Understanding Of Virtue Research Articles

The consciousness of virtue: uncovering the gaps between educational specialists and the general public in their understanding of virtue in Japan.

Virtue is a normative concept that constitutes social and moral codes. The notion of virtue can be identified in both the West and the East. Since this concept was revived in academia in the 20th century after a long sinking into oblivion, contemporary professional researchers, but not the general public, may be familiar with this notion. We conducted a survey on the attitudes of educational specialists and the general public regarding the notion of virtue in Japan. Our study found that, in contrast to educational specialists, the general public were not so familiar with the notion; both had a positive image of virtue and a poor understanding of the Confucian notions of virtue; both retain Buddhist values under the term of virtue, but educational specialists tended to associate ancient Greek and Western elements with the notion of virtue. Educational specialists emphasized active, intellectual virtues, such as practical wisdom, whereas the general public emphasized passive, emotional virtues, such as gratitude. Our study showed that, the notion of virtue was understood in different ways between educational specialists and the general public in Japan. This finding has several social implications, such as academic integrity and educational policy.

Neo‑Aristotelian Approach to Educating Virtues with Reference to Gratitude

A neo‑Aristotelian approach to educating virtue – and more specifically the virtue of gratitude – will first require a degree of familiarity with key Aristotelian concepts. In the first part of this paper, the concept of ‘phronesis’ (φρόνησις, or practical wisdom), and the doctrine of ‘The Golden Mean’ will be discussed in relation to Aristotle’s understanding of virtues. Having laid the conceptual ground, the paper will proceed in a practical vein by applying this reconstructed approach (hence the term Neo‑Aristotelian) to gratitude – a quality Aristotle did not himself identify as a virtue. Aristotle assigned a place to the thinking of both ‘the Wise’ and the ‘the Many’ (Aristotle, 1985) and this paper will follow his lead there too in bringing conceptual theorizing about gratitude (the opinions of ‘the Wise’) into dialogue with empirical research on gratitude involving the participation of ordinary ‘lay’ people (‘the Many’).

Erdemli Bireyin İnşası ve Özgecilik: Psikolojik Bir Değerlendirme

Virtue is a pattern of an individual's emotions and behaviors; It can be defined as feeling, desiring, and taking action when necessary. Virtue is being able to respond with a rational and conscientious judgment rather than a habit that is practiced without thinking. Contrary to the "Kantian" and "Consequentialists" who focus on the rightness or wrongness of actions in the context of moral philosophy, "Virtue Theorists" focus on character and are concerned with the life of the individual as a whole. The main question for virtue theorists is “How should I live?” is the question, and the answer that should be given should be “Trying to have the virtues”. In Islamic culture, great importance is given to the building of the virtuous individual and society; in fact, this is the main purpose of the religion of Islam. In many studies conducted in psychology and its branch, the Psychology of Religion literature, it has been concluded that being virtuous is an important factor in the development and self-realization process of the individual. Altruism, which means living for someone else as a result of a natural goodness, preferring others to oneself, is considered one of the greatest virtues by some. In contrast, it can be seen as a state of psychological imbalance by others. As a result, altruism can sometimes be considered as a healthy mood and sometimes as a neurotic behavior in terms of sociopsychology. True altruists (sincere altruists) are those who can sacrifice themselves for others in times of danger and do so without any expectation. Participating in wars and becoming a martyr because of the love of homeland and religion can be shown as an example of a truly sincere and healthy behavior. There are also some forms of behavior that are actually neurotic behavior or a morbid condition but manifest under the guise of altruism. Hidden selfishness can sometimes be perceived as altruism. The intention to focus on one's own interest lies behind the action that seems like altruism in order to ensure the continuation of worldly interests and/or to gain status. This study is a qualitative study. The data were analyzed in the context of people's understanding of virtue in general and altruism in particular. It has been concluded that the main thing in the construction of the virtuous individual and, therefore, the virtuous society is to have consistency of discourse and action. The aim is to remind people or scientists, raise awareness, and offer a different perspective to the client and the counselor, especially in the psychotherapy process.

Quo Vadis?On the role of just peacewithinjust war

AbstractThis article contributes to the debate about the future of just war thinking, which has been challenged by the emerging school of just peace. Just peace thinkers hope that by foregrounding nonviolent means just war reasoning will become obsolete. Recently, the German Catholic Bishops have argued that the traditional understanding of just war contributed to their predecessors' silence on the Second World War. Grounded in just peace thinking, their argument implies that had the new framework been in place at the time, it would have been easier for their predecessors to oppose Hitler's war. In this article, I defend traditional just war thinking as encountered in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. For Aquinas, just war thinking was part of an encompassing ethics of war and peace. In fact, peace was the primary goal. Grounded in Aquinas's understanding of virtue, I argue that there is a place for just peace scholarship within the just war framework. The tools of nonviolence should be seen as an important complement to the justifiable use of armed force.

Character development through the curriculum: teaching and assessing the understanding and practice of virtue

ABSTRACT This article reports on the differential impact of a curriculum intervention on students’ understanding and practice of virtue. The research is germane given Ofsted’s new requirement that its inspectors should assess how the curriculum in all schools in England and Wales supports students’ character development. Results are reported here for a total of 1226 eleven- and twelve-year-olds assessed at the beginning and end of their first secondary school term: 822 children in nine program schools, where students experienced the Narnian Virtues character education English curriculum, and 404 children in eight control schools that did not experience the intervention (2 lessons per week over 12 weeks). Mean scores for knowledge and understanding of virtues (wisdom, love, integrity, fortitude, self-control and justice) in the experimental group showed a significant increase from pre- to post-test, which was not the case for the control group. Although scores pre- to post-test for the experimental group declined on a number of (self-assessed) character measures, this decline was not as pronounced as it was for the control group. That children’s understanding of character improved rapidly in the experimental group is important, as knowledge of virtue generally precedes behavioural application.

“Making Mystics Out of Cheese”: Flannery O’Connor’s Grotesque Reimagination of Pride and Humility in A Prayer Journal and “The Lame Shall Enter First”

ABSTRACTThis article explores the work of Flannery O’Connor as a unique twentieth century Catholic author, who understood the metaphysical and moral crisis of her day as confronting a pervasive nihilism which denied the existence of objective good and evil and any sense of transcendent, universal morality such as the Thomistic understanding of virtue and vice central to the Christian moral tradition. The author first examines A Prayer Journal (2013), which O’Connor wrote as a young MFA student, to explore her earliest use of grotesque aesthetics in her implicit reimagining of pride and humility as connected to true self-knowledge and knowledge of God. He then uses this moral framework to ground a literary reading of O’Connor’s story “The Lame Shall Enter First” focused on the tragic pride of Sheppard, O’Connor’s revelatory use of a satanic narrative voice, and the grotesque humility in the diabolic prophet character, the juvenile delinquent Rufus Johnson. The author seeks to cast light on questions related not only to literature, moral theology and moral philosophy but also on the intellectual history of the twentieth century Catholic recovery of metaphysics.

Virtue, Rule-Following, and Absolute Prohibitions

AbstractIn her seminal article ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ (1958) Elizabeth Anscombe argued that we need a new ethics, one that uses virtue terms to generate absolute prohibitions against certain act-types. Leading contemporary virtue ethicists have not taken up Anscombe's challenge in justifying absolute prohibitions and have generally downplayed the role of rule-following in their normative theories. That they have not done so is primarily because contemporary virtue ethicists have focused on what is sufficient for characterizing the deliberation and action of the fully virtuous person, and rule-following is inadequate for this task. In this article, I take up Anscombe's challenge by showing that rule-following is necessary for virtuous agency, and that virtue ethics can justify absolute prohibitions. First, I offer a possibility proof by showing how virtue ethics can generate absolute prohibitions in three ways: by considering actions that directly manifest vice or that cannot be performed virtuously; actions that are prohibited by one's institutional roles and practical identities; and actions that are prohibited by the prescriptions of the wise. I then seek to show why virtue ethicists should incorporate rule-following and absolute prohibitions into their theories. I emphasize the central role that rules have in the development of virtue, then motivate the stronger view that fully virtuous agents follow moral rules by considering the importance of hope, uncertainty about consequences, and taking responsibility for what eventuates. Finally, I provide an account of what Anscombe called a ‘corrupt mind’, explaining how our understanding of virtue is corrupted if we think that virtue may require us to do vicious actions.

Rationality Meets Ren: beyond Virtue Catalogues for a World Business Ethos

The Confucian tradition, which places the virtue of ren or fellow feeling at its heart as a ‘gateway’ to the more concrete virtues of common Western parlance, offers a potential antidote to the excesses of a Western business ethics which, even after its recent academic reembrace of the Aristotelian tradition, in practice still too often instrumentalises virtue in the service of a ‘rational’ or ‘reasonable’ constraining of the profit motive. The deeper, intrinsic ‘ethos’ promised by a Confucian approach also finds its echo in the West in the work of Hans Kung’s Weltethos (World Ethos) project, led today on the business ethics front by Klaus Leisinger and Claus Dierksmeier. This paper explores a dilemma at the heart of the World Ethos movement seen from the twin peaks of the World Ethics Institute at Peking University and the Weltethos Institut at the University of Tubingen: namely, whether a business ethics culture accustomed to thinking in terms of CSR-esque lists of corporate values, virtues or principles can best be reformed via documents like the UN Global Compact, the 2010 Global Economic Ethic Manifesto, or even the UN Sustainable Development Goals, or whether a more radical, revolutionary quest for an inner ‘ethos’, to be lived and experienced by self-cultivating individuals engaged in business all over the world regardless of background, ought somehow to be undertaken parallel to these endeavours. The authors outline possible steps towards such a transformation of the management community’s understanding of virtue, without, however, dismissing the contribution of traditional, dilemma-oriented Western thinking about applied ethics in general, and business ethics in particular.

Justice as a Virtue: A Thomistic Perspective by Jean Porter

Reviewed by: Justice as a Virtue: A Thomistic Perspective by Jean Porter J. Brian Benestad Justice as a Virtue: A Thomistic Perspective. By Jean Porter. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2016. Pp. xiii + 286. $40.00 (paper). ISBN: 978-0-8028-7325-5. Porter describes her book as "a study of the virtue of justice as Aquinas presents it in the Summa theologiae, developed in such a way as to bring out the contemporary significance of his account" (x). Porter does not attempt to summarize in any way what Aquinas says about justice in his other extensive writings. She thinks "that Aquinas's overall account of justice and the virtues is the true theory of morality" but will not attempt to prove this statement conclusively in her book (ibid.). She does make clear that she "will offer a constructive expansion of Aquinas's views on justice . . . developing Aquinas's theory in some way, rather than simply interpreting what he says" (6). In other words, readers should be aware that she may depart from Aquinas's account of justice or add new things to it. The remaining parts of chapter 1 focus on the basics of the Thomistic presentation of justice. Justice is a personal virtue of individuals rather than a characteristic of society's basic institutions. It is a perfection of the will, the most excellent of the moral virtues, but inferior to the supernatural virtue of charity. For Aquinas, "the will is perfected through right relations to others" (27). In order to understand justice as a virtue, we need to understand the fundamentals of Aquinas's understanding of virtue. Porter notes that Aquinas begins his analysis with Peter Lombard's definition of virtue, which was, in turn, drawn from Augustine's writings: "Virtue is a good quality of the mind, by which we live righteously, of which no one can make bad use, which God [End Page 317] brings about in us, without us" (18, quoting STh I-II, q. 55, a. 4, which is quoting II Sent., d. 27, q. 5). The last part of the definition only applies to the infused virtues. The word "quality" in the definition refers to a habit or stable disposition inclining a person to do the right thing. Porter also makes her readers aware of the complexity of justice by distinguishing different kinds of justice: general, or legal, justice and particular justice, which is subdivided into distributive and commutative justice. To put justice into practice, a person will always need prudence, she adds with emphasis. More examples of these three kinds of justice and a more discernible order of the book's five chapters in relation to each other would have helped Porter's readers. Already in the second paragraph of chapter 1, Porter notes correctly that Aquinas's treatment of justice as a virtue and a perfection of the will is totally foreign to the theories of justice expounded by John Rawls and his interlocutors. Porter rightly sees that Rawls's "theory of justice . . . proposes an account of the ways in which institutions ought to operate, which kinds of structural arrangements are acceptable, and which kinds of outcomes are acceptable, given basic criteria of fairness and respect" (2). Although Porter says that "Aquinas gets justice right," she immediately adds that "he does not raise, much less address, questions pertaining to social and institutional structures that are central to most contemporary theories of justice" (5). Despite her great appreciation of Aquinas's thought on the virtue of justice, she never says that Rawls and his interlocutors should draw upon Aquinas in order to raise questions pertaining to the practice of the virtues by individuals responsible for the reform of institutions and structures. The constraints of a short review will not allow me to deal thoroughly with the main points of chapters 2 through 5. In the remainder of this review, after briefly mentioning a few insightful points made in these four chapters, I will focus on Porter's nonacceptance of Aquinas's way of evaluating the morality of the human act. In sum, she thinks that his analysis leads to more prohibitions than are acceptable today. In chapter 2, Porter directs...

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.

Reframing Catholic Theological Ethics: Summary and Application

This text represents a summary of the major points developed in the book, Reframing Catholic Theological Ethics, and a brief overview of how the author understands the relation between religion, ethics, and the building of a virtuous community. The main points of the book involve the anatomy of “the moral event” that includes a breakdown of all the elements necessary to consider before one arrives at ethical judgments and decision-making. Foundations are brought forth for these elements, each of which exhibits its own characteristics. The good and evil details of actions and circumstances that make up behavior are based upon an analysis of what is beneficial or harmful to human persons, integrally and adequately considered. Behaviors themselves are considered right or wrong in relation to whether they are appropriate ways of achieving one’s intended ends. Then, the distinction between good and bad is related to one’s virtuous or vicious dispositions, which necessitates a revised understanding of virtue. Based upon a view of religion that provides a formulation of principles that guide the life of the believing community, it is suggested that these principles encourage a commitment to ends or goals that serve the maintenance and advance of a community’s ethics.

Art of the Self: The Ethics of Balinese Pepaosan Performance

Abstract The art of pepaosan, an Indonesian tradition of singing and interpreting religious texts, is widely represented as a Hindu form of ethical self-cultivation focused on the pursuit of divine guidance. However, while state programs to develop this art form promote an understanding of virtue that foregrounds interiority and personal responsibility, many pepaosan practitioners pursue a relational form of virtue—at once material and immaterial, aesthetic and ethical—that is the product of both human and divine agency. Through analysis of the ethical dimensions of pepaosan, this article considers how music may be implicated in the sociohistorical processes by which shared conceptions of self are constructed, circulated, sustained, and transformed.

The egoistic teacher: educational implications of Spinoza’s ethical egoism

In this paper I suggest that Spinoza’s understanding of virtue and collective flourishing, rooted in his psychological and ethical egoism, offers a fresh perspective on the question of egoism in education. To this end, I suggest an understanding of the teacher as egoist, where the self-seeking of the teacher is conditioned by – and runs parallel to – the flourishing of his or her students. The understanding of the egoistic teacher is offered as a productive counter-image to the altruistic ideal in education as well as to the commonplace conception of the teacher as primarily a provider of services and the student as a consumer on an educational market.

Scarecrow, Tin Woodsman, and Cowardly Lion: The three-factor model of virtue

Recent research has identified three virtues from the 24 strengths in the VIA Classification of Strengths and Virtues, labeled caring, inquisitiveness, and self-control. This article explored this model further. Study 1 demonstrated substantial congruence in three-factor loadings across 12 samples (total N = 1,082,230) despite substantial differences in methodology. Study 2 (N = 1719) provided support for the use of aggregate scores for the three virtues. Study 3 (N = 498) demonstrated substantial overlap between measures of personality and the virtues. We conclude these three are potentially essential components of a theory of virtue. They cannot be considered a sufficient model, which may be unattainable. We also note that treating virtue as an individual difference concept neglects key elements of our understanding of virtue as a social construct, and these more amorphous elements must be considered in developing an optimal model of virtue.

‘A power that deifies the human and humanizes God’: the psychodynamics of love and hypostatic deification according to Maximos the Confessor

ABSTRACTMaximus the Confessor has been the subject of numerous subsets of the historical, philosophical, and theological disciplines, but the prominent role virtue – and above all else love – plays in his corpus remains vastly underexplored or misunderstood in secondary scholarship. The ascetic thinker’s understanding of virtue is fascinating in its own right since it implies and decodes the enormity of his theological vision by serving as the locus in and through which the created and the uncreated encounter each other. But the distinctive edge of his aretology is all the more peculiar by the way in which he forged it from the remaining shards of the late antique philosophical schools and honed it against the theological touchstones of anchorites, monastics, and Biblical commentators. The result was a multilayered theology of virtue that reimagined the place of love in the Christian life and remained a constitutive aspect of Greek monastic practice and lay piety until the fall of Constantinople and beyond. This chapter situates Maximus within the intellectual horizons wherein he expressed his theology of virtue, analyzes the relationship of love to knowledge and personhood, and examines how the virtues, and especially love, function as the mediating principle between divine condescension and human deification.

Tugend als Wert: Christoph Halbig und Max Scheler im Vergleich

Virtue as Value: A Comparison between Christoph Halbig and Max SchelerThe aim of the following contribution is to compare the virtue conceptions of Christoph Halbig and Max Scheler in order to scrutinize their common positions and differences and thus to answer two questions: Firstly, is it true that Scheler's approach is based on the basic assumptions of the recursive theory of virtues, as Halbig asserts this? Secondly, can the virtues be defined as attitudes (Thomas Hurka, Christopher Halbig), or should they be conceived as qualities of the person (Max Scheler)? In addition, the author examines the connection of virtues and emotions more closely and shows that virtues can be regarded as a kind of transformers from the negative to the positive, because they fix the right way of dealing with negative emotions and because they switch over the negative basic mood into a positive and joyful one. The reflection of these questions is embedded in a constant reference to Aristotle's understanding of virtues.

A new positive psychology: A critique of the movement based on early Christian thought

Positive psychology offers two visions for human life: a hedonic path that focuses on the seeking of pleasure and happiness, and a eudaimonic journey that involves the development of virtues conducive to a good life. Early Christian thought offers a sophisticated critique of the strengths and weaknesses of these visions because it responded to similar ideas that were present in classical philosophical systems like Stoicism. Early Christian writers rejected hedonic understandings of human flourishing (as did most people in the classical period) and approved of a focus on virtue as necessary to a good life. They also would join with positive psychologists and criticize a narrowly medical model view of mental health. However, there are also important differences between early Christian thought and eudaimonic positive psychology. Early Christian authors had a different understanding of virtue as holistic and relational, in contrast to the more fragmented and individualistic picture of virtue and health found in most positive psychology research. These Christian writers also had a different view of suffering as having positive potential or a ‘medicinal’ quality, while positive psychology writers generally see suffering as something undesirable that needs to be eliminated. Overall, some aspects of positive psychology are not incompatible with the vision of life, struggle, and helping that was developed by early Christian writers. However, the differences are probably more notable than the similarities.

The Theological Virtues According to Bruce Springsteen

Bruce Springsteen’s relationship to his Roman Catholic background is complex and multifaceted. This paper seeks to analyze the artist’s understanding of the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love as seen in the album Wrecking Ball (2012). By juxtaposing Springsteen’s understanding of these virtues with Catholicism’s Thomistic tradition, scholars can see how he draws upon this tradition while creating a more robust role for the virtue of hope. This analysis of Springsteen’s engagement in a theological discourse around the virtues of faith, hope, and love offers a fuller understanding of the artist’s commitment to visions of the American Dream.

Book Review: Book Reviews

Cultivating Virtue: Perspectives from Philosophy, Theology, and Psychology. Edited by Nancy E. Snow. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. xii + 349 pp. $105.00 (cloth); $36.95 (paper).Health as a Virtue: Thomas Aquinas and the Practice of Habits of Health. By Melanie L. Dobson. Princeton Theological Monograph Series. Eugene, Ore.: Pickwick Publications, 2014. 170 pp. $20.00 (paper).What does it take to cultivate virtue in oneself, ones children, and one's community? Editor Nancy Snow suggests in Cultivating Virtue that in the recent resurgence in virtue ethics, little attention has been paid to the question of how virtue is developed (p. 1). The book aims to fill this presumed gap, bringing together philosophers, theologians, and moral psychologists to reinforce what each field contributes (p. 16).Yet while a gap in reflecting on the cultivation of virtue may exist in some circles of discussion, that gap does not quite exist in theology. Cultivating Virtue presumes a very broad understanding of theolog/ (Confucianism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity), yet its conversation comes mostly from of religion whose entry points (history, culture) are distinct from those with theological concerns from those same traditions. Granted, theology necessarily includes historical and cultural work, and granted the work of of religion is important; still, the fact that most of the authors in this book directly use the word philosophy or philosophers to refer to the book's audience is suggestive of the conversations that are engaged here.Thus, for the audience of this journal, some of the conversations in Cultivating Virtue will show noticeable gaps. As one example, another book recently published, Melanie Dobson's Health as a Virtue: Thomas Aquinas and the Practice of Habits of Health, is one of many books in the Christian theological tradition that stem from a robust Christian theological conversation about virtue and its cultivation. In this review, I will show some points where Dobson's book might demonstrate precisely some of the conversations the authors in Cultivating Virtue advocate. That said, of course neither book is dealing directiy with the other and some of the unique conversations in both books are important, though they do not bear on each other, and so I aim to account for those conversations as well.Accordingly, if readers look a bit past Cultivating Virtue's central organizing question, they will find some weighty essays by an array of notable scholars. Moreover, these scholars often draw on each other's work, which makes for a kind of consistent conversation in these essays that is sometimes lacking in essay collections.The first essay, by Daniel C. Russell, closely examines Aristotle's understanding of virtue in light of the moral psychological research done on what it takes to develop a skill. Russell suggests that too often take a view of Aristotle's ethics as suggesting too lofty a picture of humanity. This then suggests that all we need to do is a kind of computation, plugging in variables of environment, who a person's moral exemplars have been, and the circumstances of the present situation, to arrive at an understanding of perfect development. Contrarily, Russell argues for a pathcentered focus on virtue, borrowed from moral psychology: to start with what we know about human development and improvement, and then extend this knowledge to an account of improving in character in particular (p. 19). Russell argues that cultivating virtue is messy, and there is no neat philosophical theory we can indulge in order to cultivate virtue. Nor is there a perfect community that will definitively cultivate the kind of people we want to be (p. 40).Russell's argument provides good potential grist for a central problem in theological virtue conversation, namely the question of whether and how the Christian community called church helps form Christian character. …

Virtue ethics and church planting: A critical assessment and reevaluation of church planting utilizing Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue

This article proposes a critical reevaluation of church planting utilizing the philosophical area of virtue ethics. The article begins first with a critique of modern church planting based primarily upon Alasdair MacIntyre’s assessment of the social sciences in After Virtue. MacIntyre’s critique of the social sciences as having the potential to be both manipulative and overconfident bears striking parallels to the current moral issues surrounding church planting. Such a critique paves the way for a rehabilitation of the practice of church planting. The second part of this article begins a process of rebuilding an understanding of church planting from the ground up. Utilizing a Thomistic understanding of virtue, I will demonstrate how the individual missional actions that compromise church planting are in accordance with our natural and supernatural ends, and thus promote human flourishing. Following this, I will begin to build a definition of church planting coherent with Alasdair MacIntyre’s notion of a practice (activities with goods internal to them). Such a definition necessitates the need for the practice of church planting to be authorized by Scripture, church, and tradition. Last, I will show how the practice of church planting must be embedded within the broader narrative of the church and the individual Christian life.