whole.

Another Instrumental Republican Approach?

This article critically examines liberal accusations that, despite some differences, there are no significant divergences between liberalism and republicanism because both approaches contain instrumental accounts of certain ideals and virtues that have the effect of enhancing the overall system of freedom for individuals. This article will explore this issue by looking at a possible response to the liberal critique by building on the recent work of Philip Pettit on republican liberty as nondomination. By exploring the ideals and institutions which accompany republican liberty, I will argue that within the constitutional and reciprocal power of nondomination reside certain goods and character traits which are not purely instrumental in the way that liberal critics charge. Rather, I believe that these goods and character traits are intrinsically valuable to republican citizens and help to constitute the freedom that they experience. In this article I will explore the types of virtues associated with nondomination and how they can be defended as being intrinsically valuable to republican citizens. Finally, I will also argue that, on this point, republicanism can be significantly differentiated from liberal accounts in a manner that is compelling and attractive.

The Virtues of Embodiment

Surprisingly, materialists and dualists often appeal to the same factors in their depiction of being an embodied, human person: sensations, agency, and causal underpinnings. I propose that this picture be expanded to include epistemic, structural, and affective components. I further propose that these elements, taken together, be construed as virtues. Being an embodied, human person consists in the exercise of six types of virtues: Sensory Virtues, the Virtue of Agency, Constitutional Virtues, Epistemic Virtues, Structural Virtues, and Affective Virtues. This project draws on recent contributions to virtue epistemology and to the philosophical analysis of self-respect.