Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-68ccn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-13T02:22:28.153Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Vices and the Self

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2010

Gabriele Taylor
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

I am interested in those vices which appear on lists of ‘deadly sins’, not from any theological point of view but because of the insight revealed in their selection as being ‘death to the soul’, which I understand as ‘corruptive of the self’. ‘Corruption’ is here to be taken in a literal sense as ‘destruction or dissolution of the constitution of a thing which makes that thing what it is’ (OED). Such corruption is to be found in the structure of the will. Aquinas thought that vice consists in desire gone wrong because uncontrolled by reason. Perhaps what follows can be seen as an interpretation and filling out of this view.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 37 , March 1994 , pp. 145 - 157
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1994

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 In ‘The Attachment of the Mind to Wealth (Greed and Avarice)’, Lectures on Ethics, tr. Louis Infield, Methuen & Co Ltd. 1979. The suggested fallacy consists in the move from the thought that her wealth could be used to fulfil this or that desire, to the thought that it could fulfil all of them. Thinking of the potential use of the money conjunctively rather than disjunctively she imagines it can buy whatever she wants.

2 I discuss this and other features of envy in Taylor, 1988.

3 E.g. Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics Book IV 1123a–1124a23. In section of Book II Part I of A Treatise of Human Nature Hume (1978, p. 297) that it is ‘evident’ that pride is not always vicious. Both he and Aristotle are careful to distinguish ‘justifiable’ or ‘non-excessive’ pride from less acceptable manifestations. See also John Casey, 1990, ch. 1, section VI.

4 For a discussion of the ambiguities of ‘self-feeding’ see Stanley Cavell's (1988) essay on Coriolanus.