DOCSLIB.ORG

After Virtue, 3Rd Edition: Outline and Commentary Chapters 1-9: the Critique an Introductory Scenario Chapter 1, a Disquieting Suggestion A

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
After Virtue, 3Rd Edition: Outline and Commentary Chapters 1-9: the Critique an Introductory Scenario Chapter 1, a Disquieting Suggestion A 1 After Virtue, 3rd edition: Outline and Commentary Chapters 1-9: The Critique An Introductory Scenario Chapter 1, A Disquieting Suggestion A. MacIntyre’s opening scenario is taken from Walter M. Miller. Jr.’s science-fiction novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960). MacIntyre argues that contemporary philosophies, especially ethical philosophies, are equally blind to how they are using language and for similar reasons. B. What is needed, then, is a narrative history of what happened, and a history that accounts for the changes in social practices and their accompanying ethical vocabularies. Emotivism: How We Got Here Chapter 2, The Nature of Moral Disagreement Today and the Claims of Emotivism A. MacIntyre begins with three examples of moral debates that suffer from incommensurable positions. Such debates have three basic problems: 1. Their rival premises make it difficult to come to any shared understanding that might change someone’s mind. 2. Because they are presented in impersonal terms, the other positions accuse them of bad faith, of manipulation and hiding their true motives. 3. The diversity of moral vocabularies are products of history, and the meanings of terms have changed, so it is impossible to come to an understanding of the conflict without a sense of history. B. Emotivism claims that all moral oughts (“This should be”) are really just strongly held feelings or intuitions (“I approve of this.”). This suffers from circular reasoning: 1. It is impossible to identify feelings of approval if they also have to explain the kind of approval in question. 2. There are differences between the way we use reason-giving utterances and the way we use utterances of simple preference. 3. The ways such utterances are used has to be accounted for, and emotivism would suggest that the meaning of moral utterances and their actual uses don’t synch up well. C. A history of emotivism shows why it was taken seriously at the turn of the twentieth-century, e.g. G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica (1902). 1. Moore’s approach had three aspects not essential to each other: a. The non-natural properties of moral intuitions: they cannot be proven. b. Every action is evaluated by its consequences: a utilitarian calculus. c. The greatest goods are aesthetic experience and friendship. 2. Moore’s milieu at Cambridge was rejecting a weak version of Christian social ethics. 3. The nature of their rejection and their moral approach made emotivism seem true. D. The social conditions surrounding emotivism were a historic social decline: 1. An attempt to give genuine rational justification for ethical actions and judgments. 2. A breakdown in this attempt to provide impersonal standards. 3. An acceptance of the emotivist claim that such standards are really just feelings. 2 4. The analytical response is no more successful because it, too, is built on unjustifiable foundations. 5. The responses of Nietzsche and the existentialists suffer a similar fate. 6. They all concede the bad faith in Enlightenment attempts at ethical justification. 7. So, emotivism is true about a certain historical ethical incoherency. Chapter 3, Emotivism: Social Content and Social Context A. A moral philosophy is based upon a social context, and the social context of emotivism is one in which all social relations are manipulative. From an emotivist perspective, the social world cannot appeal to impersonal criteria—there are none. The social world can only be a meeting place of individual wills and competing desires. B. The managerial world and its commitment to effectiveness is an example of this kind of social world. Max Weber’s analysis of decisions is emblematic of this kind of reasoning, and he is unable to truly distinguish reasoning from power since all decisions are subjective and finally arbitrary. C. MacIntyre appeals to socio-ethical characters to help explain how certain ideals shape our social content. 1. Definition #1 (27): “They are a very special type of social role which places a certain kind of moral constraint on the personality of those who inhabit them in a way many other social roles do not.” 2. Definition #2 (28): “Characters are masks worn by moral philosophies. characters merge what is usually thought to belong to the individual man or woman and what is usually thought to belong to social roles.” 3. Definition #3 (29): “A character is an object of regard by the members of the culture generally or by some significant segment of them. He furnishes them with a cultural and moral ideal. Social type and psychological type are required to coincide. The character morally legitimates a mode of social existence.” D. Along with the Rich Aesthete, MacIntyre argues that the Manager and the Therapist represent two modern socio-ethical characters, though they need not garner universal consent to nonetheless be reflective of modern ideals. E. The emotivist modern self, on the other hand, is a democratized self without set social context, deeply fluid and contingent, and without a narrative of moral commitments. This is because the emotivist self has lost the telos or end purpose that came with pre-modern social roles and obligations. F. Taken together, the public character (i.e. the manager or therapist) and the personal emotivist self are a basic division in which individualism and collectivism are at continual odds. And MacIntyre thinks this has happened because of a particular history. Discussion Questions Why does MacIntyre begin with a science-fiction story? Why does he hold that the history of ethics and social roles is a key to the problem? 3 Do you find his analysis of emotivism convincing? Is it still a contemporary problem? Why does MacIntyre consider it a failure as a moral theory? Can you think of other socio-ethical characters that exemplify MacIntyre’s point? The Failure of Enlightenment Arguments Chapter 4, The Predecessor Culture and the Enlightenment Project of Justifying Morality A. Some might object that the views of ethical philosophy can have little influence on the culture at large. MacIntyre argues that in the Enlightenment, a Northern Protestant culture involving England, Scotland, Southern Germany, and the Netherlands did have such influence, which also shaped the philosophes of France, as well as Naples. B. Its secularization is symbolized by the changing understanding of moralis (morality), which began roughly as character, then practice, and finally, only as sexual continence. C. To trace the history of the breakdown of the Enlightenment project, MacIntyre examines in particular four thinkers, all who support in the main traditional (i.e. Christian) ethical practices, yet who tried to appeal to one aspect of human agency—the will, reason, or desires: 1. Kierkegaard—Kierkegaard’s Either-Or explores the meaning of a radical, ultimate choice that is neither aesthetic nor ethical in and of itself. It is a choice beyond reason because the authority behind the ethical itself is treated as transcending rationality. 2. Kant—Rational ethics must be the same for all persons, and all must have the will to carry them out. They must be categorical imperatives that are judged by duty, not happiness, and they must possess internal consistency among themselves. Yet these tests for universal maxims do not always succeed. Trivial and immoral maxims can be formulated according to his criteria. 3. Diderot—He tries to build an ethic based on human desires, even as he recognizes the need to adjudicate between rival desires. 4. Hume—Hume’s project is more detailed and sophisticated than Diderot’s, yet he, too, wants to make human desires (sympathy) the basis of ethics, and he fails in this. D. MacIntyre concludes that each system was built upon the failure of the other two faculties. Their failure to find a foundation in the human person is set against the background of loss of religion and the failure to share a public rationality open to all. Chapter 5, Why the Enlightenment Project of Justifying Morality Had to Fail A. Each Enlightenment moralist failed because, though he sought to base his ethics on human nature, he did not account for the totality of the human person. While they each have recognized the unformed state of humans and of rules, they have each overlooked what humans can become, the teleological aspect of human becoming. B. The reason, will, and desires are all necessary within a specific practice, for reason employs the rules and precepts to instruct and shape the will and desires towards a specific end. This Aristotelian understanding is expanded in theistic cultures, including a greater respect for the divine law, the telos being located in the afterlife, and so on. And such has a high view of human reason and its ability to comprehend the virtues and that necessary for ethical rationality. 4 C. This synthesis began to unravel with the Reformation critique of human reason and the judgment that reason is not capable of guiding the passions. A judgment as to telos was lost and with this, the remaining two components of unrealized human nature and ethical rules were strained in their attempts to go forward. Kant realized the potential problem and attempts to reintroduce a kind of teleological argument. D. Trying to adopt an objective principle based on ‘facts’ alone lead to failure. A key historical change in the moral language of the 17th and 18th centuries meant that no longer could one offer valid inferences from is to ought. 1. Certain terms (including roles) have built in assumptions about their good practice. 2. Assuming ethical oughts without contexts leads to incoherence. 3. The loss of a telos and of social roles within an ethical practice reduces ethical matters to that of individuals. 4. Survivals from classical theism were hypothetical yet treated as categorical, and yet they ignored the contexts necessary to make them meaningful.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Infinite Ethics
    INFINITE ETHICS Nick Bostrom Faculty of Philosophy Oxford University [Published in Analysis and Metaphysics, Vol. 10 (2011): pp. 9-59] [This is the final version. Earlier versions: 2003, 2005, 2008, 2009] www.nickbostrom.com ABSTRACT Aggregative consequentialism and several other popular moral theories are threatened with paralysis: when coupled with some plausible assumptions, they seem to imply that it is always ethically indifferent what you do. Modern cosmology teaches that the world might well contain an infinite number of happy and sad people and other candidate value-bearing locations. Aggregative ethics implies that such a world contains an infinite amount of positive value and an infinite amount of negative value. You can affect only a finite amount of good or bad. In standard cardinal arithmetic, an infinite quantity is unchanged by the addition or subtraction of any finite quantity. So it appears you cannot change the value of the world. Modifications of aggregationism aimed at resolving the paralysis are only partially effective and cause severe side effects, including problems of “fanaticism”, “distortion”, and erosion of the intuitions that originally motivated the theory. Is the infinitarian challenge fatal? 1. The challenge 1.1. The threat of infinitarian paralysis When we gaze at the starry sky at night and try to think of humanity from a “cosmic point of view”, we feel small. Human history, with all its earnest strivings, triumphs, and tragedies can remind us of a colony of ants, laboring frantically to rearrange the needles of their little ephemeral stack. We brush such late-night rumination aside in our daily life and analytic 1 philosophy.
    [Show full text]
  • Liberalism, Neutrality and the Politics of Virtue
    Koray Tütüncü Liberalism, neutrality and the politics of virtue Abstract The relationship between politics and virtue has been a controversial issue. Some significant scholars make a sharp distinction between what is political and what is not, but others underline the impossibility of separating politics from virtue. This article aims to re-consider the problem of virtue in terms of liberal politics. In doing so, it distinguishes three different arguments, namely the ‘inescapability of virtue’, ‘virtue lost’ and ‘reclamation of virtue’ arguments. The first argument underlines the impossibility of separating politics from virtue; the second shows the impossibility of virtuous politics in modern liberal politics; while the third criticises liberal neu- trality and individualism which undermines virtue politics. This article offers in their place a Rawlsian solution which centralises justice as the first virtue of a well-or- dered liberal society. It argues that, without negotiating fundamental rights and equal liberties, a Rawlsian solution transcends the limitations of liberal neutrality by articulating political virtuousness into liberalism. The result is that it concludes that liberal democracies would be politically virtuous without imposing any particular virtuous life conceptions. Keywords: virtue, liberal politics, good life, procedural and substantive neutrality, inequalities, justice, rights, perfectionism, freedoms, obligations, relativism, utili- tarian, Kantian, communitarian, individualism Introduction The relationship between politics and virtue has long been a controversial issue. Some significant political scholars make a sharp distinction between what is political and what is not, and consider morality and virtues as apolitical issues,1 while others underline the impossibility of separating politics from virtues, despite a unity of polit- ical and virtuous lives having been more apparent in ancient and medieval times.2 Some argue that modernity aims to separate politics not only from the religious but also from the virtuous.
    [Show full text]
  • After Virtue Chapter Guide
    After Virtue After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre. Wikipedia has a very useful synopsis (permalink as accessed Dec 9 2008). Citations refer to the 1984 second edition, ISBN 0268006113. Chapter Summary A note and disclaimer about the chapter summary: This summary is intended only to supplement an actual reading of the text. It is not sufficient in and of itself to understand MacIntyre's theory without having read the book, and even having read it, this guide is not sufficient to understand it in its entirety. A necessary amount of detail and nuance was eliminated in order to create the guide. Its intended purpose is to aid in comprehension of this complex but profoundly significant work during and after the process of reading it. I would suggest reading the synopsis of each chapter after reading the chapter. The goal is to present the outline of MacIntyre's claims and arguments with only a minimal gloss on the justifying evidence at each point. Thus, hopefully, the guide should prove reasonably sufficient to help a reader retain the crucial parts of MacIntyre's argument, and the text can be returned to for a full justification. It is easy to get bogged down in this book, but just take your time. No portion of his argument can be fully understood without understanding the whole— nevertheless, certain chapters deserve particular attention: Chapters 1-5, 9, 14, and 15. Enjoy. —Ari Schulman ([email protected]), Dec 9 2008 Chapter 1. A Disquieting Suggestion MacIntyre imagines a world in which the natural sciences "suffer the effects of a catastrophe": the public turns against science and destroys scientific knowledge, but later recants and revives science (1).
    [Show full text]
  • Other Moral Theories : Subjectivism, Relativism, Emotivism, Intuitionism, Etc
    INTRODUCTION TO ETHICS 30 Other Moral Theories: Subjectivism, Relativism, Emotivism, Intuitionism, etc. 1 Jan Franciszek Jacko Metaethics includes moral theories that contain assumptions which answer some metaphysical and epistemological questions about moral goods and values. The metaphysical questions (such as What are, and how do moral goods and values exist?) are about the nature and existence of moral goods and values. Epistemological questions (such as Can we know moral goods and values? If so, what are the sources of knowledge about them?) regard sources of knowledge about moral goods, values and criteria of moral evaluations.2 Assumptions of ethical subjectivism, relativism, decisionism, emotivism and intuitionism are exemplary answers to these questions. We call their answers “normative assumptions.” There are at least three good reasons to ask and answer such questions. First, without answering them, moral judgments remain ambiguous. For example, if I say, “Action X is wrong,” the judgement has several meanings. To specify its sense, I should clarify my normative assumptions. For example, I can assume metaphysical subjectivism (anti-realism) or realism in metaethics. According to the former assumption, my above judgment about X is not about reality; it is about my or someone’s opinion. In this case, the exact meaning of this judgement is: someone evaluates X as morally wrong. If I assume the counter-assumption of metaphysical realism (anti-subjectivism), I mean that it is true that X has the property of moral wrongness. Second, these assumptions are conductive to peculiar practices. To specify the practice, which follows from moral judgments, one has to determine some normative assumptions.
    [Show full text]
  • Moral Theories Course Leader
    PHIL 101: Conceptual Foundations of Bioethics: Moral Theories Course Leader: Stavroula Tsinorema Semester: 1st (7 ECTS) Course Type: Required Objectives: The aims of this course unit are (a) to bring students in contact with the theoretical basis of Bioethics, through training in the methodologies and analytical tools of moral reasoning, (b) to provide them with the basic categories which show the conceptual links between the frameworks of moral philosophy and normative bioethical reasoning, (c) to equip them with the appropriate theoretical frameworks in order to be able to investigate critically and, where possible, to resolve specific moral problems deriving in biomedical research, its application in clinical contexts, health care and environmental policy. The overall aim is to enable students to develop core skills for the conduct of normative analysis and reasoning in Bioethics. Content: The normative resources for moral argument and justification in Bioethics are found in moral philosophy and philosophical theories of ethics. This course unit will survey some of the principle philosophical approaches in addressing a number of bioethical controversies and bring appropriate perspectives from ethical theories to bear on case studies in Bioethics. Topics include: 1) Philosophical ethics and its relation to Bioethics. 2) Classical approaches. Ethics and metaphysics. Ontological approaches to ethics. 3) Modern classical approaches to ethics. Theories of Scottish Enlightenment. Moral sentiments and the ethics of work: David Hume and Adam Smith. 4) Immanuel Kant: The ethics of form. 5) Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Utilitarianism. 6) Contemporary moral theories: - Contractarian and constructivist theories. John Rawls, Jurgen Habermas, Onora O’ Neill Postgraduate Prospectus 17 - Virtue ethics, ethics of care, feminism, communitarianism 7) Theories of a deflatory kind and moral scepticism.
    [Show full text]
  • RICHARD HARE 07 Hare 1226 15/11/2004 10:29 Page 117
    07 Hare 1226 15/11/2004 10:29 Page 116 RICHARD HARE 07 Hare 1226 15/11/2004 10:29 Page 117 Richard Mervyn Hare 1919–2002 RICHARD HARE left behind at his death a long essay titled ‘APhilosophical Autobiography’, which has since been published.1 Its opening is striking: I had a strange dream, or half-waking vision, not long ago. I found myself at the top of a mountain in the mist, feeling very pleased with myself, not just for having climbed the mountain, but for having achieved my life’s ambition, to find a way of answering moral questions rationally. But as I was preening myself on this achievement, the mist began to clear, and I saw that I was surrounded on the mountain top by the graves of all those other philosophers, great and small, who had had the same ambition, and thought they had achieved it. And I have come to see, reflecting on my dream, that, ever since, the hard-working philo- sophical worms had been nibbling away at their systems and showing that the achievement was an illusion. Yet his imagination could also be less modest: a gaggle of moral philoso- phers is trapped beneath the earth in a smoke-filled chamber; they talk at cross purposes, and refuse to take the way out into the open air that he alone has discovered. It was his ambition to have united elements from Aristotle, Kant, and Mill in a logically cogent way that solved the funda- mental problems of ethics (though with unfinished business); and he usu- ally believed himself to have achieved this.
    [Show full text]
  • The Idea of a Communitarian Morality
    The Idea of a Communitarian Morality Philip Selznickt During the past few years, and especially since the publication of Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue in 1981, we have seen a renewed attack on the premises of liberalism.' There is nothing new about such criticism. A long list of writers-Hegel, Marx, Dewey, and many others, including several Popes-have recoiled in various ways from what seemed to be an impoverished morality and an inadequate understanding of human society. The contemporary criticism has raised some new issues and has been sparked, in no small degree, by a spate of impressive writing in legal, moral, and social philosophy-writing that has reaf- firmed the liberal faith in moral autonomy and in the imperatives of rationality. I refer, of course, to the work of John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and Ronald Dworkin. The new critics are called communitarian, an echo of similar views expressed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by English liberals like John A. Hobson and L.T. Hobhouse, and American pragmatists, especially John Dewey. Yet the communitarian idea is vague; in contemporary writing it is more often alluded to and hinted at than explicated. Furthermore, there are communitarians on both left and right. The quest for a communitarian morality is a meeting ground for conservatives, socialists, anarchists, and more ambiguously, welfare liber- als. Serious issues of social policy are at stake. It seems important, there- fore, to explore what a communitarian morality may entail. For if we shoot these arrows of the spirit we should know, as best we can, where they will light.
    [Show full text]
  • ARISTOTLE and the IMPORTANCE of VIRTUE in the CONTEXT of the POLITICS and the NICOMACHEAN ETHICS and ITS RELATION to TODAY Kyle Brandon Anthony Bucknell University
    Bucknell University Bucknell Digital Commons Honors Theses Student Theses 2010 ARISTOTLE AND THE IMPORTANCE OF VIRTUE IN THE CONTEXT OF THE POLITICS AND THE NICOMACHEAN ETHICS AND ITS RELATION TO TODAY Kyle Brandon Anthony Bucknell University Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.bucknell.edu/honors_theses Part of the Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Anthony, Kyle Brandon, "ARISTOTLE AND THE IMPORTANCE OF VIRTUE IN THE CONTEXT OF THE POLITICS AND THE NICOMACHEAN ETHICS AND ITS RELATION TO TODAY" (2010). Honors Theses. 21. https://digitalcommons.bucknell.edu/honors_theses/21 This Honors Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Theses at Bucknell Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of Bucknell Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1 What does it mean to live a good life? 7 The virtuous life 8 Ethical virtue 13 Bravery as an ethical virtue 20 Justice 22 Chapter 2 The Politics and the ideal polis 28 Development of a polis 29 Features of an ideal polis 32 What does it mean to be a citizen of a polis? 40 Aristotle’s views on education 42 Social groups in a polis who are not recognized as citizens 45 Non-ideal political systems 51 Chapter 3 Connections between the Politics and the Ethics 57 Chapter 4 Difficulties in applying Aristotle’s theories to a modern setting 68 Conclusion Where do we go from here? 87 Bibliography 89 iv Acknowledgements First off, I have to thank God, as He helped me endure this project and gave me the courage to press on when I became frustrated, angry, and ready to quit.
    [Show full text]
  • Is, Ought, and Objectivity in Hume's Social Science Stephen G
    Bryn Mawr College Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College Political Science Faculty Research and Scholarship Political Science 1980 "Cool Reflexion" and the Criticism of Values: Is, Ought, and Objectivity in Hume's Social Science Stephen G. Salkever Bryn Mawr College, [email protected] Let us know how access to this document benefits ouy . Follow this and additional works at: http://repository.brynmawr.edu/polisci_pubs Part of the Political Science Commons Custom Citation Salkever, Stephen G. "'Cool Reflexion' and the Criticism of Values: Is, Ought, and Objectivity in Hume's Social Science." American Political Science Review 74 (1980): 70-77. This paper is posted at Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College. http://repository.brynmawr.edu/polisci_pubs/17 For more information, please contact [email protected]. "Cool Reflexion"and the Criticismof Values: Is, Ought,and Objectivityin Hume's SocialScience STEPHENG. SALKEVER Bryn MawrCollege Is the fact/value distinction incompatiblewith the possibility of a social science which is both objectiveand evaluative(or normative)?Does support of the latterrequire rejection of the former and vice versa? This article presents an indirect argument against the incompatibilityof the fact/value distinction and an objectively evaluativesocial science. My procedureis to show that David Hume, whose is/ought distinction is the locus classicusof the fact/value distinction, is committed both to the view that valuescannot be derivedfrom facts and to the view that social science is not (and should not be) value-neutral.Furthermore, Hume's position is free from any logical flaws. My conclusion is that it is false to say that the fact/value distinction entails a value-neutralsocial science, and that it is thereforeutterly unnecessaryfor criticsof such a science to waste their time attemptingto "bridgethe gap" betweenfacts and values.
    [Show full text]
  • HOW to STAND up for NON-COGNITIVISTS John O'leary-Hawthorne and Huw Price Is Non-Cognitivism Compatible with Minimalism About
    Published in The Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 74(1996) 275-292. HOW TO STAND UP FOR NON-COGNITIVISTS John O’Leary-Hawthorne and Huw Price Is non-cognitivism compatible with minimalism about truth? A contemporary argument claims not, and therefore that moral realists, for example, should take heart from the popularity of semantic minimalism. The same is said to apply to cognitivism about other topics—conditionals, for example—for the argument depends only on the fact that ordinary usage applies the notions of truth and falsity to utterances of the kind in question. Given this much, minimalism about truth is said to leave no room for the view that the utterances concerned are non-cognitive in nature.1 In this paper we want to derail this fast-track route to cognitivism. We want to show that with a proper understanding of what is essential to non-cognitivism, the position turns out to be largely untouched by the adoption of any of a range of minimalist views about truth. The issue as to the nature of non-cognitivism is crucial, however, and we begin in §I below by defending a broader characterisation of the position than is common in contemporary literature. The nature of minimalism also calls for clarification, and in §II we distinguish two importantly different strands which are both prominent in contemporary debates. Against this background, we go on to explore two possible strategies for standing up for non-cognitivism in the face of minimalism. One of these strategies has been propounded in a recent paper by Frank Jackson, Graham Oppy and Michael Smith.2 It turns on the idea that minimalism about truth is quite compatible with a non-minimalism about truth-aptness, and that the latter can be used to ground non-cognitivism.
    [Show full text]
  • Nietzsche's Ethic
    Nietzsche’s Ethic: Virtues for All and None? A thesis submitted To Kent State University in partial Fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts by Daniel Robinson May 2015 ©Copyright All rights reserved Except for previously published materials Thesis written by Daniel Robinson B.A., University of South Alabama, 2012 M.A., Kent State University, 2015 Approved by Linda Williams, Associate Professor, Masters Advisor Deborah Barnbaum, Chair, Department of Philosophy James Blank, Associate Dean, Dean of Arts and Sciences Table of Contents Introduction……………………………………………………….……………......01 Chapter I. Solomon’s Nietzsche: A Summary………………….………….....04 Introduction…………………………………..………...………….04 Concern for Character …………………………………………….05 Passion as the Root to the Virtues…………………………..……..15 Building Nietzsche’s Ethic: Virtues for All……………….….…...22 II. Nietzsche on Ethics……………………………………...……..….32 Introduction………………………………………………………..32 Custom & Natural Morality……………………………………….35 Master-type and Slave-type Moralities…………………………...41 Slave-type’s Universalization ……………………………………48 Nietzsche on Virtue and Virtues …………………….……………52 III. Ethical Contortions: Fitting Nietzsche into Virtue Ethics……...…59 Introduction…………………………………………………….…59 Against a Prescriptive Interpretation……………………….….….60 Redefining Virtue and Ethics……………………………….….…64 Nietzsche’s Individualism …………………………………..…....74 Relevant Bibliography…………………………………………………………….83 i Introduction A year ago I read Robert Solomon’s Living with Nietzsche: What the Great “Immoralist” Has to Teach Us for the first time with the hopes of finding a greater understanding of both Nietzsche and virtue ethics. I was undecided on whether Nietzsche was a virtue ethicist, but I was considering it, simply because of how frequently he mentions virtue and because Aristotle was one of the few major philosophers I knew of that Nietzsche didn’t routinely, vehemently reject. The beginning and middle of Solomon’s text made me very hopeful for his conclusion.
    [Show full text]
  • Ethics for A-Level for AQA Philosophy and OCR Religious Studies
    Ethics for A-Level For AQA Philosophy and OCR Religious Studies MARK DIMMOCK AND ANDREW FISHER To access digital resources including: blog posts videos online appendices and to purchase copies of this book in: hardback paperback ebook editions Go to: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/639 Open Book Publishers is a non-profit independent initiative. We rely on sales and donations to continue publishing high-quality academic works. Ethics for A-Level Mark Dimmock and Andrew Fisher https://www.openbookpublishers.com © 2017 Mark Dimmock and Andrew Fisher This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Mark Dimmock and Andrew Fisher, Ethics for A-Level. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2017, https:// doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0125 In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit https://www. openbookpublishers.com/product/639#copyright Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web Digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://www.openbookpublishers. com/product/639#resources ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-388-9 ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-389-6 ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-390-2 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-391-9 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-78374-392-6 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0125 Cover image: Malaysia from the Sky, photo by Ishan @seefromthesky.
    [Show full text]