State-Inflicted Violence and the Ethics of Suffering

This chapter investigates two ways in which playwrights adapt violent historical subjects for the stage in Gabriel Bounin’s Soltane (1561) and Jean de Beaubreuil’s tragedy Regulus (1582). The loyal heroes from both are victims of state violence, though their stories unfold quite differently. In La Soltane, Moustapha obeys his father’s orders to visit him despite being warned his father will have him killed. In Regulus, Atilie remains loyal to his homeland (Rome) despite knowing the Carthaginians will punish his betrayal. However, whereas Bounin depicts Moustapha as an innocent victim of filicide, Beaubreuil paints Atilie as an arrogant warrior whose hubris causes his defeat in battle. Nonetheless, Atilie accepts his change in fortune and his violent death in Carthage. Thus, despite his flaws, he is a stoic exemplar who might inspire spectators to take virtuous action themselves. Further, while the stories take place in the Ottoman Empire and the Mediterranean Basin, they mirror the religious and civil wars of sixteenth-century France.

The Duke of Guise’s Murder and the Imperative of Vengeance

This chapter focuses on Simon Belyard’s Guysien (Troyes, 1592), a tragedy that reenacts the Duke of Guise’s assassination at Blois in 1588. On the one hand, Guise suffers unjust punishment and deserves our pity; on the other, Guise’s loyalty to his homeland inspires virtuous action in the spectators. In Le Guysien, the French king Henry III’s violence is a negative, evil force that paradoxically must be countered with more violence to free the French people from tyranny. The chapter considers the Catholic League’s polemical literature concerning Henry III’s legitimacy, as well as political philosophy and the legitimization of tyrannicide in late sixteenth-century France. Belyard’s play not only incites spectators to pick up the sword to avenge what he considers to be the unjust death of Guise, but is itself a militant act during the turbulent years between Henry III’s own assassination (1589) and Henry IV’s conversion to Catholicism (1593) and subsequent coronation (1594).

The Doing of Justice and the Priority of Acting from Virtue

Aristotle famously distinguishes between merely doing a virtuous action and acting in the way in which a virtuous person would. Against an interpretation prominent in recent scholarship, I argue that ‘acting virtuously,’ in the sense of exercising a virtue actually possessed, is prior to ‘virtuous action,’ understood generically. I propose that the latter notion is best understood as a derivative abstraction from the former, building upon a reading of a neglected distinction between per se and coincidentally just action in Nicomachean Ethics 5, and thus shed light on the meaning and philosophical significance of the priority of acting from virtue.

Simbolizācijas spējas nozīme reliģiskajā hermeneitikā

The aim of this study is to look at the role of moral behaviour in the process of awareness and self-awareness, reflecting on how each person’s virtuous action helps to develop his/her self-awareness and how we have possibility to transcend our everyday (pseudo)consciousness to a higher level of (real) consciousness, which gives us very special opportunities in hermeneutics, too. The study reflects on the peculiar and unique scientific status of philosophy in the field of science, and discussion about epistemological and hermeneutical stagnation in modern philosophy is provoked stating that philosophy uses a logical linear discourse borrowed from exact sciences. At the same time, in philosophy we shouldn’t be slaves to public opinion, but the discourse of transcending the everyday consciousness should be applied. The novelty of the study is the invitation to interpret some moral statements of Plato or Kant, and perhaps of other philosophers, in a radically different way. For example, from the point of view of most modern philosophy Plato’s expression “virtue is a gift of the Gods” (from “Meno”) and Kant’s “confusion and surprise about law of virtue in myself” looks like philosophy’s weakness, but from the point of view of this research, these quotes are indications of philosophy’s power, letting us really transcend our consciousness, wake up and come out from the cave!

An Implication of Buddhist Ethical Teaching on Sustainable Development

Ethical teaching of religion has a significant impact on human action. Scripture has always been considered a guideline for human life. However, there is an argument that Buddhist philosophy is dysteleological. Therefore, it is difficult to argue for the virtuous action for protection or restore nature within the early Buddhist framework. This paper is an attempt to argue that Buddha has the main concern for Human suffering and he prescribed the solution or path to get rid of the suffering but there is a significant implication of Buddhist ethical teaching. Therefore, Buddhist ethical teaching can be a significant step towards sustainable development.

Aristotle on the Necessity of Habituation

In Nicomachean Ethics 2.4 Aristotle raises a puzzle about moral habituation. Scholars take the puzzle to concern how a learner could perform virtuous actions, given the assumption that virtue is prior to virtuous action. I argue, instead, that Aristotle is concerned to defend the necessity of practice, given the assumption that virtue is reducible to virtuous action.

Buddhist Ethic: Conceptual Foundations of the Doctrine of Meritorious Activity

The doctrine of meritorious activity as an everyday practice of individual moral development is the center of Buddhist ethics. The topic of the paper comprises the conceptual basis of this activity as presented in the exegetic treatise «The Encyclopedia of Abhidharma» («Abhidharmakośa») ascribed to eminent medieval Indian Buddhist thinker Vasubandhu (4–5th centuries). Three forms of meritorious activity are analyzed here: giving, cultivation of benevolence to all sentient beings, virtuous action. Meritorious activity is treated as religious virtue. The basis for this interpretation is formed by the theory of karma (transcendental law of causality). Ethical aspect of the practice of giving deserves special attention. Canonical typology of giving’s having no religious virtue because of moral defectiveness of the giver is considered. The paper also presents the explication of virtuous action. According to this theory abstention from immoral actions must be supplied with the refusal of self-gratification.

Eudaimonia: The sociocultural value of consumers’ social labor

Consumers participate in social media producing value through social labor. So far scholars approached social labor through a Marxist lens focusing on the economic aspects of its value and the potential risks related to consumers’ exploitation. We build a sociocultural conceptualization of social labor actualizing the Aristotelian idea of virtuous action that realizes a life well lived with others. Following this approach, we identify Eudaimonia as a theoretical construct to capture the sociocultural value of social labor, and we elaborate how social labor in social media enables the achievement of a eudaimonic state of living. We support our conceptualization with empirical evidence in the social media context of amateur cooking practices that illustrates how Eudaimonia is achieved through social labor practices of cultural performativity. Our perspective extends previous theory related to three research domains of consumers’ social labor: (1) Marxist and technocapitalist critique, (2) neoliberalist perspective, and (3) networked consumer collectives.

Credo

This chapter focuses on the role that emotion plays in virtue, emphasizing that acting virtuously is the central and most important dimension of virtue. It analyses the centrality of roles in virtue as a matter of their being tied to virtuous action, which is more central than every role in virtue that is not tied to virtuous action. It also discusses reference to virtue in other traditions that serves to emphasize the moral significance of certain ways of being, instead of doing. The chapter concentrates on two virtues: compassion and courage, and two emotions: sympathy and fear. It argues that having a modified sympathy trait is indispensable to being a reliably correct judge of which action require compassion in a practical situation.