What’s good about the good life? Action theory, virtue ethics and modern morality

2020 ◽  
pp. 019145372094837
Author(s):  
Frédéric Vandenberghe
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Action Theory ◽  
Critical Realism ◽  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Research ◽  
The Right

The article explores the scope and the limits of virtue ethics from the perspective of critical theory (Habermas) and critical realism (Bhaskar). Based on new research in moral sociology and anthropology, it ponders how the self-realization of each can be combined with the self-determination of all. The article adopts an action-theoretical perspective on morality and defends the priority of the right over the good. It suggests that in plural and polarized societies, there no longer exists a consensus on any version of the good life. It therefore limits the scope of virtue ethics to personal life and pleads for a minima moralia at the social and political level.

Virtuous Emotions

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristján Kristjánsson
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Moral Justification ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Emotion Theory ◽  
Moral Theorizing ◽  
Emotional Value

Aristotelian virtue ethics has gained momentum within latter-day moral theorizing. Many people are drawn towards virtue ethics because of the central place it gives to emotions in the good life; after all, Aristotle says that emotions can have an intermediate and best condition proper to virtue. Yet nowhere does Aristotle provide a definitive list of virtuous emotions. In the Rhetoric, Aristotle does analyse a number of emotions. However, many emotions that one would have expected to see there fail to get a mention, and others are written off rather hastily as morally defective. Whereas most of what goes by the name of ‘Aristotelian’ virtue ethics nowadays is heavily reconstructed and updated Aristotelianism, such exercises in retrieval have not been systematically attempted with respect to his emotion theory. The aim of this book is to offer a revised ‘Aristotelian’ analysis and moral justification of a number of emotions that Aristotle either did not mention (such as awe, grief, and jealousy), relegated, at best, to the level of the semi-virtuous (such as shame), made disparaging remarks about (such as gratitude) or rejected explicitly (such as pity, understood as pain at another person’s deserved bad fortune). It is argued that there are good ‘Aristotelian’ reasons for understanding those emotions either as virtuous or as indirectly conducive to virtue. The book begins with an overview of Aristotle’s ideas on the nature of emotions and of emotional value, and it ends with an account of Aristotelian emotion education.

The Measure of Greatness

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Social ◽  
Moral Nature ◽  
Complex Trajectory ◽  
The Many ◽  
Human Excellence ◽  
Ethical Perspectives

Magnanimity is a virtue that has led many lives. Foregrounded early on by Plato as the philosophical virtue par excellence, it became one of the crown jewels in Aristotle’s account of human excellence and was accorded an equally salient place by other ancient thinkers. One of the most distinctive elements of the ancient tradition to filter into the medieval Islamic and Christian worlds, it sparked important intellectual engagements there and went on to carve deep tracks through several later philosophies that inherited from this tradition. Under changing names, under reworked forms, it continued to breathe in the thought of Descartes and Hume, Kant and Nietzsche, and their successors. Its many lives have been joined by important continuities. Yet they have also been fragmented by discontinuities—discontinuities reflecting larger shifts in ethical perspectives and competing answers to questions about the nature of the good life, the moral nature of human beings, and their relationship to the social and natural world they inhabit. They have also been punctuated by moments of controversy in which the greatness of this vision of human greatness has itself been called into doubt. This volume provides a window to the complex trajectory of a virtue whose glitter has at times been as heady as it has been divisive. By exploring the many lives it has lived, we will be in a better position to decide whether and why this is a virtue we might still want to make central to our own ethical lives.

Into The Void

Janus Head ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 156-189
Author(s):  
Clay Lewis ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Eternal Return ◽  
Will To Power ◽  
Experience Of Time ◽  
Complete Failure ◽  
Impossible Task ◽  
Poetic Vision

This paper looks at authoritarianism as an expression of nihilism. In spite of his rigorous critique of Platonism, I suggest that Nietzsche shares with Plato an authoritarian vision that is rooted in the cyclical experience of time. The temporality of the eternal return unveils a vista of cosmic nihilism that cannot possibly be endured. In the absence of metaphysical foundations, the vital will to power is assigned an impossible task – to create meaning from nothing. I suggest that when confronted with the horror of the ungrounded void, the self-overcoming of nihilism reverts to self-annihilation. The declaration that God is dead becomes the belief that death is God. I trace Nietzsche’s cosmic nihilism back to Plato’s myths and the poetic vision of Sophocles and Aeschylus. I argue that Nietzsche’s overcoming of nihilism is itself nihilistic. However, this does not mean that Nietzsche’s project is as a complete failure. On the contrary, I suggest that Nietzsche’s deepest insight is that the good life does not consist of the pursuit of truth, but the alleviation of suffering.

Virtues and Practices

1984 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
David Miller
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Moral Pluralism ◽  
Important Distinction ◽  
The Social ◽  
Narrative Unity

AbstractMaclntyre presents an account of the virtues first in terms of practices and then in terms of the narrative unity of a person’s life. He fails, however, to observe an important distinction between self-contained and purposive practices; if the virtues are to be understood by reference to practices, they must be of the latter kind. By the same token, a defence of the virtues must refer to the social purposes which practices serve rather than to the goods internal to practices. An appeal to the idea of narrative unity does not save the position in the absence of any concrete specification of the good life for man. Maclntyre’s attempt to reconstitute the virtues falls foul of the moral pluralism that he has earlier diagnosed so acutely.

Part I

Good Lives ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 3-124
Author(s):  
Samuel Clark
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Ethical Reasoning ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Self Knowledge

Part I investigates a wide range of autobiographies, alongside work on the history and literary criticism of autobiography, on narrative, and on the philosophies of the self and of the good life. It works from the point of view of the autobiographer, and considers what she does, what she aims at, and how she achieves her effects, to answer three questions: what is an autobiography? How can we learn about ourselves from reading one? About what subjects does autobiography teach? This part of the book develops, first, an account of autobiography as paradigmatically a narrative artefact in a genre defined by its form: particular diachronic compositional self-reflection. Second, an account of narrative as paradigmatically a generic telling of a connected temporal sequence of particular actions taken by, and particular events which happen to, agents. It defends rationalism about autobiography: autobiography is in itself a distinctive and valuable form of ethical reasoning, and not merely involved in reasoning of other, more familiar kinds. It distinguishes two purposes of autobiography, self-investigation and self-presentation. It identifies five kinds of self-knowledge at which autobiographical self-investigation typically aims—explanation, justification, self-enjoyment, selfhood, and good life—and argues that meaning is not a distinct sixth kind. It then focusses on the book’s two main concerns, selfhood and good life: it sets out the wide range of existing accounts, taxonomies, and tasks for each, and gives an initial characterisation of the self-realization account of the self and its good which is defended in Part II.

Virtue ethics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Crisp
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Moral Theory ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Virtue Theory ◽  
Virtuous Person ◽  
Moral Reasons ◽  
The Good Life

Virtue ethics has its origin in the ancient world, particularly in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. It has been revived following an article by G. E. M. Anscombe critical of modern ethics and advocating a return to the virtues. Some have argued that virtue ethics constitutes a third option in moral theory additional to utilitarianism and Kantianism. Utilitarians and Kantians have responded vigorously, plausibly claiming that their views already incorporate many of the theses allegedly peculiar to virtue ethics. Virtue theory, the study of notions, such as character, related to the virtues, has led to the recultivation of barren areas. These include: What is the good life, and what part does virtue play in it? How stringent are the demands of morality? Are moral reasons independent of agents’ particular concerns? Is moral rationality universal? Is morality to be captured in a set of rules, or is the sensitivity of a virtuous person central in ethics? From virtue ethics, and the virtue theory of which it is a part, have emerged answers to these questions at once rooted in ancient views and yet distinctively modern.

Virtue ethics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Crisp
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Moral Theory ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Virtue Theory ◽  
Virtuous Person ◽  
Moral Reasons ◽  
The Good Life

Virtue ethics has its origin in the ancient world, particularly in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. It has been revived following an article by G.E.M. Anscombe critical of modern ethics and advocating a return to the virtues. Some have argued that virtue ethics constitutes a third option in moral theory additional to utilitarianism and Kantianism. Utilitarians and Kantians have responded vigorously, plausibly claiming that their views already incorporate many of the theses allegedly peculiar to virtue ethics. Virtue theory, the study of notions, such as character, related to the virtues, has led to the recultivation of barren areas. These include: What is the good life, and what part does virtue play in it? How stringent are the demands of morality? Are moral reasons independent of agents’ particular concerns? Is moral rationality universal? Is morality to be captured in a set of rules, or is the sensitivity of a virtuous person central in ethics? From virtue ethics, and the virtue theory of which it is a part, have emerged answers to these questions at once rooted in ancient views and yet distinctively modern.

scholarly journals Youth Experiences with Social Norms Feedback: Qualitative Findings from The Drug Prevention Trial the GOOD Life

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (9) ◽  
pp. 3200
Author(s):  
Christiane Stock ◽  
Satayesh Lavasani Kjær ◽  
Birthe Rasmussen ◽  
Lotte Vallentin-Holbech
Keyword(s):  
Social Norms ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Intervention Strategy ◽  
Drug Prevention ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Normative Feedback ◽  
Web Based ◽  
The Social ◽  
Prevention Programmes ◽  
Group Interviews

Background: Normative feedback is an intervention strategy commonly used in drug prevention programmes. This study collected process evaluation data about how programme recipients engage with social norms (SN) feedback in The GOOD Life intervention and how they experience it. Methods: Eight focus group interviews were conducted with a total of 44 adolescents (pupils aged 14–16 years) who have participated in the social-norms-based intervention The GOOD Life. The interviews focused on three topics: (1) interest in and impact of the intervention; (2) perception of the intervention elements; and (3) suggestions for improvement of The GOOD Life. They were transcribed and analysed with content analysis. Results: The analysis revealed that The GOOD Life motivated pupils to re-evaluate their own drug use behaviour and overall met their interest regarding receiving engaging and non-moral forms of drug prevention programmes. While pupils perceived the normative feedback session in the classroom and the posters with SN messages as positive, stimulating and surprising, the web-based application with SN feedback was rarely used and less positively evaluated. Anonymity and confidentiality were regarded as essential to provide honest answers in the poll. The pupils suggested even more variety in ways to engage them and to use more gaming elements. Conclusions: SN feedback was well perceived by adolescents. The intervention met their interest and needs and was able to achieve the intended impact of challenging norm perceptions. Anonymity and confidentiality are key in order to build trust and engage adolescents in the intervention.

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