Natural Law: An Introduction—Part 3

"Bamboo stems with branches and folia," Kishi Ganku (Japanese, 1749-1838), Edo period. © Smithsonian Institution


“Ever since Antigone’s resistance to Creon’s prohibition against performing the rights of burial for her brother, and ever since the controversy over the essence of right and justice among Sophists and Platonists, that is, from the very outset of Occidental legal thought, philosophers have asked themselves whether positive law is committed to general moral principles. These principles of legal morality have been articulated in theories of natural law or justice.”— Otfried Höffe

“In the Enlightenment, natural law as a discipline [was] grounded exclusively on reason and independently of doctrinal elements. …[I]t belonged both to the faculty of jurisprudence and to that of philosophy.”—Otfried Höffe

“Before the Americans and French declared the rights of man, the leading proponents of universalism lived on the margins of the great powers. Perhaps that very marginality enabled a handful of Dutch, German, and Swiss thinkers to take the initial lead in arguing that rights were universal. As early as 1625, a Dutch Calvinist jurist, Hugo Grotius, put forward a notion of rights that was applicable to all of mankind, not just one country or legal tradition. He defined ‘natural rights’ as something self-possessed and conceivably separate from God’s will. He also suggested that people could use their rights—unaided by religion—to establish contractual foundations for social life. His German follower Samuel Pufendorf, the first professor of natural law at Heidelberg, featured Grotius’s achievements in his general history of natural law teachings in 1678. Although Pufendorf criticized Grotius on certain points, he helped solidify Grotius’s reputation as a prime source of the universalist stream of rights thinking.”—Lynn Hunt

“The Swiss natural law theorists built upon these ideas in the early eighteenth century. The most influential of them, Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui, taught law in Geneva. He synthesized the various seventeenth-century natural law writings in The Principles of Natural Law (1747). Like his predecessors, Burlamaqui provided little specific legal or political content to the notion of universal human rights; his main purpose was to prove their existence and their derivation from reason and human nature. He updated the concept by linking it to what the Scottish philosophers called an internal moral sense…. Immediately translated into English and Dutch, Burlamaqui’s work was widely used as a kind of textbook of natural law and natural rights in the last half of the eighteenth century. Rousseau, among others, took Burlamaqui as a point of departure. Burlamaqui’s work fed a more general revival of natural law and natural rights theories across Western Europe and the North American colonies. [….] Grotius, Pufendorf, and Burlamaqui were all well known to American revolutionaries, such as Jefferson and Madison, who read in the law.”—Lynn Hunt

“Having grown up with natural law theory and the associated moral philosophy, it is hardly strange that Americans found use for such ideas in their own writings and, eventually, in the documents of independence and constitution-building.”—Knud Haakonssen

“Certain basic rights are inalienable because they are duties under natural law, and all other duties/rights derive their ultimate justification more or less directly from these. None of the American theoreticians put forward a clear idea of rights as underived, primary features of the person, and one inevitably gets the impression that some of the apparent moral certainty stemmed from the fact that Americans stayed well within the comfortable moral world of traditional natural law theory, with its assurance of an in-principle harmony of individual rights and duties.”—Knud Haakonssen

“The persons known as major German war criminals were tried in 1945 for offenses specified in an agreement (‘the London Agreement and Charter 8 August 1945’) made between the states governing Germany since its surrender to them. The judges held that the defendants had at all relevant times been bound by (and in many instances had acted in violation of) the principles or rules specified in the London Charter, such obligations being derived not, of course, from the agreement (which was made subsequent to the acts in question), but rather, as to some of the crimes alleged, from international law and, as to the alleged ‘crimes against humanity,’ from the ‘elementary dictates of humanity.’ To hold the defendants responsible for violating these rules and dictates, and reject any argument that their acts’ compliance with German law could make the acts lawful, was not (so the tribunal ruled) to violate the principle of law and justice that no one should be punished except for violation of law. The result of these rulings might be accounted for by (i) exclusive positivism: the tribunal was morally authorized to apply moral rules, notwithstanding that the rules so applied were not rules of law either at the time of the crimes or the time of the prosecution. But the terms of the rulings (as just summarized) can be accounted for (ii) by inclusive positivism: the Charter was positive law for the tribunal and directed it to apply moral rules which by virtue of that direction were also legal rules. Still, (iii) natural law theory’s account seems the most explanatory: the moral rules applied were also rules of the ‘higher law’ applicable in all times and places (and thus in Germany and its territories, before as after the Charter) as a source of argumentation and judgment ‘according to law’ when the social-fact sources which are the normally dominant and quasi-exclusive source of law are, in justice, inadequate and insufficient guides to fulfilling obligations such as the judicial obligation to do justice according to law, or everyone’s obligation to behave with elementary humanity even when under orders not to—even if those orders have intra-systemic legal validity according to the formal or social-fact criteria of some existing legal system. And if one has doubts about victors’ justice, those very doubts can likewise appeal to principles of the same higher law, jus gentium, or law of reason and humanity.”—John Finnis

“The reluctance of legal positivists to provide a set of basic international norms that could conclusively mandate international legal intervention for a wide array of human rights abuses, such as prosecuting Nazi war criminals, led many theorists to look back to the natural law tradition. Justice Robert H. Jackson, the chief American prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, said that he saw himself representing all of humanity as he sought to punish those Nazi leaders who had committed ‘atrocities and persecutions on racial or religious grounds.’ Jackson argued that the Martens Clause of the Hague Convention of 1907 provided two related sources of international law from which a defense of international tribunals could be derived. International interventions are justified by reference to ‘the principles of the law of nations, as they result from the usages established among civilized peoples, [1] from the laws of humanity, and [2] the dictates of public conscience. On this view, there are principles of natural law that are somehow enshrined in the public conscience. What offends the public conscience in international crimes is that humans are treated in ways that no human should have to bear—namely, to be made to suffer arbitrarily. Arbitrary suffering is here treated as clearly wrong from the natural law perspective since it violates the most basic standards of how humans regard each other, and how humans know, in the light of reason, that they should behave. Humans are supposed to treat each other with minimal decency based on the idea that human personhood has a core of intrinsic value that must always be respected.”—Larry May

“Law’s effectiveness is dependent on the moral legitimacy of the law. In this…I follow Lon Fuller, a paradigmatic moral minimalist, who attempted to provide a middle ground between legal positivism and robust natural law theory. [….] [I]n a pluralistic society or world community, it makes prudential good sense to link wide-scale acceptance to normative justification. For law to be effective, there must be such acceptance, but the acceptance is not what justifies the norms. Rather it is the moral legitimacy of law that both provides a justification for its enforcement and also creates wide-scale acceptance. There is a minimum moral or natural law content that laws must display to be legitimate. This is what I am calling the ‘moral legitimacy’ of the law. The morality of law does not need to be robust for law to be legitimate. Here there is a set of moral principles, recognized in virtually every legal system, that makes a law worthy of being enforced. Such moral principles ultimately protect the inner normative core of law by guaranteeing that the law is, in some rudimentary way, fair.”—Larry May

“[Intuitionism] has three main characteristics: (1) It is an ethical pluralism, in the sense that it affirms an irreducible plurality of basic moral principles…. (2) Each principle centers on a different ground for action, conceived as a factor implying a prima facie moral duty and knowable by ordinary moral agents. The ground itself might be an action, like making a promise; a cognition, such as noticing a person will bleed to death without one’s help; or an accessible fact, such as the possibility that one can contribute to the well-being of others. It is in virtue of grounds of these sorts that one has the duty in question. (3) Each moral principle is taken to be in some sense intuitively know by those who appropriately understand it.”—Robert Audi

Epistemologically, intuitionism “is roughly the thesis that basic moral judgments and basic moral principles are non-inferentially knowable and that, for those who justifiedly hold them non-inferentially, they are justified by, and constitute knowledge on the basis of, the non-inferential deliverance of reason.”—Robert Audi

Prima facie duties in the intuitionist sense are “ineradicable but overridable.” Indeed, as in the case of W.D. Ross’s intuitionism, once we appreciate that the “primary role of intuition is to give us direct, i.e., non-inferential knowledge (or at least justified belief) of the truth, rather than of the self-evidence, of moral propositions (especially certain moral principles), there is less reason to think that moral beliefs resting on an intuitive apprehension of principles are indefeasibly justified. [….] The view that the justification of moral intuitions is defeasible…is quite consistent with [Ross’s] claim that the self-evident truths in question do not admit of proof. That a true proposition does not admit of proof is an epistemic fact about it and leaves open that a person might have only poor or overridden grounds for believing it. It is true that paradigm cases of presumptively unprovable propositions—such as luminously self-evident simple axioms—invite the sense of indefeasibility. But a proposition’s having the epistemic status of unprovability does not entail that one cannot lose one’s justification for believing it, or fail to become justified in believing it upon considering it, or even fail to find it intuitive and for that reason not come to believe it at all.”—Robert Audi

“Rossian principles of duty (though perhaps not exactly Ross’s list of them) may be argued to be just the general moral principles one would derive—even, if not strictly deduce—from a careful application of the [Kantian] categorical imperative to everyday life. For instance, if one is to avoid treating people merely as means—and so to realize the negative standard expressed by the categorical imperative—one must recognize (prima facie) duties of non-injury (including avoidance of murder, brutality and theft), of reparation and of fidelity and veracity’ and if one is to treat people positively as ends—and so to realize the positive standard it expresses—one must recognize duties of beneficence, gratitude, self-improvement, and justice…. [….] If a Kantian intuitionism is viable, and if principles of the kind Ross proposed can serve as middle axioms, we have made a theoretical advance.”—Robert Audi

“We may still wonder what it is about persons in virtue of which, for Kant, they must be treated as ends. Kant employs a number of notions. Consider just one: dignity. This may in turn be taken to be based on autonomy, rationality, or other characteristics of persons. The most important point here is that dignity is a moral value. This is in part to say that it is essential to it that beings possessing it have moral rights. In part, to call the dignity of persons a moral value is to say that in virtue of it there are moral reasons to act in a certain way toward them and that certain other ways of acting toward them are wrong. A second important point about dignity—or indeed any comparably broad moral value that might ground the categorical imperative (such as ‘worth’), is that there is a far-reaching moral attitude that goes with it: respect for persons. If this is so, we might take both dignity and respect for persons as fundamental elements in a value-based intuitionism.”—Robert Audi

[The Natural Duty of Justice] is “the obligation each of us has to treat every person with equal concern and respect,” and “according to which each of us—independently of which institutions we find ourselves in or the special commitments we have undertaken—has a limited moral obligation to help ensure that all persons have access to institutions that protect their basic rights.”—Allen Buchanan

References and Further Reading:
(Several of these books simply contain brief discussions of natural law, ideas similar to those found in the natural law tradition, or insights explicitly or implicitly in support of natural law philosophy. I make the assumption that natural law need not be religious in formulation even if it is often religious in inspiration or motivation, hence there is such a thing as ‘secular’ or philosophical natural law, as we see quite early and clearly with the Stoics.)

• Alexy, Robert. The Argument from Injustice: A Reply to Legal Positivism. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2002.
• Audi, Robert. The Good in the Right: A Theory of Intuition and Intrinsic Value. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.
• Bix, Brian H. ‘Natural Law: The Modern Tradition,’ in Jules Coleman and Scott Shapiro, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002: 61-103.
• Buchanan, Allen. Justice, Legitimacy and Self-Determination: Moral Foundations for International Law. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
• Cunningham, Lawrence S. Intractable Disputes about the Natural Law: Alasdair MacIntyre and His Critics. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009.
• Dworkin, Ronald. Law’s Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.
• Finnis, John. Natural Law and Natural Rights. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1982 ed.
• Finnis, John. Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998.
• Finnis, John. “Natural Law Theories,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2007), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
  http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2007/entries/natural-law-theories/.
• George, Robert P. In Defense of Natural Law. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
• George, Robert P., ed. Natural Law Theory: Contemporary Essays. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1992.
• George, Robert P. and Christopher Wolfe, eds. Natural Law and Public Reason. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2000.
• George, Robert P., ed. Natural Law. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003.
• Gomez-Lobo, Alfonso. Morality and the Human Goods: An Introduction to Natural Law Ethics. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2002.
• Haakonssen, Knud. Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• Höffe, Otfried (Alexandra Newton, trans.). Kant’s Cosmopolitan Theory of Law and Peace. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
• Hunt, Lynn. Inventing Human Rights: A History. New York: W.W. Norton, 2007.
• Iyer, Raghavan. “The Open Texture of Natural Law,” in his Parapolitics: Toward the City of Man. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979, pp. 50-60.
• Janis, Mark W. An Introduction to International Law. New York: Aspen Law & Business, 3rd ed., 1999.
• Kainz, Howard P. Natural Law: An Introduction and Re-examination. Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2004.
• Maritain, Jacques. The Rights of Man and Natural Law. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1943.
• May, Larry. Crimes Against Humanity: A Normative Account. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
• May, Larry. War Crimes and Just War. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
• Murphy, Mark C. Natural Law and Practical Rationality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
• Murphy, Mark C. “The Natural Law Tradition in Ethics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (Winter 2002), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
  http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2002/entries/natural-law-ethics/.
• Murphy, Mark C. Natural Law in Jurisprudence and Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
• Novak, David. Natural Law in Judaism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
• Nussbaum, Martha C. Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006.
• Paul, Ellen Frankel, Fred D. Miller, Jr., and Jeffrey Paul, eds. Natural Law and Modern Moral Philosophy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Natural Law: An Introduction—Part 2

"Crow on a Cherry Branch," Okuhara Seiko (1837 - 1913) © Smithsonian Institution.

“In Locke’s state of nature there are binding moral duties, including a duty of self-preservation and, given natural equality and reciprocity, a duty to preserve others, a duty not to take the life of another and a duty not to do what tends to destroy others by impairing their liberty, health or property. (These duties seem to be derived from the fundamental law of nature, which is the preservation of humankind.). Citing Richard Hooker’s views, Locke holds that the recognition of moral equality also gives rise to positive duties of benevolence and beneficence.”—Martha C. Nussbaum

Although positivist legal theorists “take their theories to be opposed to, or at least clearly distinct from, natural law theory,” natural law theorists “have not conceived of their theories in opposition to, or even as distinct from, legal positivism.”—John Finnis

“Natural law theory accepts that law can be considered and spoken of both, as a sheer social fact of power and practice, and as a set of reasons for action that can be and often are sound as reasons and therefore normative for reasonable people addressed by them.”—John Finnis

“The fulcrum and central question of natural law theories of law is: How and why can law…give its subjects sound reason for acting in accordance with it? How can a rule’s, a judgment’s, or an institution’s legal (‘formal,’ ‘systemic’) validity, or its facticity or efficacy as a social phenomenon (e.g., of official practice), make it authoritative in its subject’s deliberations?”—John Finnis

“[N]atural law theory holds that law’s ‘source-based character’—its dependence upon social facts such as legislation, custom or judicially established precedents—is a fundamental and primary element in ‘law’s capacity to advance the common good, to secure human rights, or to govern with integrity.’”—John Finnis

While law is “normally [an] indispensable instrument of great good”… [it nonetheless can become] “an instrument of great evil unless its authors steadily and vigilantly make it good by recognizing and fulfilling their moral duties to do so, both in settling the content of its rules and principles and in the procedures and institutions by which they make and administer it.”—John Finnis

“If one thinks perceptively and carefully about what to pursue (or shun) and do (or forbear from), one can readily understand and assent to practical propositions such as that life and health, knowledge and harmony with other people are desirable for oneself and for anyone else. The intrinsic desirability of such states of affairs as one’s flourishing in life and health, in knowledge and in friendly relations with others, is articulated in foundational, underived principles of practical reasoning (reasoning towards choice and action). [….] A natural law moral theory will give us an account of the way in which first principles of practical reason take on a moral force by being considered, not one by one but in their united (‘integral’) directedness. That integral directedness is given specific (albeit highly general) articulation in principles such as the injunction to love one’s neighbor as oneself; or the Golden Rule of doing for others what you would want them to do for you and not doing to others what you would not have them to do to you; or in the ‘categorical-imperatives’ to respect, and treat intrinsically valuable humanity (the basic aspects of human flourishing) in oneself and in others, so that each of one’s communities is treated as a [Kantian-like] kingdom of ends—of persons each ends in themselves” (John Finnis). These higher level moral principles can be given further specification, what Aquinas called determinatio, through the institution of governmental authority acting in the first instance through legislation and other forms of law-making. The political-theoretical part of natural law theory should address—explain and elaborate—the corresponding (moral) grounds of political obligation and the proper forms of governmental authority.

“Social facts make a positive legal rule a reason for action because the desirability of authority as a means of securing common good, and the desirability of the ‘rule of law and not of men,’ are standing and potent reasons for acknowledging such facts as an instance of valid legislation giving presumptively sufficient reason for compliance. Purely positive law that is legally valid is (presumptively and defeasibly) valid and binding morally—has the moral form or meaning of legal obligatoriness—when and because it takes its place in a scheme of practical reasoning whose practical starting-point is the range of basic ways in which human well-being can be promoted and protected, the way picked out in practical reason’s first principles.”—John Finnis

The defeasibility of the presumptive obligatoriness of authoritative reasons “is entailed by the dependence of such reasons’ peremptory, pre-emptive or exclusionary force upon a background of presupposed basic human needs and goods, and of basic moral principles and norms, a background which entails that if a purportedly authoritative proffered (posited) reason conflicts sufficiently clearly with those standing needs, good, principles or norms, its exclusionary force is exhausted or overcome and the purported obligatoriness defeated.”—John Finnis

“[B]oth the effectiveness of laws as solutions to coordination problems and promoters of common good, and the fairness of demanding adherence to them, are dependent on there being both by the subjects and administrators of the legal system as legally and morally entitled, precisely as validly made law, to prevail against all other reasons save competing moral obligations of greater strength.”—John Finnis

“The positivist thesis that all law depends for its existence, validity and obligatoriness on its social-fact source(s) is often accompanied, as in [Joseph] Raz’s ‘exclusive legal positivism,’ by the thesis that judges, as the ‘primary law-applying institutions,’ have a duty to decide certain sorts of case (e.g., cases where the existing legal rule would work injustice) by applying moral principles or rules or rules which warrant amending or even abandoning part of the existing law.”—John Finnis

“Natural law theories hold as strongly as any positivist theory that sound and legitimate adjudication gives priority to conscientious and craftsman-like attention to social-fact sources and to rules and principles pedigreed by such sources, [and] sets them aside only if and to the extent that they are ‘too iniquitous to be applied,’ and tailors the resultant new rule so as to cohere as far as possible with all the other (not too iniquitous) doctrines, rules and principles of the particular legal system in which the judge has jurisdiction.”—John Finnis

“Most people now do not need natural law for instruction regarding clear-cut issues like genocide, slavery, or sexual molestation. But the fact that these issues are ‘clear-cut’ seems to be a tribute to the fact that at a certain junction in history, at least implicit natural-law considerations were influential in bringing about new moral insights and changing prevailing practices.” —Howard P. Kainz

“Let us take telling examples of Natural Law assertions:
‘All human beings seek self-preservation.’ (factual-seeming)
‘All human beings are entitled to survive.’ (evaluative)
‘A human being cannot seek self-preservation and with consistency deny the same right or urge to another.’ (a seemingly logical truth)
‘All human beings are equally entitled to freedom of choice, thought, speech, and action.’ (evaluative)—liberty, negative or positive
‘All human beings are equally entitled to some minimal respect worthy of human stature.’(evaluative)—minimal egalitarianism
All human beings are entitled to equal respect and equal opportunities of self-expression and self-fulfillment.’ (evaluative)—strict egalitarianism
‘No human being should act toward another in a manner that he or she would not wish anyone else to act toward him or her.’ (evaluative)—the Golden Rule
[….] In general, such assertions are not merely definitions of ‘man’ or decisions of principle, and they certainly are not contingent truths. If we could correctly characterize them we might be in a position to show that the criticism of the logical positivists [i.e., that the concept of Natural Law ‘is wholly empty of empirical content and cognitive meaning;’ legal positivists, on the other hand, contend ‘the concept is empty of operative force and practical import’] is irrelevant rather than false. Natural Law assertions are often about what a human being must be assumed to be, or how human beings must be treated if we are to assign abiding, universal, and meaningful status to being human; that is, if we are to regard all human beings (biologically defined) as rational and moral agents, or if we are to differentiate decisively between the human and other species of beings without detaching man entirely form nature. It is important to concede that the word must necessarily introduces a metaphysical (a non-empirical as well as non-evaluative) element into every careful formulation of Natural Law.”—Raghavan Iyer

“Inasmuch as the concept of Natural Law contains a minimal element, it is an attempt at the definition of ‘man’ and the articulation of the foundations of human existence in a social and cosmic context. Insofar as it contains a maximal element, it is plainly metaphysical, passing beyond the boundaries of presently verifiable experience. However, between minimal and maximal ranges of meaning, the concept touches upon generally shared (or at least sharable) notions of human self-awareness, felt needs and ideals, common feelings of deprivation, self-alienation, and moral autonomy, as well as mutually recognizable signs of striving after a deeper and larger fulfillment than is capable of conceptualization. Natural Law has often been articulated with a stress on features that seem to be defined with dogmatic certainty, but essentially it expresses a deep sense of wonder, reverence, and agnosticism as to the unknown possibilities of human growth.”—Raghavan Iyer

Please Note: A list of "References and Further Reading" will be appended to the third and final post in this series.

Natural Law: An Introduction—Part 1

"Persimmon Tree," late 18th-early 19th century, Nakamura Hochu © Smithsonian Institution (The image is for ornamental purposes.)

Natural law has to do with the idea that there are some meta-laws (or principles) that transcend, supervene upon or trump positive law(s). In the Western philosophical tradition, its roots go back as far as the pre-Socratic philosophers: Anaximander (610-547 BCE), Pythagoras (570-500 BCE), and Heraclitus (540-475 BCE). There are glimmers of it in Aristotle’s notion of “right reason” and Plato appears to assume the workings of some sort of unwritten and divine natural law. It is also found in the work of the Greek dramatists, Aeschylus (525-456 BCE) and Sophocles (495-406 BCE). Natural law receives its first strong articulation among the Greek and Roman Stoics: “We find in Stoic natural law theory very general but groundbreaking concepts of divine governance, of rationality or logos embedded in nature, universal human equality and brotherhood, and the ideal of respecting and harmonizing oneself with nature” (Howard P. Kainz).

Among the Roman jurists, Gaius (130-180) identified natural law with the “law of nations,” in the sense that there is a rational element underlying and therefore common to all judicial systems. The East Roman Christian Emperor Justinian (483-565) oversaw a codification of all Roman law as the Corpus Juris Civilis (in three parts: the Digesta, Institutiones and Codex) in which natural law is distinguished from the ‘law of nations’ and is depicted as a set of immutable divine laws which can be used to judge the validity of civil laws. The twelfth century Benedictine monk and canon lawyer from Bologna, Gratian, understood natural law as contained in the Hebrew Bible’s Decalogue and in the Golden Rule of the New Testament Gospels.

After the Stoics, St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) represents the most important development in the natural law tradition. Aquinas distinguishes between the “Eternal Law” that governs the universe, the “Divine Law” found in the Scriptures, “Natural Law,” which is participation in the Eternal Law by rational creatures, and civil or positive law. In this account, Eternal Law gives rise to natural law and the Divine Law reiterates aspects of the Natural Law. At its best, civil law will assume or incorporate much of the natural law that pertains to social order. In effect, natural law mediates between divine law, on the one hand, and human or positive law, on the other. As explained by Kainz, “what we experience as fundamental human inclinations are aspects of the eternal law instilled into human nature, orienting humans toward certain natural goals. Human beings have a natural inclination to accomplish the general ends congruent with their nature, and this inclination is a mark or impression of the eternal law in which they are participating. Natural law thus is the actual participation in the eternal law, facilitated by human inclinations to implement the will of the divine legislator.” The primary motivation for such participation in the eternal law is a rational apprehension of the imperative that “good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided,” which is a general principle of practical reason. This is said by Aquinas to be the “first precept” of natural law. The good for humans is eudaimonia, clarified in terms of the natural inclinations of human nature, and which entail three pivotal secondary precepts of natural law: (1) the preservation of human life, (2) sexual intercourse and education of offspring (an inclination in common with other animals), and (3) an inclination to good, according to the nature of our reason which nature has provided us, and involving an inclination to know about God, live in society, and to shun ignorance (and hence pursue knowledge). The determination of further natural law principles is not a strict logical or deductive exercise of reasoning from premises to a conclusion, but involves the derivation of conclusions from the secondary precepts, for instance: do not kill, help maintain social order and harmony, as well as the giving of “determinations” to certain generalities: for example, prison sentences or fines are a determination from the principle that evildoers should be punished.

With Francisco Suárez (1548-1617), natural law is made known to us through “natural reason” and the law of the Decalogue. The law of God is, after St. Paul, written in the hearts of all men, “But if we would look for empirical confirmation of the rational application of natural law, Suarez suggests that the ‘law of nations’ is the closest approximation to it.”—Howard P. Kainz

“For many years, natural law was thought to be the principal source of international law. Indeed, many texts of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries characterized themselves as studies of the ‘laws of nature and of nations.’ [….] A belief in the relevance of natural law to international relations may, but need not, stem from religious principles. The early sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish international lawyers, Vitoria and Suárez, for example, based the law of nations on Catholic natural law foundations. However, Grotius [see below], a Protestant, later looked to more general biblical sources, as well as to classical authors and to right reason, to ground his theory of natural law. [….] When nineteenth-century legal positivists began deriding international law as being mere morality and not law at all, many international lawyers took affright and tried to sever their ties with natural law altogether. There was a suspicion that intimately linking international law to natural law debased international law.”—Mark W. Janis

Relying on the polyvalent meaning of jus in early medieval philosophy as law, right or justice, “the Spanish Dominicans, Francisco de Vitoria (1492-1546) and Bartolemé de las Casas (1474-1566), reflecting critically on the Spanish conquest of the New World, insisted that natural rights inhered in humans and were being subverted by European colonizers. Vitoria applied jus gentium [the ‘law of nations’ or international law] in condemning the actions of the Conquistadores in America, arguing that jus gentium forbids the taking of property of the Indians, or trying to bring them under the domination of the Spanish Empire, since they have a right to their own government. Native Americans may not be enslaved since they have dominion over themselves and over things, and their state of freedom is indicated by their political systems, magistrates, and system of exchange and religion; and it is unjust to force the Christian religion on them, since faith has to be voluntary.”—Howard P. Kainz

The Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (1588-1645), made explicit a point found earlier in the tradition (e.g. with Robert Bellarmine): natural law can be valid and binding even if God does not exist (i.e., we need not presume a divine legislator). The “father of international law” grounded natural law in what he took to be our intrinsically social, altruistic nature as rational beings. In her recent book, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (2006), Martha C. Nussbaum states that she is attempting to “revive” the natural law philosophy of Grotius. Although Grotius applies natural law principles specifically to international relations, Nussbaum contends such principles suggest a broader or more “general template for thinking about domestic issues as well, although he does not so apply it: In On the Law of War and Peace (1625), Grotius gives an account of the basic principles of international relations, tracing it to the Greek and Roman Stoics (Seneca and Cicero above all). Put very simply, this approach holds that the way to begin, when we think about fundamental principles, is to think of the human being as a creature characterized both by dignity or moral worth and by sociability: by ‘an impelling desire for fellowship, that is for common life, not just of any kind, but a peaceful life, and organized according to the measure of his intelligence, with those who are of his kind.’ Grotius thinks of these features as deeply natural. We may, however, (with Cicero, who was agnostic in metaphysics), view these claims as freestanding ethical claims out of which one might build political conceptions of the person that can be accepted by people who hold different views in metaphysics and in religion. The general idea of Grotius’ natural law theory is that these two features of the human being, and their ethical value, suggest a good deal about the treatment to which every human being is entitled. Thus political theory begins from an abstract idea of basic entitlements, grounded in the twin ideas of dignity (the human being as an end) and sociability. It is then argued that certain specific entitlements from those ideas, as necessary conditions of a life with human dignity. [….] What I want to bring out about Grotius’ theory is that it begins with the content of an outcome, in the sense of an account of basic entitlements of human beings whose fulfillment is required by justice; if these entitlements are fulfilled, then a society (in this case, ‘international society’) is minimally just. The justification of the entitlement set is not procedural, but involves the intuitive idea [what for Aquinas would be a ‘self-evident’ idea] of human dignity and arguments to the effect that a certain entitlement is implicit in the idea of human dignity. Grotius explicitly argues that we must not attempt to derive our fundamental principles from an idea of mutual advantage alone; human sociability indicates that advantage is not the only reason for which humans act justly. Grotius evidently believes that a society based upon sociability and respect rather than upon mutual advantage can remain stable over time. [….] Notice that for Grotius the important kind of equality among persons is moral equality, which entails equality of respect and entitlement. Equality of powers plays no significant role in his argument. [….] Thus there is no analogue in his theory to Hume’s Circumstances of Justice or to the similar assumptions in the theories of Hobbes, Locke, and Kant. Wherever human beings are alive, there are already Circumstances of Justice between them, just because they are human and sociable.”—Martha C. Nussbaum

“Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) might be treated as the antitype to everything Grotius stands for, but such a presumption would clearly be mistaken. Indeed, what is most striking to someone who examines the social contract tradition beginning from the natural law tradition is how much these thinkers agree with Grotius and his fellow natural law thinkers. That is to say, Hobbes holds that there are natural moral laws that enjoin ‘Justice, Equity, Modesty, Mercy, and (in summe) doing to others, as wee would be done to’ (XVII). But he believes that these moral laws can never give rise to a stable political order, because they are ‘contrary to our naturall Passions, that carry us to Partiality, Pride, Revenge, and the like’ (ibid). Natural sociability can be observed among bees and ants, but in human beings there is no reliable sociability without coercion. Because our natural passions are fundamentally competitive and egoistic, with fear playing a central motivating role, the state of nature—the state of human relations in the absence of a strong coercive sovereign—is a state of war. Hobbes famously describes this state as a very miserable one indeed. In this state of war, there is a rough equality of power and resources. Where bodily strength is concerned, the weakest can kill the strongest by stealth; where mental capacity is concerned, this rough equality will be doubted only by those who have a ‘vain conceipt’ of their own wisdom. [….] Although Hobbes appears to think humans are moral equals as well (the natural law part of his theory suggests this strongly, at any rate), it is equality of power and ability that plays the salient role in his argument. Equality of ability plays a large role in making the state of nature as bad as it is: for it generates an equality of hope, which in turn spurns people on to further competition. Given this natural equality of power, our passions incline us to make peace with one another, so that we can get on with our lives in tolerable security. ‘The Passions that encline men to Peace, are Feare of Death; Desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living; and a Hope by their Industry to attain them. And Reason suggesteth convenient Articles of Peace, upon which men may be drawn to agreement’ (XIII). Hobbes does not portray his social contract as generating principles of justice. He speaks of justice in ways that are hard to reconcile, sometimes arguing that there is no justice where there is no coercive power (XV), and sometimes arguing that there are natural principles of justice, albeit ineffectual ones, given our natural passions. But the social contract does generate the fundamental principles of political society. The contract is a reciprocal agreement to transfer natural rights (XIV). Its object is for every man a ‘good to himselfe,’ for the group of human beings a mutual advantage, ‘that Is to say, of getting themselves out from that miserable condition of Warre’ (XVII).”—Martha C. Nussbaum

“…Hobbes is normally portrayed as the great defender of the position that moral laws are not laws properly so called, and ‘states could be bound by no higher law.’ This view is based on Hobbes’s claim that the relationship among States in international affairs is like the relationship of people in the state of nature, where the natural human condition can be described as the ‘war of very man against every man.’ As Hobbes says at the end of Chapter 30 of the Leviathan: ‘The Law of Nations and the Law of Nature, is the same thing. And every Sovereign hath the same Right, in procuring the safety of his People, that any particular man can have, in procuring his own safety.’ It is thus contended that Hobbes is the great defender of the use of violence, especially in situations where there is no sovereign, and most especially in the relations between States. It is often forgotten, though, that in the very paragraph where Hobbes speaks of the war that exists in any state of nature, he also declares that the first branch of the ‘first, and fundamental law of nature’ is ‘to seek peace and follow it.’ The more Hobbesian-sounding law of nature, ‘by all means we can, defend ourselves,’ is said to be only the second branch of the first law of nature. Hobbes has been often unfairly characterized as the defender of the right of States to use any means, including violence, in the relations with one another and with their own subjects. This is because in the state of nature, while individual persons have the right to do everything, this is not a reasonable position in which to remain.”—Larry May

“[W]hile it is always unreasonable to be first performer of the social covenant, it is also unreasonable not to want to join cooperative associations that could protect us. It seems reasonable to argue that if Hobbes rejects the desirability of first performance to the social contract, he should also be opposed to the attitudes of cooperation and trust that are essential to an international rule of law. Yet, in Chapter 14 of Leviathan, Hobbes indicates that the first performance of contracts is only conditionally irrational in the state of nature—that is, only when cooperation jeopardizes self-defense. But Hobbes also counsels that we should always pursue peace over war and that it is reasonable to go to great lengths to create a situation in which people feel bound to keep their promises and contracts. Indeed, Hobbes defines the law of nature as a dictate of right reason that counsels against the use of force and violence. Civil society, along with the domestic rule of law, is created so as to provide just the sort of mutual enforcement of agreements that will make the first performance reasonable. [….] A Hobbesian position on international law would support a systematic set of laws of nature that can be derived from the two-pronged principle: Seek peace where you can, and otherwise be ready to resort to war. What is lacking in Hobbes’s account, from a contemporary perspective, is a strong defense of human rights.”—Larry May

“Hobbes argues that the laws of nature are mere theorems for what ‘conduceth to the conservation and defense of themselves.’ For this reason, natural laws are not laws properly so-called: they are binding ‘in foro interno,’ not ‘in foro externo.’ Nonetheless, for Hobbesians, natural laws are no less binding in terms of their reasonable restraint on violent action because of their ‘in foro interno’ status. These secular laws bind in the conscience, and this is a true bindingness. But they do not bind as laws often do—that is, they do not bind because of the fear of punishment at the hands of the law-givers. Fear of the person who could punish creates a bindingness that is externally motivated . Yet the internally motivated bindingness of conscience, while weaker than such things as fear, is still a motivation for most people. And a Hobbesian can follow Hobbes in arguing that it is reasonable for humans to place restraints on what they can bargain away: ‘[T]here be some rights that no man can be understood by any words, or other signes, to have abandoned or transferred….’ Because Hobbes did not clearly recognize a category of moral rights that could be used to ground fundamental legal norms, and because he did not think that the laws of nature were laws properly so-called, he is normally seen as the first strict legal positivist rather than a defender of natural law theory. But it seems to me that the Hobbesian, although non-standard Hobbesian, position on international relations…blurs the distinction between positive and natural law theories in significant ways and sets the stage for a moral minimalism that lets in a minimal conception of natural law. For while the law of nature only bind in the conscience, they do still bind, and can form the basis for restraint of violence, even in the international arena. A secularized and minimalist natural-law theory is one that derives constraints on the use of violence from principles of human psychology and morality.”—Larry May

Please Note: A list of "References and Further Reading" will be appended to the third and final post in this series.

Virtue Ethics: An Introduction—Part 3

‘Rules can be indispensable and yet indeterminate, they can be indeterminate and yet action-guiding. [….] Rules are not the enemy but the matrix of judgment.’—Onora O’Neill

‘…[T]he Aristotelian ancestry of the concept of (moral) virtue…traditionally consists—under one aspect—in a capacity for thinking correctly about how to respond to particular situations as they arise. (This is the capacity summed up in the concept of phronēsis, a “practical wisdom”—in Aristotle’s terms an “intellectual,” not a “moral virtue, but one that has to be understood by abstracting the common cognitive element from a range of different virtues that are genuinely moral: virtues consisting in the reliable disposition to deal in an appropriate, felicitous, or at least not contemptible way with the various sorts of circumstances attendant on human life.) The subject matter of this kind of correctness is not itself psychological: it relates, first, to the evaluatively significant features of situations and, second, to the identification and weighing of any reasons for action that these features may generate. [….] Virtue ethics, then, can be seen as aiming at the evaluation of the rational character ideal as it relates to practical rationality, and within practical rationality, to the proper appreciation of those (potentially action-guiding) values that lie beyond the range of ordinary self-interest.’— Sabina Lovibond

‘[W]e can begin with the idea…that the virtuous person has a distinctive way of seeing situations, persons, courses of action, or anything else that we regard as a logically appropriate object of moral evaluation. This way of seeing is objective in that those who become party to it are thereby alerted to genuine features of the world.’—Sabina Lovibond

‘Virtue ethics…offers a character ideal not just in the edifying sense (an example we should strive to imitate) but also in an epistemological one: it follows Aristotle in holding out a standard of correct judgement.’—Sabina Lovibond

‘[Phronēsis brings] together, on one hand, a general insight into what is of value or worth pursuing and, on the other, insight into the concrete possibility of realizing value in particular situations. People who have the quality of phronēsis will therefore excel in the construction of “practical syllogisms,” which we can think of as verbal representations of the thought expressed in an episode of purposive action. They will have a good eye for the evaluatively significant particular, and so will be among the active supporters of that structure of concern which makes such a particular “significant” (that is, potentially action-guiding) in the first place.’—Sabina Lovibond

‘[S]omeone who has been successfully initiated into a culture cannot make explicit all that she has thereby learned about the ethical—either about what counts as an instance of some concept figuring in the common ethical vocabulary, or about how to assess the relative “saliency” of different value considerations bearing on a particular case.’—Sabina Lovibond

‘Contrary to the common view, virtue ethics is not…starkly opposed to Kant and his followers on the issue of “moral motivation.” Virtue ethicists who rely on Aristotle’s philosophy of action rather than Hume’s need not, and should not, say that the virtuous agent acts “from desire” as opposed to reason, for…Aristotle and Kant share the non-Humean premise that we have two principles of movement, not just one. The virtuous Aristotelian agent does not characteristically act from the principle-of-movement-we-share-with-the-animals, as a child does, but from reason (logos) in the form of “choice” (prohairesis).’—Rosalind Hursthouse

‘[T]he territory of virtue is larger than that of action and tendency to action. Virtue involves and depends on appropriate emotions as well as actions. This is still true where the tendency to action is not an important aspect of the emotion, as in feeling sympathy for what deserves sympathy in the past, about which, in the most important respects, we cannot do anything. Even more importantly, virtue depends on motives and beliefs that shape actions. Claims about virtue and the virtues are not chiefly about the ethical classification and evaluation of actions performed, but rather about the ethical significance of what lies behind our actions.’—Robert Merrihew Adams

‘A view of virtue as a kind of goodness rather than a kind of rightness makes it easier to see how there can be quite different alternative ways of being genuinely virtuous.’—Robert Merrihew Adams

‘Moral virtue is excellence of moral character.’—Robert Merrihew Adams

‘One who enjoys the supreme benefit in loving the Good will have a motive to imitate the Good, and therefore to become as excellent as possible.’—Robert Merrihew Adams

‘Spirituality has long been considered to be a concept that is concerned in the first instance with activities rather than theories, with ways of living rather than doctrines subscribed to, with praxis rather than belief.’—John Cottingham

‘There were many Stoic treatises entitled “On Exercises,” and the central notion of askesis found for example in Epictetus, implied not so much “asceticism” in the modern sense as a practical programme of training, concerned with the “art of living.” Fundamental to such programmes was learning the technique of prosoche—attention, a continuous vigilance and presence of the mind (a notion, incidentally, that calls to mind certain Buddhist spiritual techniques). Crucial also was the mastery of methods for the ordering of the passions—what has been called the therapy of desire [after Martha Nussbaum’s book of that title]. The general aim of such programmes was not merely intellectual enlightenment, or the imparting of abstract theory, but a transformation of the whole person, including our patterns of emotional response [cf. the Greek term, metanoia].’—John Cottingham

‘[Aristotle] has quite a bit to say about what the virtue of phronēsis consists in, but he clearly is not confident that he can give a full account of it. …[H]e thinks that fundamentally it does not matter, because we can pick out persons who are phronetic in advance of investigating the nature of phronēsis. [As Zagzebski writes in a note, ‘Since Aristotle think that the virtue of phronēsis is both a necessary and sufficient condition of having the moral virtues, the truly phronetic person will always be paradigmatically good as well as paradigmatically wise.’] The phronimōs, can be defined, roughly, as a person like that, where we make a demonstrative reference to a paradigmatically good person. So Aristotle assume that we can pick out paradigmatic instances of good persons in advance of our theorizing.’—Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski

‘The function of an exemplar is to fix the reference of a “good person” or a “practically wise person” without any use of concepts, whether descriptive or nondescriptive.’—Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski

‘It is not implausible to think we are elevated by others who are more developed than ourselves in their striving for harmonious hierarchical development and for a valuable life. We are aided and encouraged along our own path of development by their striving for self-development and purer feeling; contrast the effects on us of encountering those with a sour mixture of one-upmanship, self-aggrandizement, desire to dominate or destroy, and other festering emotions, the effects of wending our way and bending our attention to their motivations and trajectories. [….] We all know people, I hope, who bring out the best in us, people in whose presence we would be embarrassed to speak or act from unworthy motives, people who glow. In their presence we feel elevated. We are pushed, or nudged further along a path of development and perfection; rather, we are inspired to move ourselves along, in the direction shown. [….] We want to find a way of living whereby our best energies and talents are poured out so as to speak to and improve the best energies and talents of others. We want to utilize our highest parts and energies in a way that helps others to flourish.’—Robert Nozick

‘First, the exemplar can serve as a standard of perfection against which the rest of us are measured. The exemplar may not be literally perfect, but he or she is close enough to determine what is good for us, on the Platonic interpretation. What is good for us in that sense is to imitate the exemplar. Second, human flourishing can be defined as the kind of life the exemplar desires or at which she aims.’—Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski

‘There are some individuals whose lives are infused by values, who pursue values with single-minded purity and intensity, who embody value to the greatest extent. These individuals glow with a special radiance. Epochal religious figures often have this quality. To be in their presence (or even to hear about them) is to be uplifted and drawn (at least temporarily) to pursue the best in oneself. There are less epochal figures as well, glowing with a special moral and value loveliness, whose presence uplifts us, whose example lures and inspires us.’—Robert Nozick

‘If all the concepts of a formal ethical theory are rooted in a person, then narratives and descriptions of that person are morally significant. It is an open question what it is about the person that makes him or her good.’—Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski

‘With respect to certain elements of human life, the terms of the novelist’s art are alert winged creatures, perceiving where the blunt terms of ordinary speech, or of abstract theoretical discourse, are blind, acute where they are obtuse, winged where they are dull and heavy.’—Martha C. Nussbaum

'[O]rdinary people—which means all of us—find [the] story mode of moral discourse [i.e., the form which includes parable, the play, short story, the narrative poem, the novel and the film] uniquely palatable and nutritious; it seems perfectly designed to engage our moral faculties. Our moral understanding and the story form seem fitted for one another. No rote learning is necessary: it all seems to flow quite naturally. This is the way our moral faculty likes to operate. It is almost effortless to take in a story, pleasant even, though the story may be replete with moral discourse. The novel, in particular, is a text of a very different kind from the scientific treatise. It is also very different from the philosophical text, which is what philosophers, naturally, are most comfortable with. Thus the novel form has tended to be ignored by moral philosophers: it is not, for them, the place to look for canonical expressions of ethical truth. Yet, quite obviously, it is for most educated people one of the prime vehicles of ethical expression. (Film plays a similar role for the less word-minded.) In reading a novel we have ethical experiences, sometimes quite profound ones, and we reach ethical conclusions, condemning some characters and admiring others. We live a particular set of moral challenges (sitting there in our armchair) by entering into the lives of the characters introduced. [....] Stories can sharpen and clarify moral questions, encouraging a dialectic between the reader's own experiences and the trials of the characters he or she is reading about. A tremendous amount of moral thinking and feeling is done when reading novels (Or watching plays and films, or reading poetry and short stories). In fact, it is not an exaggeration to say that for most people this is the primary way in which they acquire ethical attitudes, especially in contemporary culture. Our ethical knowledge is aesthetically mediated.'—Colin McGinn

‘Religious exemplars are sometimes useless for modeling virtue in the messy situations that ordinary, less-than-virtuous persons encounter in modern life precisely because what makes the religious exemplars extraordinary is that they know how to avoid such messes. Some of us want to learn how to avoid the messes, but meanwhile, we have to face them and need exemplars of how to do that.’—Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski

‘Emotions easily become dispositions. Human beings develop patterns of emotional response in similar situations. These circumstance/emotion pairs become part of a person’s character. They express the way she emotionally fits into the world around her. An emotion is motivating because of the combination of its affective component and its intentionality. Affectivity is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a state’s being motivating. It is necessary because affect is what gets us going. Hume is usually associated with this point, but so is Aristotle [in De Anima], and I believe they are right that no cognitive or purely representational state can do so.’—Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski

‘The concept of a motive arises within the discourse of giving reasons in both the sense of precipitating reasons and the sense of justifying reasons.’—Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski

‘Motive dispositions are constituents of traits of character. A trait of character is the combination of a motive-disposition and reliability in acting in a way that expresses the motive and reaching the end (if any) of the motive. The good ones are constitutive of virtues, and the bad ones are constitutive of vices.’—Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski

‘I have proposed that “good” is defined by direct reference. If so, it is plausible that “good life” is defined by direct reference as well. It is a life like that, which is to say that we know it when we see it. Describing lives is one of the functions of literature and biography. [….] If we defined the good life as a life like that, we do not do it independently of referring to persons whose lives we want to imitate. We imitate persons we regard as exemplars, and we imitate lives we regard as exemplary, and these are not independent activities. [….] So what is a flourishing life? I propose that it is determined by what the exemplars say it is. [….] The exemplars make the determination of good lives in the hard cases. If “good life” is defined by direct reference independently of a “good person,” then the life of a good person can come apart from a good life. However, if I am right, that is not the way these concepts work. The lives we want to imitate are lives of persons we want to imitate.’—Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski

References and Further Reading:

• Adams, Robert Merrihew. A Theory of Virtue: Excellence in Being for the Good. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
• Annas, Julia. The Morality of Happiness. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
• Aristotle (Roger Crisp, trans.). Nicomachean Ethics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
• Athanassoulis, Nafsika. ‘Virtue Ethics,’ Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
  http://www.iep.utm.edu/v/virtue.htm
• Baron, Marcia W. Kantian Ethics Almost Without Apology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995.
• Berkowitz, Peter. Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.
• Broadie, Sarah. Ethics with Aristotle. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
• Chong, Kim-chong. Early Confucian Ethics. Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2007.
• Crisp, Roger, ed. How Should One Live? Essays on the Virtues. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1996.
• Crisp, Roger and Michael Slote, eds. Virtue Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
• Darwall, Stephen, ed. Virtue Ethics. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003.
• Dent, N.J.H. The Moral Psychology of the Virtues. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
• DePaul, Michael and Linda Zagzebski, eds. Intellectual Virtue: Perspectives from Ethics and Epistemology. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003.
• Engstrom, Stephen and Jennifer Whiting, eds. Aristotle, Kant and the Stoics: Rethinking Happiness and Duty. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• Foot, Philippa. Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1978.
• Foot, Philippa. Natural Goodness. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2001.
• Galston, William. Liberal Purposes: Goods, Virtues and Diversity in the Liberal State. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
• Geach, Peter. The Virtues. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
• Goldie, Peter. On Personality. London: Routledge, 2004.
• Gonzalez, Francisco J. Dialectic and Dialogue: Plato’s Practice of Philosophical Inquiry. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998.
• Goodin, Robert E. Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
• Hanley, Ryan Patrick. Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
• Harvey, Peter. An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics: Foundations, Values and Issues. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
• Hurka, Thomas. Virtue, Vice, and Value. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
• Hursthouse, Rosalind. On Virtue Ethics. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Hursthouse, Rosalind, ‘Virtue Ethics,’ The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2003) Edward N. Zalta, ed. URL= http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2003/entries/ethics-virtue/.
• Hursthouse, Rosalind, Gavin Lawrence and Warren Quinn, eds. Virtues and Reasons: Philippa Foot and Moral Theory. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1995.
• Iyer, Raghavan. Parapolitics: Toward the City of Man. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
• Keown, Damien. The Nature of Buddhist Ethics. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
• Kupperman, Joel. Character. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
• Lear, Gabriel Richardson. Happy Lives and the Highest Good: An Essay on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.
• Lovibond, Sabina. Ethical Formation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
• MacIntyre, Alasdair, 1985, After Virtue. London: Duckworth, 2nd ed., 1985.
• McGinn, Colin. Ethics, Evil, and Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
• McKinnon, Christine. Character, Virtue Theories, and the Vices. Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 1999.
• Murdoch, Iris. The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.
• Norton, David L. Democracy and Moral Development: A Politics of Virtue. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991.
• Nozick, Robert. Philosophical Explanations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.
• Nussbaum, Martha C. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
• Nussbaum, Martha C. The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.
• O’Neill, Onora. Towards Justice and Virtue: A Constructive Account of Practical Reasoning. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• Sherman, Nancy. Making a Necessity of Virtue: Aristotle and Kant on Virtue. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
• Sim, May. Remastering Morals with Aristotle and Confucius. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
• Slote, Michael. From Morality to Virtue. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
• Slote, Michael. Morals from Motives. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
• Slote, Michael. The Ethics of Care and Empathy. New York: Routledge, 2007.
• Sorabji, Richard. Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
• Swanton, Christine. Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
• Taylor, Gabriele. Deadly Vices. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
• Tessman, Lisa. Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggles. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
• Van Norden, Bryan W. Virtue Ethics and Consequentialism in Early Chinese Philosophy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
• Wallace, James. Virtues and Vices. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978.
• Wierzbicka, Anna. What Did Jesus Mean? New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
• Wood, Allen E. Kant’s Ethical Thought. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
• Yu, Jiyuan. The Ethics of Confucius and Aristotle: Mirrors of Virtue. New York: Routledge, 2007.
• Zagzbeski, Linda Trinkaus. Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• Zagzebski, Linda Trinkaus. Divine Motivation Theory. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Image: Mending Clothes in the Early Morning Sun, © Smithsonian Institution

Virtue Ethics: An Introduction—Part 2

The image is of "Noah's Ark" (ca. 1590), a painting attributed to Miskin. © Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. I chose this for the same reasons Amyn B. Sajoo selected it for the cover of his Muslim Ethics: Emerging Vistas (2004), as explained in the Preface to the book.


The mature, self-responsible, self-actualizing individual is first and foremost self-governing. The art and science of self-government is for virtue ethical theory the paradigm of good government (or governance). We might imagine, therefore, that the primary task of good government is to assure that the opportunities and occasions of such self-governance are generalized throughout society. Owing to the human condition and reflective of our natural sociability, not all of the preconditions of self-directed individuality can be self-supplied by individuals. It follows that if we are to hold individuals morally accountable for self-discovery and self-actualization, they are entitled to the necessary conditions of same. In short, some of the necessary (yet not sufficient) conditions of eudaimonistic moral aspiration are best thought of as social and political conditions, the responsibility for which is everyone’s:

To say that all are responsible is not necessarily to say that each is responsible, though. Still less is it to say that each is necessarily responsible for attempting to do whatever must be done himself. [….] [W]e typically—and rightly—suppose that, when responsibilities have not been allocated to anyone in particular within a group, the most that can be said is that each of them has an imperfect duty to perform at least some (but not necessarily all) of the acts that we might ideally wish be performed. The same general principle gives rise to much stronger implications at the level of the group as a whole, however. When no one in particular bears responsibility for performing some morally desirable actions, everyone collectively has a strong, perfect duty to see to that those things are done, within the limits of the capacities of the group as a whole to do so without undue sacrifice. [….] [The requirements of strong collective responsibility are, from the perspective of individual action, a coordination problem.] [T]he solution to such coordination problems is, of necessity, a responsibility peculiar to the group as a whole (Robert E. Goodin).

While in the past it was the polis or city-state that provided (through its ‘constitution’) a solution to the coordination problem represented by the generalization of the opportunities and occasions for human flourishing, today that solution is provided by the State. The State bears ‘ultimate responsibility for providing the coordination that is required in order for people to be able do the right thing’ (Goodin). Virtue ethics can appreciate the fact that individual moral responsibilities give rise to collective moral responsibilities that cannot be self-supplied by individuals: Where shared collective responsibilities are concerned, it is—by definition—everyone’s business what everyone else does. And this tautology is far from an empty one. It is everyone’s business, first and most simply, because it is a responsibility that everyone shares with everyone else. It is everyone’s business, second and more importantly, because, for anyone else’s contribution to be efficacious, each agent must usually play his part under the scheme that has been collectively instituted for discharging that shared responsibility. [….] Failure to discharge shared, collective responsibilities…undermin[es] in certain crucial respects other people’s moral agency itself. [….] That is what justifies us, pace libertarian principles, in forcing people to play their part in collective moral enterprises—so that others may play their part in them too [….] All of this is simply to say that, where there is a collective responsibility to coordinate individual behavior in pursuit of some morally important goal, it is legitimate for the collectivity to impose sanctions upon individuals in pursuit of that goal. Of course, it is perfectly true that not all coordination schemes require such enforcement…[for]people are sometimes prepared to play their assigned roles without any external sanctions whatsoever. So my argument here is not that we should necessarily always enforce coordination schemes. It is, rather, that we should always be prepared to enforce them as necessary (Robert E. Goodin).

Eudaimonistic ethics is a valuable voluntary option for individuals only if the necessary social and political conditions for it prevail.

The eudaimonist conception of human nature and the good life entail enhancing the quality of life through the acquisition of moral virtues and the proper development of character. As dispositions of character, the moral virtues are (1) personal utilities, (2) intrinsic goods (i.e., of intrinsic or inherent value), and (3) social utilities (because morally ‘other-regarding’). Utility is understood here in its lexical sense, meaning fitness for some purpose or worth to some end.

To have moral integrity implies one is dedicated to the task of harmoniously integrating otherwise separable, conflicting and often fragmented aspects of personhood—notably, cognitive and affective faculties, desires, interests, roles, life-shaping choices—into a self-consistent if not harmonious whole. In the Apology and the Crito Socrates exemplifies moral integrity, conducting himself in a manner that vividly and exquisitely exemplifies the very conduct for which he is condemned (i.e., living a philosophical way of life).

The problem of moral development is the problem of discovering the conditions necessary and sufficient for the manifestation of the virtues and the actualization of value(s). Each person is morally obligated, from the perspective of virtue ethics, to sincerely and persistently endeavor to actualize, conserve and defend those values he or she identifies with as the product of self-examination and the prerequisite of self-direction. The specific cluster of values so identified may (and usually does) vary from person to person and no one individual is capable of realizing all such values, although one might nonetheless recognize and appreciate all values (or value as such), especially insofar as these values have become identified with other individuals. Individual values identification brings in its wake the intrinsic and intangible rewards of personal fulfillment and flourishing. We are all alike with regard to values-potentialities by virtue of our human nature, but we differ, owing to genetic inheritance, upbringing, circumstance and so forth in the manner of values-identification and actualization. We might see this as the interdependence of value-actualizers, serving to confirm our inherently social nature as human beings. Such interdependence, furthermore, is capable of (has implications for) filling out the meaning of true community.

Identification with particular values is a sign of moral integrity and entails ‘living in truth to oneself,’ where ‘the self’ is fulfilled in the actualization, conservation and defense of value(s). Such identification is of a piece with self-knowledge and simultaneously a ‘knowledge of the good.’

Eudaimonistic individualism supports and strengthens both community and tradition, these being in the course of any life ‘received’ and then ‘chosen.’ Individual moral autonomy here has a necessary connection to the identification and appreciation of the ‘right’ tradition and the ‘right’ community. Recall that the individual self-realization of eudaimonistic ethics is inherently a social enterprise, as virtuous individuals are the vehicles for manifesting objective worth in the world. Being objective, the worth of such values actualization and expression is incomplete without the recognition, appreciation and utilization by appropriate others; that is to say, by those individuals who comprise an individual’s ‘natural community.’ The obligation of the individual to relate to this community is one with the moral obligation of self-actualization, an inherently non-egoistic enterprise. In the same way, and as explained by Norton, there is a ‘natural tradition’ and ‘natural meta-tradition’ for every person, for we have predecessors in the general endeavor of self-directed living, as well as predecessors in a particular chosen course of life. Thus to ‘choose oneself’ inevitably and invariably entails the deliberative choice of one’s meta-tradition and tradition. Prior to this choice, one’s meta-tradition and tradition are central to what Jürgen Habermas has called the ‘lifeworld,’ the individuated (if not idiosyncratic) backdrop of personal and collective identity that symbolize one’s share of the cultural inheritance, and about which one may be only dimly (less than fully consciously) aware, yet with which (through its language, concepts and categories, etc.) one makes one’s way about in the world. With the age of reason, as it were, one’s involuntary affiliations are subject to reasoned choice, to deliberate commitment and self-imposed obligations, as one identifies with that tradition that becomes the backbone of one’s worldview (while one’s worldview may contain elements from more than one tradition, the nature of philosophical and spiritual discipline or praxis, the student-teacher relationship, and the sheer depth and scope of major religious and philosophical traditions suggests it is neither wise nor prudent to identify with more than one tradition) . The ‘choice’ and commitment to community and tradition assume a developmental period of inquiry and exploration, experimentation and uncertainty, the eudaimonistic equivalent of moral adolescence. Moral maturity is evidenced when one comes to identify with one’s freely chosen community(ies) and tradition, when one comes to appreciate the absolutely fundamental pride of place one’s tradition plays in providing propitious conditions for individual and collective flourishing. The eudaimonistic approach to community and tradition hopes to avoid the pitfalls of New Age dilettantism, the follies of faddish eclecticism, and the vices of rootless cosmopolitanism while not succumbing to a Burkean-like veneration of traditions that fails to subject their contents to a rational or reasonable scrutiny (‘critique’). Eudaimonist communities are self-defining, being predicated on the individual’s moral autonomy and her unique articulation and realization of values for herself and others (i.e., the common good). In such a community, individuals interact with one another as ‘whole persons,’ being greater than the sum total of their social roles, their social interactions characterized by a conspicuous exemplification of caring and compassionate relations understood as universalizable forms of erōs (in the Platonic sense) and philia (in both Platonic and Aristotelian senses).

Understood at a sufficient level of abstraction, the shared values and beliefs within such a community are perfectly compatible with diverse lifestyles or life-plans; to use Norton’s example, not every Transcendentalist need live, like Thoreau, for two years in a cabin in the woods. Indeed, think of the variety of individuals who were Transcendentalists: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Sarah Margaret Fuller, by way of lustrous examples.

One learns from the aporetic dialogues, Socratic elenchus, and Platonic dialectic that knowledge of the virtues—and the Good for that matter—is neither simply the product of unreflective or untutored intuition (the ‘stuff’ of everyday experience), nor propositional knowledge (the claim of the Sophists; propositions ascribe predicates: qualities, properties or attributes, to an ‘object’), nor a combination thereof. (When we say that a person ‘knows that p,’ ‘believes that p,’ ‘doubts that p,’ ‘affirms that p,’ etc., ‘p’ stands for a proposition.) In Platonic thought, the fact that we have some ability to recognize instances and properties of a particular virtue, is due to our soul’s possession of (or prior acquaintance with)—however obscure or opaque in the present—the knowledge of that virtue, knowledge, if you will, of its essence. A propositional definition of virtue is partial and incomplete, incapable of expressing the true knowledge of virtue. However important in some contexts—after all, they express relative truths—propositional formulations should not be confused with the knowledge of virtue. One reason for this is that the knowledge of virtue is bound up with self-knowledge, and such knowledge effaces the boundaries between subject and object (for instance, one cannot communicate one’s self-knowledge to others). The knowledge of good (and evil) is directed more to, and evidence in, the ‘how’ of knowing rather than the knowledge ‘that:’ knowledge of the good means knowing how to be good (or how to do things well). As Francisco J. Gonzalez explains, the knowledge associated with the virtues and the Good is (1) a knowledge how (exemplified by Socrates himself in the course of a dialogue), (2) a self-knowledge insofar as it is ineluctably tied to the virtuous agent herself, and (3) non-propositional knowledge (hence the aporias, the Socratic method, and the philosopher’s ascent out of the Cave to a vision of the Agathon). Nonetheless, words, images (as allegories, metaphors, analogies, etc.) and propositions are dialectically essential to the dialogic process of evoking, remembering, or awakening that enables one to recognize, in some measure, that with which the soul has had prior acquaintance. In terms of the Platonic Cave allegory, the Good is the true cause of knowing and being known, and the knowledge of the Good is decidedly non-propositional. For example, our knowledge of beauty itself, as a ‘form’ or ‘idea,’ depends on illumination of the Good (the Sun) in the very way that our perception of beautiful sensible objects (as partial or instantiations or realizations of “beauty”) depends on the illumination of the sun. The Platonic ‘form’ of beauty is the ideal that all objects christened ‘beautiful’ must approximate or instantiate. Similarly, ‘we can know what a virtue is without reducing it to its imperfect and contingent instances only because our understanding of the good allows us to idealize’ (Gonzalez). Knowledge, on this account, is not simply or solely knowledge of how things are, but presupposes a desire to know how things (by nature) should be. Doxa, opinion or belief, does not become epistēmē or knowledge through syllogistic proofs or deductive justification (for the Good remains outside any system of deductive knowledge), as the former already presupposes the latter, its epistemic status owing to the fact that it is an implicit awareness of the (idealized) ‘form,’ albeit restricted to its incomplete instantiation or partial realization. Through dialectical ascent to the Good we learn to distinguish belief from true knowledge, to properly distinguish the ‘form’ from its instantiations, in Aristotelian terms, to distinguish the contingent from the necessary. ‘The soul can seek to understand what virtue is only because it already “divines” this in the words, propositions and images with which it deals’ (Gonzalez). So propositions are used in dialectic to attain an insight that transcends them (the Good, after all, is transcendent), an insight into that nature which they themselves presuppose but cannot adequately or definitively express. This insight is on the order of a ‘knowledge by acquaintance’ (not in the Russellian sense, which is an immediate kind of sensuous or empirical knowledge) but is more than that inasmuch as the virtuous individual exemplifies the proper praxis of a ‘knowing how,’ having artfully woven together insight, reason, and right living.

Plato is an objective idealist, for it is as a result of our insight into and reflection upon noumenal realities outside the Cave that we are able to properly re-order the concrete and phenomenal world of the political realm with that which is true and just, with that which is Good, thereby bringing the soul of man into proper harmony and proportion with the polis of men, and both in alignment with the macrocosm. The objective nature of morality assumes the integrity and intelligibility of a cosmic order permitting subjective views of the Good articulated by individuals capable of indefinite growth or perfectibility, relative views and formulations of the Good that are consciously distinguished from but inspired by absolute (non-propositional) truth and goodness (the Agathon).

After Plato and Aristotle, it is the Hellenistic philosophical schools in Greece and Rome that provide the clearest expression of virtue ethics. These schools practiced what Martha Nussbaum calls the ‘therapy of desire,’ as the Epicureans, Skeptics and Stoics—among others—'all conceived of philosophy as a way of addressing the most painful and pressing problems of human life. They saw the philosopher as a compassionate physician whose arts could heal many pervasive types of human suffering. They practiced philosophy not as a detached intellectual technique dedicated to the display of cleverness but as an immersed and worldly art of grappling with human misery. They focused their attention, in consequence, on issues of daily and urgent human significance—the fear of death, love and sexuality, anger and aggression—issues that are sometimes regarded embarrassingly messy and personal by the more detached varieties of philosophy’ (Nussbaum). In Platonic terms, this represents the dialectical descent back into the Cave following the ascent to the Good, the ascending and descending dialectics complementing each other not unlike the way in which political theory is dialectically related to political praxis. The goal of philosophy remains human flourishing (or the relief and prevention of unnecessary suffering), and the methods of this medical ethical philosophy make use of logical rigor, precise reasoning, rational arguments, yet these are valuable only insofar as they prove their ‘protreptic’ worth, that is, insofar as they prove helpful in turning the Socratic interlocutors toward self-examination and philosophy, toward virtue and the good life. As with Socrates, the premises of a therapeutic argument are not designed in the first instance to logically necessitate an indubitable conclusion, but rather to turn an individual in a certain direction, to convert her to a certain course of action, the measure of success being practical and ethical, rather than purely formal or theoretical. The conception of the philosopher’s mission a medical one, ‘compassion and love of humanity [are] central features of it. Having understood how human lives are diseased, a philosopher worthy of the name—like a doctor worthy of that name—will proceed to cure them’ (Nussbaum). This medical philosophy must therefore challenge and change the psychology of the interlocutor, must delve deep into her inner world with appeals to memory and imagination, relying on the techniques of narrative and rhetoric, and calling upon the resources of friendship and community. It is a therapy of desire because our emotions often have a cognitive dimension that helps us better perceive and assess what is deeply significant or important in our lives. In Nussbaum’s words, ‘passions such as fear, anger, grief and love are not blind surges of affect that push and pull us without regard to reasoning and beliefs. They are, in fact, intelligent and discriminating elements of the personality that are very closely linked to beliefs and are modified by the modification of belief.’

While virtue ethics has social and political preconditions, as well as political implications and importance, it is perhaps best viewed as serving parapolitical purposes, where parapolitics ‘signifies the imaginative application of seminal ideas vitalizing political theory and practice; the elaboration of fundamental principles into paradigms of relationships among persons and between civil means and humane ends; the quest for political understanding and action based upon the ever-receding perspective of ideals rooted in the ethics, metaphysics and psychology of self-transcendence.’—Raghavan Iyer

Please Note: 'References and Further Reading' will be appended to the third and final part of this series.

Virtue Ethics: An Introduction—Part 1

Virtue ethics
…begins with the question: ‘What is a worthy life for a human being?’
…is preoccupied with the moral growth and character of individuals.
…postulates, in its classical Greek version, four principal (or ‘cardinal’) moral virtues: wisdom, justice, temperance (or moderation, sōphrosynē), and courage. Of these four virtues, sōphrosynē is the most difficult to render adequately into English. It implies mastery of the art of self-control, excellence of character and soundness of mind; it further connotes the qualities of wisdom and eudaimonia. In Plato’s triune soul, it represents reason ruling over the ‘spirited’ and ‘appetitive’ parts. In social and political terms it suggests balance, proportionality, and judiciousness in action. Indeed, as with all the cardinal virtues, we might examine it in terms of thought, feeling, speech and action, for it (they) has (have) both intra- and interpersonal application. Christians, while acknowledging the significance of classical Greek virtues, recognize the following (cardinal) specifically theological virtues: faith, hope and love [agapē, also ‘charity,’ Gk. charis, L., cāritās]; other theological virtues include goodness, humility, chastity, and poverty. A Buddhist list of virtues would include wisdom, compassion, generosity, patience, perseverance, concentration and non-attachment. The Confucian cluster of virtues is relatively unique as well, although all of these lists might plausibly be said to have more than strong family resemblance to each other, as some virtues, notably wisdom and some form of self-control, are common to both religious and non-religious worldviews.
…is ‘agent-centered.’ While modern moral theories, like utilitarianism/consequentialism and deontology/Kantian ethics, are largely or conventionally ‘act(ion)-centered.’ It is certainly possible to imagine an ethical life that appreciates and integrates the virtues of all three ethical theories, even if that means giving (lexical) priority to one theory over the others. The leading notions of eudaimonist ethics are, typically, not those of obligation, duty and rule-following but rather goodness, worth and value, although the endeavor to be good or to realize value(s) is certainly conceived as obligatory. And indeed, there’s nothing that precludes obligations, duties and rules, imperatives and commands, from playing an indispensable role in virtue-ethical training and moral growth.

A virtue is a settled (i.e., reliable) disposition to act in a certain way. It expresses an ideal as much as an achievement.

The qualities of moral character, however fragile, are a (spiritual, ethical, cognitive and affective) developmental outcome. These virtues, as excellent qualities of character, are intrinsically valuable for those who exemplify them while at the same time being extrinsically valuable for others.

Virtue ethics is perfectionist or, better, perfectibilist (in the Godwinian sense): it demands of individuals a continuous moral growth, a ‘self-surpassing’ with no endpoint, and commitment to an askēsis familiar to Hellenistic ethics, Christianity, Islamic humanism and mysticism (Sufism), Indian religious worldviews, and some forms of Daoism. This perfectibilist ethics in the ‘art of living’ involves a training dedicated to techniques of mental attentiveness or presence of mind and focused on learning those methods necessary for ordering the passions or mastering the ‘therapy of desire.’

Because virtue ethics are dispositional, there’s a significant difference between a ‘virtuous act’ and ‘living virtuously.’ Cultivating a virtuous disposition entails habituating our emotions in particular ways as well as the exercise of practical reasoning (deliberative judgment, phronēsis) so as to learn how and why to act the right way in any given situation, as well as, more broadly, conduct our lives in such a way as to reveal our dedication to (the fundamental value of) the Good. Developmentally speaking, the virtuous person comes to learn how to intuitively and spontaneously respond to the moral dimensions of any circumstance or situation: ‘The better I get at deliberating and working out what to do, the less I will need to deliberate, for the more obvious it will become to me what the morally salient features of the situation in front of me are.’—Julia Annas

The virtues are rational states generated from repeated choices and the fruition of a developmental pattern or habit (in the Aristotelian sense) of consistent and coherent reasoning about the right and proper thing to do, the right and proper way to live. Acquiring a virtue is often compared (keeping in mind the analogy is not perfect) to acquiring a skill (e.g., becoming an artisan), or learning to play a musical instrument. The emulation of one’s betters enables on to eventually progress to the point where one acquires an understanding of what one is doing and has the ability to freely act (perform) on one’s own in a self-directed fashion. One’s parents, teachers, and peer group all affect the trajectory of ones’ character development, all can work with our natural endowments and tendencies in the arduous process of chiseling, cutting, shaping and polishing this raw material through habituation exercises and (formal and informal) educational practices. In the first instance, virtue ethics is beholden to the presence of virtuous agents as intimate role models fit for direct and indirect emulation.

‘One might think that the demands of morality conflict with our [enlightened] self-interest, as morality is other-regarding, but eudaimonist ethics presents a different picture. Human nature is such that virtue is not exercised in opposition to self-interest, but rather is the quintessential component of human flourishing. The good life for humans is the life of virtue and therefore it is in our interest to be virtuous. It is not just that virtues lead to the good life (e.g., if you are good you will be rewarded), but rather that a virtuous life is good because the exercise of our rational capacities and virtues is its own reward.’—Nafsika Athanassoulis

Human nature contains innate potentialities and capacities that can come to fruition with careful cultivation, proper habituation and education. The actualization or realization (or expression) of such potentialities and capacities is experienced as affording that sort of happiness, contentment or satisfaction that is peculiar to self-fulfilling conduct, otherwise known as eudaimonia or ‘human flourishing’ (living well).

Our innate excellences or virtues (aretaiē, s. aretē) come to fruition as a result of a proper orientation toward ‘the Good,’ for in our heart of hearts, we are lovers of the Good.

Eudaimonia, awkwardly translated as ‘happiness,’ but better rendered as ‘human flourishing,’ identifies the condition of living in truth to oneself, and requires a deliberate process of self-discovery and self-examination as integral to that form of self-knowledge that is part and parcel of virtuous living.

‘In an ethics of virtue there is no room for supererogation. There is no “floor” of minimal moral obligation for the agent to rise above; being a fully virtuous agent is an ideal for everyone. The development of virtue is a process that everyone starts and continues to go along, there are no levels that only moral heroes are supposed to reach. However, there is an analogue to the problem of supererogation: the thought that there is a distinction between the virtue that we all may be expected to achieve , and the virtue which only exceptional people may be expected to achieve.’—Julia Annas

‘The eudaimonistic handling of supererogation is discernable in the testimony of heroes and saints that their heroic or saintly conduct was perceived by them as their duty; yet at the same time, they typically do not universalize their heroic or saintly duties. [….] We can think of their situation on the analogy of the skilled swimmer who can accomplish a deep-water rescue that is beyond the capabilities of a novice and a non-swimmer. As moral development increases, so do moral responsibilities, and in recognition of this the hero or saint demands more of himself than he asks of other persons, and more of himself than he asked at prior levels of development. In sum, eudaimonism’s thesis is that some of what is obligatory at later stages of moral development is supererogatory…with respect to earlier stages, while moral development itself is a universal demand upon humankind.’—David L. Norton

For eudaimonistic individuation or self-actualization it is the responsibility of persons to actualize objective value(s) in the world. (David L. Norton)

Whatever one’s projects and commitments are (apart from specifically moral ones), they cannot be identified with character, but how someone maintains or fails to maintain commitments and responsibilities normally counts heavily toward character, as do the sorts of commitments and responsibilities someone takes on.’—Joel Kupperman

‘Strength of character is independent of goodness of character, in the deeply wicked people have strong characters. Indeed, a strong character is required to be either extremely good or deeply wicked.’—Joel Kupperman

‘A person’s character is a complex of innate dispositions, shaped by environmental influences, as well as traits acquired through habituation, reasoned assessments, and voluntary choices. A character is not something that comes ready-made and can just be put on. It is a complex individuating feature of persons and cannot be hived off from the person. It provides a source of continuity throughout a person’s life. Thus, characters are not to be thought of as simply a collection of moral virtues. Further, virtues, unlike characters, can be specified independently of persons who instantiate them. If two people have the virtue of courage, it is the same virtue they have. Characters are inextricably linked with the persons who create them.’—Christine McKinnon

‘We value traits, calling them virtues, because they are dispositions reliably to recognize what is of value or disvalue in the world, and reliably to respond appropriately in thought, feeling and actions. Intellectual virtues, such as wisdom, and moral virtues, such as benevolence and being just, have precisely this feature. We value wisdom because we value truth. We value benevolence because we value such things as security and comfort, and we disvalue cruelty because we disvalue such things as pain and needless suffering. And so on for justice and the other virtues. What you value in the world will determine what character traits you value in yourself and in others. Another way of putting what is at the heart of virtue is that a virtue is a trait that is reliably responsive to good reasons, to reasons that reveal values; it is reason-responsive in the right way.’—Peter Goldie

‘Character is fragile.’—Peter Goldie

‘People who exhibit quite different traits in different spheres of life are often seen as not typical, let alone successful, in their inner fragmentation, but as having pervasive failings of character and feeling and as susceptible to swings of judgment and action. A rigid distinction or disassociation between spheres of life is often maintained at great psychic cost, and frequently fails: the impartial severities of the “public” person carry over into intimate relationships; the indulgences or bullying of “private” life become the corruptions of “public” life. Habits of dishonesty or of callousness, of friendliness or of courtesy, are not easily kept within distinct departments of life; nor are sensitivity and lack of sensitivity to others. Without some very general inclusive traits of character, patterns of action, attitude, and feeling within spheres of life, even psychological stability, can fail. Inclusive principles of virtue are no more dispensable than inclusive principles of justice.’—Onora O’Neill

Please Note: A list of 'References and Further Reading' will be appended to the third and final post of this series.