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Honour, Community, and Ethical Inwardness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Christopher Cordner
Christopher Cordner
Affiliation:
University of Melbourne
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Extract

Daniel Putman thinks I am right to hold that for Aristotle a concern to appear before one's peers in a certain way is internal to virtue. He takes me to suppose that things are otherwise under a ‘modern concept of virtue’, and says that I am wrong about this. Putman rightly distinguishes between a desire to look good before one's peers which is a substitute for virtue, and a desire to look good to them because, acting virtuously, ‘we genuinely deserve to be viewed that way’. (He acknowledges that I recognize such a distinction in Aristotle.) Once this distinction is made, Putman thinks, we can appreciate that modern ethical understanding is as much dependent on ‘the communitarian foundation of character’ as is Aristotelian virtue. The only thing, says Putman, which gulls us into thinking otherwise is the sociological fact that Aristotle's political community was homogenous, while ours is heterogenous, so that more often virtuous people today will have to act in a way which goes against what many around them think.

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Type
Articles
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Philosophy , Volume 72 , Issue 281 , July 1997, pp. 401 - 415
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1997

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References

1 ‘In Defence of Aristotelian Honour’, Philosophy 70, No. 272 (04 1995), 286–288.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The paper of mine to which Putman is responding is ‘Aristotelian Virtue and Its Limitations’, Philosophy 69, No. 269 (07 1994), 291–316. While I disagree with it, Putman's response is substantial and clear, and belongs to a long and powerful philosophical tradition. I thank him for pressing me further in response to him.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Op. cit., 286.

3 Op. cit., 288.

4 Op. cit., 287.

5 Op. cit., 288.

6 Op. cit., 287.

7 Op. cit., 288.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

10 I discuss the Gorgias in these terms at greater length in the Introduction to my forthcoming book Becoming Good. The book also elaborates on the wider themes of the present article.Google Scholar

11 Op. cit., 287.

12 Op. cit., 288.

13 Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception (London: Macmillan, 1991), 54. I am indebted to Gaita's book not only in my remarks about remorse, but for illumination on the central themes of this paper.Google Scholar

14 Op. cit.,48.

15 Op. cit., 61.

16 Op. cit., 56.

17 Op. cit., 60.

18 Op. cit., 59.

19 In the following discussion I owe a debt to Gloria Prentice.

20 Gaita does note that “(i)t is sometimes said that we are always alone in our grief and when we die” (47), but he does not reflect or elaborate on what “truth” there may be in this thought.

21 Op. cit., 51.

22 Op. cit., 48.

23 Compare Paul, Hamilton, Wordsworth (Harvester, 1986), 22–23: ‘Imaginative generosity in the conception of a person involves, for Wordsworth, a sympathy which exceeds the power to help them.’Google Scholar

24 For more on this point, see my Becoming Good, Chapter Two.Google Scholar

25 Putman op. cit., 287.