Virtuous People Research Articles

It's Time for Schools To Implement Character Education

Character education can provide our nation's youth with the information and skills they need to mature into ethical and virtuous people. Do we want a youth population that does not bring guns to school because of an armed guard and metal detector at the door? Or do we want a youth population that does not bring guns to school because it goes against their intrinsic nature?

Motivating moral corporate behavior

Although companies are institutionalizing ethics, ethical infractions continue unceasingly, causing questions as to where ethical emphasis is going awry. Suggests that businesspeople need not only the intellect but also the will to do the right thing in the face of temptation. Proposes several reasons why businesspeople should want to take the moral high road, including the fact that usually ethical behavior proves to be profitable in the long run. However, such a pragmatic consideration is not sufficient to motivate a person of ethical character. The ethical person chooses the moral course of action regardless of personal sacrifice. It is such virtuous people that business leaders should be hiring and cultivating in ethical mentoring and training which instills an absolutist (not relativist) philosophy and reinforces the importance of willpower. Uses an advertising case study to illustrate how common ethical fallacies can be uncovered and dispelled among employees.

Honour, Community, and Ethical Inwardness

Daniel Putman thinks I am right to hold that for Aristotle a concern to appear before one's peers in a certain way is internal to virtue. He takes me to suppose that things are otherwise under a ‘modern concept of virtue’, and says that I am wrong about this. Putman rightly distinguishes between a desire to look good before one's peers which is a substitute for virtue, and a desire to look good to them because, acting virtuously, ‘we genuinely deserve to be viewed that way’. (He acknowledges that I recognize such a distinction in Aristotle.) Once this distinction is made, Putman thinks, we can appreciate that modern ethical understanding is as much dependent on ‘the communitarian foundation of character’ as is Aristotelian virtue. The only thing, says Putman, which gulls us into thinking otherwise is the sociological fact that Aristotle's political community was homogenous, while ours is heterogenous, so that more often virtuous people today will have to act in a way which goes against what many around them think.

Ideal Government and the Mixed Constitution of the Middle Ages (review)

BOOK RZVXZWS 667 scholarship on Avicenna. Certainly ~man's book is one of the most truly philosophiCal thus far in the Rout.ledge series: the concerns and the tone are philosophical, but not at the expense of historical sensitivity. Unfortunately, truly philosophical studies of the major medieval Islamic philosophers are still all too rare, and it is to Goodman's credit that he has provided both specialist and general readers with such a philosophical appreciation of Avicenna's thought. DEBORAH L. BLACK Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto James M. Blythe. Ideal Government and the Mixed Constitution of the Middle Ages. Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1992. Pp. xvi + 343. Cloth, $45.oo. In a wide-sweeping survey of political writings from Aquinas to Machiavelli, Guicciardini and Gianotti, Robert Blythe convincingly demonstrates the continuing influence of the theory of mixed government as the best political arrangement for human society. Drawing on the research of medievalists such as the Carlyles, McIlwain and Tierney, as well as on that of scholars of early modern political thought such as Pocock and Skinner, Blythe develops an original thesis through the examination of original sources. Although it comes as no surprise that, while favoring monarchy as the best form of government, individual medieval thinkers espoused monarchical exercise of power within the framework of a mixed constitution, Biythe's thorough analysis of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century political thought reveals a strikingly wide consensus on that position. At the same time the author sees in the medieval Aristotelian tradition the primary source of ideas on which Machiavelli and his contemporaries based their own theories of mixed government. Consequently, acknowledging that these sixteenth-century thinkers articulated their theories in Polybian terminology, he rejects the current view that they took it directly from the ancient Greek historian. Blythe is quick to point out that, if basically using Aristotle, medieval proponents of government commingling monarchical, aristocratic and democratic elements varied widely in their understanding of its composition and the functioning of its different parts. Indeed, the response of each writer reflected the results of a reciprocal relationship between Aristotle's text and the individual's approach to previous interpretations and his own needs and experiences. Subtle differences in vocabulary and meaning relate intimately to political and intellectual milieux. If at times Blythe's analysis of an author's position comes perilously close to burying the reader in detail, the basic theme of the medieval adaptation of the classical tradition of mixed government and its effect on early modern thought provides coherence throughout. After a brief discussion of the doctrine of mixed constitutionalism in Plato, Aris.toile , and Polybius, and the disappearance of the terminology in the early Middle Ages, Biythe devotes the second portion of the book to tracing the reformulation of the concept by Scholastic thinkers following the translation of Aristotle's Politics in the 126os. At the very outset, a profound "disjunction" (3o2) in interpreting Aristotle 668 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 32:4 OCTOBER 1994 became embedded in the famous commentary on the Politics partially written by Aquinas and continued by his disciple, Peter of Auvergne. Thomas read Aristotle as favoring a "political" king tempered by the power of the wise few and of the body of citizens. Each cidzen would be loyal to the government because each had a stake in its success in attaining the common good. With its checks and balances this government was best for any people, because it prevented tyranny of the one, few, and/or many. By contrast, Peter saw a mixed constitution as best only for a virtuous people because its essence depended on uniting the virtues of each element in society: the king provided unity, the few, wisdom, and the many, power. The confusion of positions within this one commentary generally ascribed to Aquinas provided a broad range of options for subsequent thinkers, most of whom agreed with Peter in allowing only the virtuous to participate in government. Some of these same men, however, were attracted to Aquinas's concept of a balance of power. Torn between his allegiance to Augustine and the attraction of Aristode, Giles of Rome confusingly endorsed both absolute monarchy and a mixed re#me...

The 1990 Elections in Côte d’Ivoire

Paraphrasing Félix Houphouët-Boigny, Ivoirian politician Camille Aliali once said, “Democracy is a system of government for virtuous people. It seldom works even in mature countries. We must be realistic. Our people are ignorant of the problems we face. They cannot be left to choose the solutions,....” In 1990, the president and his close associates changed their minds. On May 3, 1990, the president of Côte d’Ivoire announced the legalization of opposition parties and the intent to hold multi-party elections. On October 28, Ivoirians voted in their first multi-candidate presidential election, which pitted the eighty-five year old Houphouët against long-standing critic and candidate of the “democratic left” coalition, Laurent Gbagbo.

The Architecture of Ideology: Neo-Confucian Imprinting on Cheju Island, Korea.

Cheju Island, Korea's historic island of exile, with a harsh natural environment, early developed a negative image as human habitat. The author challenges this perception and shows how Neo-Confucian state ideology during the Yi dynasty (A.D. 1392-1910) created and conserved the island as a viable habitat by using feng-shui--a powerful medieval science of surveying--to shape the island's built environment and quality of life. The outcome, reflecting sustained political commitment to the philosophical concept of enlightened undervelopment, was a sincere landscape inhabited by a virtuous people.

Aristotle on Making Other Selves

There is still a relative paucity of discussion of the views on friendship that Aristotle presents in the Nicomachean Ethics, although some recent work may indicate a new trend. One suspects that this paucity reflects a belief that those views are not very interesting; if true, this witnesses to an unfortunate underestimation of Aristotle's account. This account is in fact quite surprising, for – I shall argue – Aristotle believes that one makes one's friends in the most literal sense of the verb.Aristotle takes virtue-friendship, i.e., the friendship of virtuous people who are friends for virtue, as ‘friendship in the primary way.’ Other ‘friendships’ – for utility and for pleasure – are only so-called by way of similarity to friendship proper, i.e., virtue-friendship (1157a30ff). Accordingly, proper friendship must be non-instrumental, or, more carefully, not essentially instrumental, unlike the friendship-analogs that fall outside the scope of friendship proper (1157a17-20). While ‘friends of utility … were never friends of each other, but of what was expedient for them’ (1157a14ff), a true ‘friend is taken to be someone who wishes and does goods or apparent goods to his friend for the friend's own sake’ (1166a3). The theme of desiring and acting for the friend's own sake is repeated many times in the Ethics; in the Rhetoric it is explicitly taken as definitive of friendship (1361b35-40). Since the contrast between true friendship and mere friendship-analogs is that between the not essentially instrumental (for the sake of the friend) and the essentially instrumental (using the friend as a means to pleasure or utility), a successful account of Aristotle's views on friendship must preserve and explain this contrast in all its centrality.

A cting and Feeling in Character: Nicomachean Ethics 3.i

There is a prevailing tendency to read the first five chapters of Nicomachean Ethics Book 3, and 3.i in particular, as though they were narrowly, and the latter exclusively, concerned with moral and legal responsibility. At least one unfortunate consequence of this is that the ouk hekousion/akousion distinction tends to be ignored or dismissed as unsatisfactory; another is that inadequate accounts are given of acting under necessity (ananke). In this paper I aim to redress the balance by emphasising what I maintain is another concern of Aristotle's 3.i namely what is involved in acting and feeling in character.' As the opening sentence of 3.i reminds us, our topic is excellence of character or virtue that is that we are students of and virtue is concerned with actions and feelings.2 Book 2 has made some general remarks about the ways in which this is so. We become virtuous by doing virtuous actions (2.i) or rather, by doing actions that are in accordance with virtue or which are called just or temperate (2.iv) and vicious by doing vicious ones. The actions that produce virtue and vice also constitute the sphere of their activity, i.e. virtuous people do virtuous actions and vicious people vicious ones (2.ii). The feelings of pleasure and pain that accompany people's actions should be taken as a sign of their dispositions and, quite generally, virtue is concerned with the feelings, viz. with pleasures and pains (2.iii). Virtue operates in the field of actions and feelings, and to each virtue there correspond two vices, from which we may derive the general idea that, given one person with a virtue and two other people

Mercy Otis Warren: The Politics of Language and the Aesthetics of Self

DURING THE LAST FIFTEEN YEARS OR SO HISTORIANS HAVE GREATLY expanded and enriched the concept of republicanism in the era of the American Revolution. No longer viewing it in narrowly governmental terms-with an emphasis on such themes as representation, checks and balances, and separation of powers-they have broadened our understanding by describing it as a comprehensive world view. The republican synthesis, as it is now commonly known, begins with the radical whig perception that history was a struggle between two parallel sets of opposing principles: in political terms, between liberty and arbitrary power; and in ethical terms, between virtue and avarice and corruption. Out of these linked pairs of oppositions, historians have generated a view of republicanism that involves the complex intersection of ideology, ethics, history, culture, religion, and language. So inseparable were these structures of intellectual and social existence that for whig intellectuals to discriminate among them (if it were possible at all) would be to rend what Mercy Otis Warren often called the beautiful of republicanism. Woven through this fabric was virtue-private and public virtue, American patriots never tired of insisting. Virtue was the genius of republicanism; it was a quality of human character and conduct that manifested the confluence of personality and public behavior, such that civic values and practices were continuous with individual values and practices. Virtuous people's interiors, so to speak, were mirrored in their exterior conduct. Public Virtue cannot exist within a Nation without private, John Adams, echoing Montesquieu, wrote to Mercy Warren,

Political Philosophy and Rhetoric: A Study of the Origins of American Party Politics (review)

120 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY John Zvesper. Political Philosophy and Rhetoric: A Study of the Origins of American Party Politics . Cambridge Studies in the History and Theory of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Pp. vii + 237. $16.95. The subject of this book, as indicated by its subtitle, will attract political scientists and historians who have a special interest in the origin and nature of American political parties. However , the book deserves the attention of students of philosophy and political philosophy as well, for Professor Zvesper argues that the first American political parties, and the "'party government" to which they gave birth, can be adequately understood only in terms of the very real philosophical dispute which characterized the American regime's first generation and which cyclically informs American politics to the present day. Taking issue especially with those historians and political scientists who either deny or discount the philosophical distance between the Federalists and the Republicans, Zvesper argues that the rise of the Jeffersonians must be understood as a principled and idealistic reaction against the starkly realistic principles of the Hamiltonian program . Beneath Jeffersonian idealism and rhetoric ultimately lay the principles of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and beneath Hamiltonian realism and rhetoric lay the principles of Thomas Hobbes (pp. 13-14, 43). The pitched battle between Federalists and Republicans was thus no mere battle of interests, nor was it merely a temporary and unwarranted ideological aberration within a "theoretically perfect system" (p. 5): that battle was the practical equivalent of a fundamental conflict within modem political philosophy. Thus, according to Zvesper, a study of the origins of American party politics is both a study of the nature of the American regime and a study of modern political philosophy in practice. Zvesper's Federalists, including of course the Madison of The Federalist Papers, unabashedly built their new government upon the foundations of popular economic self-interest and official political ambition. Popular and official virtue were too unreliable to be the building blocks of a truly modern republic, and although political ambition represented a more elevated defect than economic self-interest, neither even approached the moral demands of "republican virtue," to say nothing of classical or Christian moral virtue (pp. 23-25). In its most "idealistic" moments, Federalism looked to the governors rather than to the governed for guidance or for political "virtue," and energetic and productive Federalist policies always spoke to the people's "self-interested acquisitiveness" rather than to their "Spartan patriotism" (p. 44). Such "virtue" as the people needed would be engendered, according to the rhetoric of Federalist orators and divines , by the pursuit of economic interest itself: the policies of the energetic governors would create a system in which the growth of "virtuous materialism" (p. 44) would guarantee continued prosperity in this world and salvation in the next (pp. 59-62). However, in Zvesper's account, Federalist rhetoric about "virtuous materialism" was undermined by the spectacle of self-interested passion and the orgy of speculation ~t off by Hamilton's financial and commercial policies (pp. 83-84). Attributing the display of public vice to the governors ' corruption of the governed, Jefferson, joined in 1791-92 by Madison, now celebrated popular republican purity and denied that a virtuous people needed to be governed so energetically . Adhering to his belief in man's natural "sociality" while conceding that man was not naturally political (p. 103), Jefferson railed against Federalist policies because they divided the people, promoted corruption among the legislators, and set the wealthy few and the corrupted governors over the many. Jefferson's charge that the Federalists were "monarchists" was the rhetoric of neither a deceitful firebrand nor a deluded partisan; rather, that charge expressed in its most effective form the Jeffersonian-Madisonian perception of the thrust of governmental policies which denied popular virtue and served to create artificial wealth and influence. The Republican challenge represented, then, both a recoiling against the harsh realism of a Hobbesian regime and a recalling of the necessary linkage between true republicanism and real morality. In Zvesper's view, thus, the recurrence of Jeffersonian rhetoric in the successful campaigns of Jackson, Lin- BOOK REVIEWS 121 coin, and Franklin Roosevelt testifies to the ongoing tension...

The French Revolution and English Parliamentary Reform: James Mackintosh and the Vindiciae Gallicae

The French Revolution and English Parliamentary Reform: James Mackintosh and the Vindiciae Gallicae

Seneca in Search of Passing Time

Seneca in Search of Passing Time
 Seneca shows us that reading the philosophers can enable the reader to escape time. He also teaches how to possess the future achieving fame among wise and virtuous people. In Seneca’s opinion, time is our greatest wealth, however ephemeral it might be, although his tragic heroes and heroines as well as the author himself are conscious of the fact that death limits the time of life thus making it valuable. Nevertheless, his philosophy is often pessimistic, neglecting hope as a key to the future.

Reiersen's Texas

translated and edited by DERWOOD JOHNSON 9 Reiersen s Texas In of 1843 Christianssandsposten Johan Reinert Reiersen, (Christiansand, the outspoken Norway), editor of Christianssandsposten (Christiansand, Norway), arrived in New Orleans and from there visited Norwegian settlements in certain northern states, including Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin. He returned to New Orleans in the spring of 1844 after boarding a boat in St. Louis that took him down the Mississippi, and then went up the Red River to Natchitoches , Louisiana. He proceeded by stagecoach, carrying only a light knapsack, to Nacogdoches and San Augustine, Texas, where a Dr. Hald showed him around and supplied information. There were then no stagecoaches to points farther southwest, so Reiersen hired a saddle horse for his journey into Austin, the new capital of Texas.1 Reiersen thus describes what he had accomplished in Austin: "Congress had just assembled and I easily gained admittance to the president of the republic, General Houston, who was intensely interested in having immigrants choose Texas as their new fatherland. He assured me that Congress would give a colony of Norwegians all the encouragement 1 Theodore C. Biegen, ed., "Behind the Scenes of Emigration: A Series of Letters from the 1840's," in Norwegian- American Studies and Records , 14:79, 95-111 (1944). 252 REIERSEN'S TEXAS that could reasonably be expected. He believed that peace and quiet were as good as insured since the President of the United States, in his last message, had emphatically declared that a continuation of warlike invasions and forays from Mexico would not be tolerated. He doubted that Texas would be admitted to the Union in the near future. In his opinion, one could consider the Comanche Indian hostilities at an end after their last defeat, and after Texas had established permanent forts along the northwest course of the Brazos and Colorado rivers. Now it seemed that nothing could hinder the rapid progress of the republic in prosperity and wealth, with an industrious and virtuous people occupying the vast stretches of fertile land/'2 After staying two days in Austin, Reiersen took a five-day stage trip to Houston by way of Bastrop, Rutersville, and Washington, on the Brazos River. He arrived at Galveston March 7, 1844, and left two days later for New Orleans.3 Reiersen's American tour had been subsidized by a group of prospective emigrants in southwestern Norway; he was to inspect local conditions in the New World and report his findings. When he returned to Norway, he published these observations in a book entitled Veiviser for norske emigranter til de forenede nordamerikanske stater og Texas (Guide for Norwegian Emigrants to the United North American States and Texas - Christiania, 1844). The volume was distributed among his sponsors.4 The title page of the "Guide" carries the following : "Containing a report to some farmers and citizens of western Norway about agriculture, climate, natural products, animals, machinery for cultivation and land improvement, possibilities for profits for all types of workers, craftsmen, and merchants , prices of products and labor, public lands, and the government and society of the states and their relation to the 2 Biegen, ed., in Studies and Records , 14:108. 3 Biegen, ed., in Studies and Records , 14:108. 4 C. A. Clausen, ed., The Lady with the Pen: Elise Wœrenskjold in Texas , 158 (Northfield, 1961). 253 Derwood Johnson Union, in western America, namely in Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, and the free state of Texas." Chapter 9 of Reiersen's book, a translation of which follows , deals exclusively with the republic of Texas. It comments on such matters as its borders, size, physical features, climate, soil, plants, animals, cities, population, public lands, and outlook for the future. Reiersen's view of Texas is generally favorable; nevertheless, he refrains from pointing it out, or indeed any of the American states, as the "Promised Land" for Norwegian emigrants. His preference for Texas was clearly demonstrated, however, in 1845, when he and a small group of followers established the first Norwegian settlement there at a place which he called Normandy, now known as Brownsboro.5 In the present translation, slight errors in spelling have been corrected. When Reiersen's use of a term varies...