Aristotle and Kant on Virtue
Public Deposited- Last Modified
- February 26, 2019
- Creator
-
Pulling, Keith
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Philosophy
- Abstract
- In what follows I provide an account of virtue as both Kant and Aristotle conceived it. Because I will argue that virtue, for both Kant and Aristotle, must be understood as part of a larger theoretical account, it will be necessary to provide a certain amount of relevant background. In reconstructing Kantian and Aristotelian virtue, we will find that the differences in the two accounts are due, not to different takes on shared and common intuitions, but rather to deep disagreements over the nature of reason, conceptions of personal identity, and, importantly, the nature and role of morality. Most of what follows is, then, a historical enterprise. However, along the way, and near the end in particular, I will suggest several reasons why Aristotle’s account is more satisfying. Like the rest of the paper, these reasons are not meant to appeal to intuitions concerning a single moral act, but rather to fundamental issues of what it is to live well as a human being. To preview, I will start by outlining the Kantian moral project in general, and will then proceed to a treatment of Kantian virtue. Following that, I will do the same for Aristotle. In the final section, I offer two concluding comments. The first, on what I will call “self-reflective endorsement,” is a response to the possible objection that, given Aristotle’s account of habituation and moral formation, virtue is too easy, that it requires very little work on the part on the agent herself. After dealing with that objection, I conclude with a reflection on the proper response of an agent who, as a result of good upbringing and self-reflective endorsement, has attained a virtuous character. That response, in my eyes, is gratitude. Although this is the formal outline of the paper, much of the interesting works get done on what may seem to be tangential comments on the nature of reason and morality. This is not, however, an accident. Though a study of Kantian and Aristotelian virtue is worthy in its own right, it is not essential. What is up for grabs is much more than differing conceptions of virtue; what is at stake, rather, are competing notions of reason and morality, and hence what it means to be human.
- Date of publication
- spring 2014
- Keyword
- DOI
- Resource type
- Rights statement
- In Copyright
- Note
- Funding: None
- Advisor
- Hill, Thomas E.
- Degree
- Bachelor of Arts
- Honors level
- Honors
- Degree granting institution
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- Extent
- 33 p.
Relations
- Parents:
This work has no parents.