The Virtuous Life In Greek Ethics

2006 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Virtuous Life

Naked

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krista K. Thomason
Keyword(s):  
Moral Emotion ◽  
Dark Side ◽  
Virtuous Life ◽  
Moral Philosophers

Moral philosophers have long argued that shame can be a morally valuable emotion that helps people realize when they fail to be the kinds of people they aspire to be. According to these arguments, people feel shame when they fail to live up to the norms, standards, and ideals that are valued as part of a virtuous life. But lurking in the shadows is the dark side of shame. People might feel shame when they fail to live up to their values, but they also feel shame about sex, nudity, being ugly, fat, stupid, or low-class. What is worse, people often respond to shame with violence and self-destruction. This book argues for a unified account of shame that embraces shame’s dark side. Rather than try to explain away the troubling cases as irrational or misguided, it presents an account of shame that makes sense of both its good and bad side. Shame is the experience of a tension between two aspects of one’s self: one’s self-conception and one’s identity. People are liable to feelings of shame because they are not always who they take themselves to be. Shame is a valuable moral emotion, and even though it has a dark side, people would not be better off without it.

Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito

2019 ◽  
pp. 117-140
Author(s):  
Hugh H. Benson
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Virtuous Life ◽  
The One ◽  
Do So

This chapter presents a reading of Plato’s Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito. These dialogues, in which Plato depicts the weeks leading up to Socrates’s last day, are replete with various philosophical explorations. Among those explorations is the question of how to live our lives. On the one hand, Socrates is clear and straightforward. We should live the examined life—making logoi and examining ourselves and others in order to determine whether we are as wise as we think we are, and we should live the virtuous life. This is how Socrates lives his life. On the other hand, the examined life undercuts, or at least should undercut, the confidence with which he seeks to live the virtuous life. It may help bring some stability to the general principles by which he lives his life, but it can do so only defeasibly and without certainty.

Imitating the Traditional Gods

Mnemosyne ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Vilius Bartninkas
Keyword(s):  
Role Models ◽  
Moral Virtues ◽  
The People ◽  
Additional Input ◽  
Virtuous Character ◽  
Ethical Role ◽  
Virtuous Life ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Religious Aspect ◽  
The Ideal

Abstract This paper examines moral virtues and cult practice in Plato’s Laws. It explores the symposium and the chorus and their potential to provide a recognisable cultural setting, in which the Magnesian citizens can test their responses to pleasurable and painful experiences and thus train their moral virtues. The challenge to this reading is to explain what additional input to moral habituation is provided by the religious aspect of these institutions. This paper draws attention to the relationship between the people and the patron gods of the respective institutions. It argues that the cult practices are designed to reflect the virtuous character of the traditional gods, who serve as the ethical role models for the worshipers. In this way, the worship of the traditional gods not only facilitates moral progress by exemplifying the objective of virtuous life, but also gives an egalitarian version of the ideal of godlikeness to its citizens.

scholarly journals Aristotle’s Two Cities: Reducing Diversity to Homogeneity

2014 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-73
Author(s):  
Refik Güremen
Keyword(s):  
Main Concern ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Working Population ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Working People ◽  
Virtuous Life

Abstract It has often been argued, in scholarly debate, that Aristotle’s denial of citizenship to the working population of his ideal city in Book VII of the Politics constitutes a fundamental injustice. According to this view, although it is true that their way of life prevents them from living a morally virtuous life, it does not follow that the working people are naturally devoid of the human qualities required for such a life. So, rather than finding a just way to distribute citizenship among the diversity a city’s population would naturally exhibit (as he does, to a certain extent, in Book III), Aristotle would commit himself to oligarchic measures in Book VII. In this article, it is argued that the main concern of Book VII is less with a just determination of the extent of citizenship (unlike Book III) than with conceiving the most efficient way for a city to be happy: this consists in establishing a community composed of individuals who lay claim to happiness in the same way and to the same degree. In other words, it consists in reducing the diversity of Book III to a certain kind of homogeneity.

What Are You Guarding?

2021 ◽  
pp. 20-48
Author(s):  
Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Virtuous Person ◽  
False Self ◽  
Desert Fathers ◽  
The World ◽  
Virtuous Life ◽  
Christian Thought ◽  
The Right

What role should anger play in a virtuous life? If anger’s rightful target is injustice, and the world is marked by persistent injustice, is it virtuous to be habitually angry? Or, on the contrary, if Christlike character is marked by gentleness, should a virtuous person have little to no anger? To address this puzzle, DeYoung incorporates insights from two strands in Christian thought—one drawing on counsel from the desert fathers and mothers to eschew anger as a manifestation of the false self, and the other from Aquinas, who argues that some anger can be virtuous, if it has the right object and mode of expression. Next, she examines ways that formation in virtuous anger depends on other virtues, including humility, and other practices, such as lament and hope. Finally, she argues for appropriate developmental and vocational variation in anger’s virtuous expression across communities and over a lifetime.

Instinct and Hesitation in the Work of Arthur Hugh Clough

2020 ◽  
pp. 123-147
Author(s):  
Daniel Tyler
Keyword(s):  
Human Activity ◽  
The Other ◽  
Technical Requirement ◽  
Moral Requirement ◽  
Ongoing Process ◽  
Arthur Hugh Clough ◽  
Virtuous Life

The processes of composition and revision put impulse and inspiration into contact with calm reflection in a way that is continuous with the other kinds of human activity Clough describes in his poems—including Dipsychus and The Bothie—where instinct and hesitation have their competing advantages and exert their rival claims. This chapter explores the drafts of Clough’s poems, many of which were heavily revised and remained incomplete at the time of his death. It shows that revision is not solely a technical requirement for Clough; understood more broadly as an ongoing process of self-checking and self-correction, it is a moral requirement in leading a responsible, virtuous life.

Virtue in Social and Public Life

2019 ◽  
pp. 45-66
Author(s):  
Fred Dallmayr
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Paul Ricoeur ◽  
Ethical Conduct ◽  
Alasdair Macintyre ◽  
Metaphysical Realism ◽  
Societal Context ◽  
Virtuous Life ◽  
Spiritual Resources ◽  
Aristotelian Tradition

This chapter considers that, because of predatory selfishness, democracy requires the cultivation of ethical and spiritual resources for which it turns to the Aristotelian tradition of shared “virtuous” life. It begins with Alasdair MacIntyre, who profiles virtue ethics against two modern alternatives: “Morality,” a set of abstract rules anchored in the cogito, and “expressivism,” the pursuit of selfish preferences. By contrast, virtue ethics focuses on the concrete, character-related conduct nurtured by prudent judgment in a societal context, though there are some drawbacks to this view, especially the legacy of “naturalism” and essentialism. The chapter next presents the “little ethics” of Paul Ricoeur and his effort to link Aristotle with Kant, “teleology” with “deontology.” The chapter finally turns to Gadamer’s ethics which purges Aristotle of metaphysical “realism” or naturalism and presents ethical conduct not as a factual endowment but as “process of ongoing self-transformation” and (spiritual) “humanization.”

Self-Knowledge and Despair

2021 ◽  
pp. 133-155
Author(s):  
Owen Ware
Keyword(s):  
Moral Progress ◽  
Moral Self ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
New Form ◽  
Virtuous Life ◽  
The Right ◽  
Two Sides

It is one thing to show that we are the kind of beings for whom morality applies, and quite another to show that our moral aspirations are on the right track. The latter raises a question of moral self-knowledge, since it asks how we as individuals can have assurance that our moral progress is genuine. This chapter argues that a new form of despair emerges from the question of how we can trust our own aspirations to live a virtuous life. The problem concerns either our tendency to self-deception or our inability to know our underlying intentions—two sides of Kant’s opacity thesis. This chapter argues that Kant’s effort to resolve the issue of moral self-knowledge leads him, in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and the Metaphysics of Morals, to a theory of conscience.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document