PHILOS 2YY3 Lecture 5: PHILOS 2YY3 - March 15 2018
16 May 2018
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PHILOS 2YY3 – Mar 15 2018
Core Virtues
A List of Virtues?
• Given the historically incompatible differences regarding the nature and content
of virtue, “is there any shared concept at all?” (325)
• MacIntyre: the differences are of historical interest; there is a conceptual unity → there
is a complex concept of virtue that gives us a unitary core
o Some core conception of virtue and it will involve some notion of humanity
o We should be willing to adopt it if you follow the point of human practice and
virtues attended with human practice
• One of the common threads running through the diverse accounts is that the exercise of
virtue “always requires for its application the acceptance of some prior account of
certain features of social and moral life in terms of which it has to be defined and
explained” (327)
o There is some sort of common feature to all these virtues, that’s embedded in
contexts of human practices
o Moral categories, equipped with all and every type of value system
o Meaning: virtue is always an embedded, context & situation-dependent practice
o These exist in these contexts and are situation depended
o Saw this in Aristotle: dealing with ethics – it’s a form of knowledge that involves
practical wisdom
▪ Doesn’t involve mathematical certainty, but dealing with concrete
certainty
o Situations are sticky, and complicated and don’t admit of an easy answer
o Situations will present themselves, if you haven’t habituated yourself correctly,
you won’t be able to perform properly because you didn’t judge it properly
Praxis & Virtue
• MacIntyre: by ‘practice’ I am going to mean 1) any coherent and complex form of
socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that
form of activity are realised 2) in the course of trying to achieve those standards of
excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, 3)
with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the
ends and goods involved, are systematically extended (328-9)
o If virtues are embedded in these contexts and contexts are always characterized
by cooperative activities which is what we call practices → there is something
called a human practice as such, whereas all these other practices are subsets
o Because they define the terms of relations, the rules of engagement, and
determine the ends by which we measure excellence, practices are the
foundational context within which virtues are cultivated
▪ Trying to get the notion of practice
▪ Aristotle: arguing from analogy – same way a good ship builder produces
ships that are sea-worthy; what is proper to the crowd?
• They have to know what parts go together, and what it is for craft
to be sea worthy
▪ Whole practice of ship building involves those things, and if we want to
say that you don’t just do ship building on your own, its cooperative, and
is a historical activity, culture and tradition of practice
▪ Distinctively, goods have to be eternal to practice
External & Internal Goods
• External goods exist outside of any given practice and merely provide an incentive for
engaging in whatever activity is necessary to achieve them
o Obtained from outside of activity – only doing this in order to get something else
▪ Teaching child to play chess, but they don’t want to, so you incentivize (if
you play chess, then you get candy)
▪ If you are in university, in order to gain gainful employment, it is external
to this enterprise
▪ Establish incentives to do something, but not obtaining any goods from
the practice itself or activities of the practice
o We may only obtain possession of external goods; this possession is spatially
and temporally limited, and contingent upon performing an action whose mere
consequence is the acquisition of that good (e.g. getting paid)
▪ Spatially and temporally limited in this way
▪ Acting for the sake of obtaining money – it is limited, only obtain finite
amount and obtain it for limited duration
▪ Acting only to get paid – would not be very smart (other ways to get
paid), and this whole enterprise would be a means to an end, no pleasure
derived from it, only engaging in activity for the sake of the pay cheque at
the end
▪ Consequence of having to perform some action, then you acquire that
good that is outside of that action
• Internal goods exist within the communal and historical practice defining them and are
sought after for their own sake
o Chess player is no longer required incentive of candy, they enjoy the activities of
practice
o Obtain all of their enjoyment from performing those actions well
o Learning new strategies for the game, getting a win but doing it in a way that
warrants it – so you can employ your skill
o We realize internal goods by participating in the same practices that involve
them; in pursuing internal goods, we cultivate “the good of a certain kind of life”
(e.g. mastering a craft)
▪ Aristotle: we become so by doing so
• Those things that we are going to need to cultivate in order to be
virtuous are going to be the same virtuous activities
Document Summary
You can either pursue the internal goods or external goods. Standards of excellence: by engaging in practices, we seek to cultivate internal goods not subjectively defined, but defined by the community constituted by the practice. Insight into what virtue might be in terms of practice: virtue: the quality of performing an act well that achieves the internal goods proper to a practice. If it"s not a practice, then these core virtues will not be there. Practices, institutions & integrity: practices devoid of the core virtues will lose integrity and devolve into institutions that merely cultivate technical skills masquerading as virtues for the sake of obtaining external good (330, 332) Individualism: antithetical to virtue: you are an isolated individual, you have rights and liberties so long as someone doesn"t bump into you and infringe those rights this is just the bare minimum, doesn"t say anything about cooperation. It undermines any sense of human excellence or integrative function.
