Love and Objectivity in Virtue Ethics

Love and Objectivity in Virtue Ethics PDF Author: Robert J. Fitterer
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442692596
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
Since the Enlightenment, a great deal of ethical philosophy has presumed that rational human beings must set aside their emotions when seeking to make objective and sound moral decisions. Love and Objectivity in Virtue Ethics challenges this presumption, arguing that emotions such as compassion and love are powerful aids in the complex process of attaining objective moral truths in decisions and actions. Drawing on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and the work of Bernard Lonergan and Martha Nussbaum, Robert J. Fitterer tests the assumption that the inclusion of the emotions leads to bias in objective judgments or when determining moral truths. Fitterer first demonstrates how certain cognitive operations set out in Aristotelian virtue ethics can indeed arrive at objective moral truth precisely through the contribution emotions make in moral discernment. Then, drawing on Lonergan's notion of inductive insight, he argues that objectivity is the result of the properly functioning subjectivity of a moral agent. Finally, building on his study of Nussbaum's ethical writings, Fitterer concludes that compassionate love is an attitude that actually fosters the likelihood of discerning and choosing the genuine good, and encourages objectivity in moral decision-making. Richly detailed and argued, Love and Objectivity in Virtue Ethics is a convincing study that involves the works of three of the most important writers on ethics and a passionate appeal to re-examine the process through which humans genuinely make vitally important decisions.

Love and Objectivity in Virtue Ethics

Love and Objectivity in Virtue Ethics PDF Author: Robert J. Fitterer
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442692596
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 145

Get Book Here

Book Description
Since the Enlightenment, a great deal of ethical philosophy has presumed that rational human beings must set aside their emotions when seeking to make objective and sound moral decisions. Love and Objectivity in Virtue Ethics challenges this presumption, arguing that emotions such as compassion and love are powerful aids in the complex process of attaining objective moral truths in decisions and actions. Drawing on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and the work of Bernard Lonergan and Martha Nussbaum, Robert J. Fitterer tests the assumption that the inclusion of the emotions leads to bias in objective judgments or when determining moral truths. Fitterer first demonstrates how certain cognitive operations set out in Aristotelian virtue ethics can indeed arrive at objective moral truth precisely through the contribution emotions make in moral discernment. Then, drawing on Lonergan's notion of inductive insight, he argues that objectivity is the result of the properly functioning subjectivity of a moral agent. Finally, building on his study of Nussbaum's ethical writings, Fitterer concludes that compassionate love is an attitude that actually fosters the likelihood of discerning and choosing the genuine good, and encourages objectivity in moral decision-making. Richly detailed and argued, Love and Objectivity in Virtue Ethics is a convincing study that involves the works of three of the most important writers on ethics and a passionate appeal to re-examine the process through which humans genuinely make vitally important decisions.

The Supremacy of Love

The Supremacy of Love PDF Author: Eric J. Silverman
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793608849
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
Thirty-five years ago Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue established virtue ethics as a major challenger to competing visions of morality, but there is still considerable disagreement concerning which version of virtue ethics provides the best approach. The Supremacy of Love describes and advocates an agape-centered vision of Aristotelian virtue ethics that portrays love as the most important moral virtue, and the goals of love as a partial constituent of every genuine virtue. This structural improvement to Aristotelian virtue ethics—found originally in the ethics of Thomas Aquinas—enables this account to address several controversial topics in contemporary virtue ethics, including why the virtues cannot be used badly, in what sense is there a unity between the virtues, how the virtues benefit the virtuous person, and how virtues provide action guidance. Eric J. Silverman demonstrates how and why a distinctly love-centered approach to virtue ethics should make the view widely attractive in comparison to alternative accounts of virtue ethics, duty based deontological theories, as well as results-based consequentialist views.

Virtuous Liaisons

Virtuous Liaisons PDF Author: Raja Halwani
Publisher: Open Court Publishing
ISBN: 9780812695434
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Author Raja Halwani discusses how virtue ethics illuminates the three central areas of our lives -- care, love, and sex -- which are often considered to be crucial to a well-lived life. Halwani concludes that virtue ethics allows for those sexual lifestyles that are deemed by traditional morality to be wrong -- promiscuity, open relationships, and sex work -- which boldly counters the conservative viewpoint of many virtue ethicists. This argument about the relationship between romantic love and virtue also examines the works of other philosophers.

Virtue Ethics

Virtue Ethics PDF Author: Christine Swanton
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 019153112X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Christine Swanton offers a new, comprehensive theory of virtue ethics which addresses the major concerns of modern ethical theory from a character-based perspective. Discussion of many problems in moral theory, such as moral constraints, rightness of action, the good life, the demandingness of ethics, the role of the subjective, and the practicality of ethics, has been dominated by Kantian and Consequentialist theories, with their own distinctive conceptual apparatus. Virtue Ethics shows how a different framework can shed new light on these intractable issues. Swanton's approach is distinctive in that it departs in significant ways from classical versions of virtue ethics derived primarily from Aristotle. Employing insights from Nietzsche and other sources, she argues against both eudaimonistic virtue ethics and traditional virtue ethical conceptions of rightness. In developing a pluralistic view, she shows how different 'modes of moral acknowledgement' such as love, respect, appreciation, and creativity, are embedded in the very fabric of virtue, the moral life, and the good life.

Virtue, Norms, and Objectivity

Virtue, Norms, and Objectivity PDF Author: Christopher Gill
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0191555800
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
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Intellectual Virtue

Intellectual Virtue PDF Author: Michael Raymond DePaul
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0199219125
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
"Virtue ethics has attracted a lot of attention and there has been considerable interest in virtue epistemology as an alternative to traditional approaches in that field. This book fills a gap in the literature for a text that brings virtue epistemologists and virtue ethicists together."-- Back cover.

Love's Virtues

Love's Virtues PDF Author: Mike W. Martin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
This book brings together a sensitive understanding of love and an unusually careful, even painstaking, analysis of the enormous but often neglected role of morality and the virtues in love. Martin's discussions of such virtues as caring, courage, fidelity, and honesty are superb, the examples well-chosen, the argument personal but nevertheless rigorous, the prose accessible and enjoyable to read.

The Objectivist Ethics

The Objectivist Ethics PDF Author: Ayn Rand
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781258115449
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 20

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Book Description


The Bourgeois Virtues

The Bourgeois Virtues PDF Author: Deirdre Nansen
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226556670
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 637

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Book Description
For a century and a half, the artists and intellectuals of Europe have scorned the bourgeoisie. And for a millennium and a half, the philosophers and theologians of Europe have scorned the marketplace. The bourgeois life, capitalism, Mencken’s “booboisie” and David Brooks’s “bobos”—all have been, and still are, framed as being responsible for everything from financial to moral poverty, world wars, and spiritual desuetude. Countering these centuries of assumptions and unexamined thinking is Deirdre McCloskey’s The Bourgeois Virtues, a magnum opus that offers a radical view: capitalism is good for us. McCloskey’s sweeping, charming, and even humorous survey of ethical thought and economic realities—from Plato to Barbara Ehrenreich—overturns every assumption we have about being bourgeois. Can you be virtuous and bourgeois? Do markets improve ethics? Has capitalism made us better as well as richer? Yes, yes, and yes, argues McCloskey, who takes on centuries of capitalism’s critics with her erudition and sheer scope of knowledge. Applying a new tradition of “virtue ethics” to our lives in modern economies, she affirms American capitalism without ignoring its faults and celebrates the bourgeois lives we actually live, without supposing that they must be lives without ethical foundations. High Noon, Kant, Bill Murray, the modern novel, van Gogh, and of course economics and the economy all come into play in a book that can only be described as a monumental project and a life’s work. The Bourgeois Virtues is nothing less than a dazzling reinterpretation of Western intellectual history, a dead-serious reply to the critics of capitalism—and a surprising page-turner.

The Virtue Ethics of Hume and Nietzsche

The Virtue Ethics of Hume and Nietzsche PDF Author: Christine Swanton
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118939395
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
This ground-breaking and lucid contribution to the vibrant field of virtue ethics focuses on the influential work of Hume and Nietzsche, providing fresh perspectives on their philosophies and a compelling account of their impact on the development of virtue ethics. A ground-breaking text that moves the field of virtue ethics beyond ancient moral theorists and examines the highly influential ethical work of Hume and Nietzsche from a virtue ethics perspective Contributes both to virtue ethics and a refreshed understanding of Hume’s and Nietzsche’s ethics Skilfully bridges the gap between continental and analytical philosophy Lucidly written and clearly organized, allowing students to focus on either Hume or Nietzsche Written by one of the most important figures contributing to virtue ethics today