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From Head‐trip to the Virtues
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Extract
The modern tradition in ethics has been under attack since the publication of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue.’ One of the more fascinating aspects of all this is that the demise of virtue ethics, in the sense discussed by Professor MacIntyre, had relegated ethics to a peripheral question discussed by Aristotle in Book VII of the Nicomachean Ethics.
It is there that Aristotle considers what most translators have rendered as “continence” and “incontinence”, enkrateia and akrasia, although one can also describe the enkratic man as disciplined. Mostly applied to question of temperance, enkrateia involves imposing the judgement of reason on unruly passions. Aristotle notes “we must now discuss incontinence and softness (or effeminacy) and continence and endurance; for we must treat each of the two neither as identical with virtue or wickedness, nor as a different genus.” (Bk. VII, Ch. 1: 1145a35). If we are tempted, as people used to say, to do something foolish or wicked, but realize that it is foolish or wicked and overcome the impulse by the imposition of reason, we are enkratic. Reason has prevailed. Yet this is not, according to Aristotle, a question of virtue. It is something less.
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- Copyright © 2003 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Notre Dame, Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press, 1982.
2 Ibid., p. 140.
3 Ibid., p. 217)
4 In certain circles, the authority of the Church (or churches) was replaced by the authority of university professors. It did not thereby become less authoritarian.
5 See my “Natural law and ethics: some second thoughts” in New Blackfriars, vol. 77 (September 1996, 381-389).
6 Hannah, Arendt, Men in Dark Times, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968, p. 27Google Scholar.
7 Aristotle, Ethics, translated by J.A.K. Thomson, Harmondsworth, Penguin Classics, 1955, p. 1994
8 “neglecting the degree of abstraction involved when an actual entity is considered merely so far as it exemplifies certain categories of thought” (Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, New York, 1929, p. 11)
9 Karl, Rahner, The Dynamic Element in the Church, Freiburg, Herder/Montreal, Palm Publishers, 1964, p. 110Google Scholar.
10 Loc. cit.
11 Hannah Arendt, op,. cit.
12 Cfr. In a Different Voice, Cambridge/London, Harvard University Press, 1982, passim.
13 Gerald, Vann, O.P. “Moral Dilemmas. I. The Muddled Marriage” in Blackfriars vol. 35 (1954, pp. 374-380)Google Scholar.
14 Cfr. Summa theologiae, 2a2ae, qu. 62, art. 5, ad 2.
15 Vann, art. cit., p. 375-376.
16 Cfr. for example FOR Witness, May 2002, on military action in Jenin: “...bulldozers had deliberately been used to break the surface of the asphalt of streets and rupture sewer and water pipes below. Our delegation members were clear that such destruction went beyond incidental damage in a hunt for terrorists, and into the area of collective punishment for what are believed to be the criminal acts of some within it.” (West Nyack, New York, p. 1–2).
17 MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 216. For a thorough discussion of Hume on the question of justice see MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, 1988), pp. 300–325. Rawls holds a similar position (See After Virtue, p. 216.)