Abstract
Following the path opened by ethics that place morality in the outside, some contemporary approaches to virtue clearly leave aside its definition in terms of habit or second nature. If separated from human nature, virtue’s consideration must be treated from an external point of view. Then, attention is placed on the effects of virtue rather than in virtue itself. This approach followed by many authors today has little to do with classical thinking and with what other philosophers like Iris Murdoch think. The purpose of this work is to set out the need to define virtue essentially in terms of ordering inner life. Outer life cannot be more than the reflection of an order or its absence in the inner life. Virtue will be posed within the perspective of a first-person ethics. Started point for a virtuous character is the moral agent’s interest in ordering of his/her inner life.
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Notes
- 1.
Murdoch (1980).
- 2.
Of course, this does not include contemporary authors who define virtue based on its ontological and teleological relationship.
- 3.
On “externalist” and “internalist” viewpoints, vid. Louden (1984).
- 4.
I will focus on the definitions of virtue offered by those authors.
- 5.
Swanton (2003, p. 19).
- 6.
Zagzebski (1996, p. 137).
- 7.
Driver (1996, p. 122).
- 8.
What happens inside the agent is not only related to the emotional component.
- 9.
In Brandt (1981, p. 272). Brandt interprets the term “basic” in the sense that the morality of actions can be deduced from character traits, but not vice versa.
- 10.
This distinction is based on ethics of first person and ethics of third person developed by Abbà (1989) Felicità, vita buona e virtù. Roma, Las-Roma.
- 11.
Approaching the concept of virtue as an “autonomous project” is not possible given its essential dependence on concepts like, for example, perfection. (Hittinger 1989, p. 454).
- 12.
«[c]oncepts such as nature, which seem to combine reports of fact with judgements of value, have worried moral philosophers». (Midgley 2002, p. 167).
- 13.
Pol, IV, 14,1333a 16–18.
- 14.
The disposition consists in imposing order on a whole made up of possibilities: «(…) a person’s moral character is also the result of a disposition.» (Simon 1986, p. 84).
- 15.
«That unity «(…) is not something given. It is a continuing lifelong project, an effort constantly undertaken in the face of endless disintegrating forces.» (Midgley 1996, p. 23).
- 16.
I take the expression ‘second nature’ in the sense in which it is found in Thomas Aquinas, S. Th. I–II, q. 58, a. 4.
- 17.
What is defended here is not the Murdochian definition of virtue, but the conditions or perspectives from which the author proposes the definition.
- 18.
(Dooley 2003, p. 71).
- 19.
See (Meilaender 1984).
- 20.
In the classical sense of the term, not the contemporary one. See Simon (1986) Chap. 3.
- 21.
«(…) in Shakespeare no less than in Aristotle, there is continuity between the laws of nature and the laws of morality (…)» (Simon 1986, p. 75).
- 22.
«[c]oncepts such as nature, which seem to combine reports of fact with judgements of value, have worried moral philosophers.» (Midgley 2002, p. 167).
- 23.
S. Th., I–II, q. 55, a. 4.
- 24.
(Vorobej 1984, pp. 535–541).
- 25.
(Midgley 1983, p. 89).
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Alvarez, M.M. (2019). Virtue as the Order of Inner Life. In: Grimi, E. (eds) Virtue Ethics: Retrospect and Prospect. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15860-6_2
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