Moral Philosophy

Aristotle is the father of virtue ethics, and virtue ethics is hot. Yet Aristotle’s accounts of the individual virtues remain opaque, for most contemporary commentators of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics have focused upon other matters. By contrast, this book takes Aristotle’s detailed description of the individual virtues to be central to his ethical theory. Working through the Nicomachean Ethics virtue by virtue, explaining and generally defending Aristotle’s claims, the book brings each of Aristotle’s virtues alive. A new Aristotle emerges, an Aristotle fascinated by the details of the individual virtues. Justice and friendship hold special places in Aristotle’s virtue theory. Many contemporary discussions place justice and friendship at opposite, perhaps even conflicting poles of a spectrum. Justice seems to be very much a public, impartial, and dispassionate thing, while friendship is paradigmatically private, partial, and passionate. Yet in Aristotle’s view they are actually symbiotic. Justice is defined in terms of friendship, and good friendship is defined in terms of justice. Virtue ethics is not only about being good; it is also about becoming good. The book reconstructs Aristotle’s account of moral development. Certain character types serve as stages of moral development. Certain catalysts and mechanisms lead from one stage to the next. Explaining why some people cannot make moral progress specifies the preconditions of moral development. Finally, the book describes Aristotle’s quest to determine the ultimate goal of moral development: happiness.

Aristotle holds that we desire things because they appear good to us – a view still dominant in philosophy now. But what is it for something to appear good? This book argues that Aristotle understands appearances of goodness as literal quasi-perceptual appearances, operations of a psychological capacity responsible for phenomena like dreams and visualization: phantasia (‘imagination’). It then uses Aristotle’s detailed accounts of phantasia and its relation to perception and thought to gain new insight into some of the most debated areas of his philosophy: his accounts of emotions, akrasia, ethical habituation, character, deliberation, and desire. The result is a new – and controversial – interpretation of Aristotle’s moral psychology: one which greatly restricts the role of reason in ethical matters, and gives an absolutely central role to pleasure.

The book develops an account of virtue which, in a contemporary version, foregrounds the idea that virtue is an exercise of practical intelligence (ideally, a form of practical wisdom) similar to the practical exercise of a skill. A practical skill is acquired through experience and habituation, but the result is not routine but an educated and intelligent application of thinking in action. This way of thinking of virtue shows how virtue does not conform to modern expectations of ‘moral reasoning’ and enables us to see how many contemporary objections to virtue as it figures in ethical theories misfire. The book does not present an ethics of virtue, but shows how the account can illuminatingly distinguish among different varieties of virtue ethics, depending on the conception of the good to which they are committed. The book also shows how an account of virtue which emphasizes its structural likeness to a practical skill fits a theory of eudaimonism, which takes us to have the aim, over our lives as wholes, of achieving happiness or flourishing.

The book represents state-of-the-art thought about moral psychology and philosophy of action in Aristotle, considered as a prelude to or basis for ethics. Drawing not only from Aristotle's ethical writings, but also from his psychological works, the chapters discuss such issues as the nature of pleasure, the relationship between pleasure and emotion, the role of desire and imagination, deliberation about ends, weakness of will, intention and double effect, and the formation of character through education and the agent's own choices.

One of the most important developments in modern moral philosophy is the resurgence of interest in the virtues. This book explores two important hopes for such an approach to moral thought: that starting from the virtues should cast light on what makes an action right, and that notions like character, virtue, and vice should yield a plausible picture of human psychology. The book argues that the key to each of these hopes is an understanding of the cognitive and deliberative skills involved in the virtues. If right action is defined in terms of acting generously or kindly, then these virtues must involve skills for determining what the kind or generous thing to do would be on a given occasion. The book also argues that understanding virtuous action as the intelligent pursuit of virtuous goals yields a promising picture of the psychology of virtue. On the whole, this book develops an Aristotelian account of the virtue of practical intelligence or phronesis — an excellence of deliberating and making choices — and argues that phronesis is a necessary part of every virtue. This emphasis on the roots of the virtues in the practical intellect contrasts with ambivalence about the practical intellect in much recent work on the virtues. This book also examines issues like the unity of the virtues, responsibility for character, and “the virtuous person”.