Virtue, Vice, and Value


Book Description

Hurka's book puts forth a comprehensive theoretical account of moral virtue and vice. More specifically, it gives an account of the intrinsic goodness of virtue, and intrinsic evil of vice, that can fit into a consequentialist moral theory.




Virtue and Reason in Plato and Aristotle


Book Description

In this authoritative discussion of the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, A. W. Price considers four related areas: eudaimonia, or living and acting well, as the ultimate end of action; virtues of character in relation to the emotions, and to one another; practical reasoning, especially from an end to ways or means; and acrasia, or action that is contrary to the agent's own judgement of what is best. The focal concept is that of eudaimonia, which both Plato and Aristotle view as an abstract goal that is valuable enough to motivate action. Virtue has a double role to play in making its achievement possible, both in proposing subordinate ends apt to the context, and in protecting the agent against temptations to discard them too easily. For both purposes, Price suggests that virtues need to form a unity--but one that can be conceived in various ways. Among the tasks of deliberation is to work out how, and whether, to pursue some putative end in context. Aristotle returns to early Plato in finding it problematic that one should consciously sacrifice acting well to some incidental attraction; Plato later finds this possible by postulating schism within the soul. Price maintains that it is their emphasis upon the centrality of action within human life that makes the reflections of these ancient philosophers perennially relevant.




Kant's Theory of Virtue


Book Description

Anne Margaret Baxley offers a systematic interpretation of Kant's theory of virtue, whose most distinctive features have not been properly understood. She explores the rich moral psychology in Kant's later and less widely read works on ethics, and argues that the key to understanding his account of virtue is the concept of autocracy, a form of moral self-government in which reason rules over sensibility. Although certain aspects of Kant's theory bear comparison to more familiar Aristotelian claims about virtue, Baxley contends that its most important aspects combine to produce something different - a distinctively modern, egalitarian conception of virtue which is an important and overlooked alternative to the more traditional Greek views which have dominated contemporary virtue ethics.




The Price of Civilization


Book Description

For the first time, Jeffrey Sachs, the pre-eminent economist of our times, turns his attention to his homeland, the United States, to reveal the stunning inadequacy of American-style capitalism and to offer a bold and ambitious plan to change it. Jeffrey Sachs has visited more than a hundred countries on five continents, invited to help diagnose and cure seemingly intractable economic problems. Now, in the wake of the worst recession in recent history, Sachs turns his focus on the United States. The complexity of the world economy means that the American form of capitalism, which has been exported around the globe, brought the world to the brink of the precipice--and it will do so again, if measures aren't taken to fix it. This will require not only government action but for US citizens to reach a consensus on their government's role in everyday life and on their basic values--hugely controversial issues in recent years. The scary thing is if they don't, it will affect us all. The good news is that Sachs, in this book, clearly and persuasively leads his readers to an understanding of what the common ground of reform can and should--indeed, must--be.




The Pursuit of Virtue


Book Description

In The Pursuit of Virtue, Lombardo outlines the impact that today’s culture of thought is having on us individually and collectively – leaving us compulsively focused on the present, seeking external validation. Lombardo encourages us to choose a path to what he calls a Good Future, by acknowledging and developing our internal resources for wisdom. This Good Future transcends the external and infuses our lives with qualities such as self-evolution, courage, and critical thinking, to lead us out of the shadows and into the light.




The Structures of Virtue and Vice


Book Description

A new ethics for understanding the social forces that shape moral character. It is easy to be vicious and difficult to be virtuous in today’s world, especially given that many of the social structures that connect and sustain us enable exploitation and disincentivize justice. There are others, though, that encourage virtue. In his book Daniel J. Daly uses the lens of virtue and vice to reimagine from the ground up a Catholic ethics that can better scrutinize the social forces that both affect our moral character and contribute to human well-being or human suffering. Daly’s approach uses both traditional and contemporary sources, drawing on the works of Thomas Aquinas as well as incorporating theories such as critical realist social theory, to illustrate the nature and function of social structures and the factors that transform them. Daly’s ethics focus on the relationship between structure and agency and the different structures that enable and constrain an individual’s pursuit of the virtuous life. His approach defines with unique clarity the virtuous structures that facilitate a love of God, self, neighbor, and creation, and the vicious structures that cultivate hatred, intemperance, and indifference to suffering. In doing so, Daly creates a Catholic ethical framework for responding virtuously to the problems caused by global social systems, from poverty to climate change.




Reclaiming Virtue


Book Description

The best-selling author of Creating Love sets out to redefine what it means to live a moral life in today's world by helping readers reclaim and cultivate their inborn moral intelligence by developing one's instincts for goodness in childhood and nurturing them through one's adult life to promote good character and moral responsibility.




Virtue in Business


Book Description

An introduction to the role of virtue ethics in business, written by one of the foremost Aristotelian scholars.




Stuck with Virtue


Book Description

Cloning, gene therapy, stem-cell harvesting--are we on the path to a Huxley-like Brave New World? Not really, argues political philosopher and Kass Commission member Peter Augustine Lawler in Stuck with Virtue: The American Individual and Our Biotechnological Future, even as he admits that we will likely become more obsessive and anxious and will be subjected to new forms of tyranny. Rather, he contends, human nature is such that the biotechnological world to come, despite the best efforts of its proponents, will still fail to make it possible to feel good without being good. It will be harder, Lawler warns, to be virtuous in the future, because we will be more detached than ever from the natural sources of happiness. But we may take some solace in the fact that virtue will still be the best way to live well with what we really know. With irony and wit, Lawler delivers the good news about the future of the American individual: We're going to remain free, because the modern effort to make increasingly individualistic human beings at home with themselves and their environments through technological progress cannot succeed. That is the truth and promise, concludes Lawler, of a genuinely postmodern conservatism.




Intelligent Virtue


Book Description

Intelligent Virtue presents a distinctive new account of virtue and happiness as central ethical ideas. Annas argues that exercising a virtue involves practical reasoning of a kind which can illuminatingly be compared to the kind of reasoning we find in someone exercising a practical skill. Rather than asking at the start how virtues relate to rules, principles, maximizing, or a final end, we should look at the way in which the acquisition and exercise of virtue can be seen to be in many ways like the acquisition and exercise of more mundane activities, such as farming, building or playing the piano. This helps us to see virtue as part of an agent's happiness or flourishing, and as constituting (wholly, or in part) that happiness. We are offered a better understanding of the relation between virtue as an ideal and virtue in everyday life, and the relation between being virtuous and doing the right thing.