In recent years, Confucian philosophers have vigorously explored the ideal of human dignity by reinterpreting key classical Confucian texts, giving rise to two contending accounts of human dignity: egalitarian dignity versus meritocratic dignity. Meritocratic dignity understands human dignity as an achievement, the outcome of a long process of moral self-cultivation, while egalitarian dignity, inspired by Mencius who believes that human nature is good, disagrees with the strong virtue-ethical account of human dignity and shift attention to universal moral potentiality. After showing that each Confucian account underpins a distinctive political system – Confucian constitutional democracy and Confucian political meritocracy, respectively – this chapter attempts to reinforce the egalitarian account of Confucian dignity from the standpoint of Xunzian Confucianism predicated on the assumption that human nature is bad. The chapter argues that, whereas meritocratc dignity is limited in justifying the independent judiciary and protecting citizens’ rights, egalitarian dignity can coherently undergird the principle of the separation of power and the right to political participation.

The intellectual historian John Pocock once observed that with the rise of commercialization, the status of citizens was no longer seen as a function of their actions and their virtues but came to be constructed in juridical terms, in terms of rights and of ownership of things. He posits an opposition between virtue (part of a political way of life) and rights (part of a commercial way of life) that was eventually bridged with the help of the social notion of manners – and this might help explain why we associate the virtue of prudence with a certain kind of prudishness.

An additional role the virtues can play involves helping to evaluate (and thereby possibly even guide) conduct. It is here in particular that responsibility or accountability mechanisms often come up short or can at least be said to be naturally limited. Typically, such mechanisms focus on single instances of conduct, divorced from what preceded or inspired them, or then conduct might be such that it can hardly be caught by rules. Some have pleaded strongly for “intelligent accountability,” but the combination of having rules and organs or agents to apply and enforce them as they relate to particular facts makes such an idea well-nigh impossible. In the typical accountability scheme, the act under review usually gets simplified and stylized. This has heuristic benefits in that it simplifies what actually goes on, but these benefits may come at the cost of proper understanding.

As the preceding chapters have suggested, there might be merit in paying some attention to the virtues when discussing global governance, both in the abstract and in highly concrete manifestations. Those merits can come in various forms and guises, and can probably be grouped neatly together under three headings. First, the virtues can have some explanatory force: they can help us to understand things we would otherwise be unable to grasp. They can help us understand why Finland’s wartime president Risto Ryti made his “personal” deal with Nazi Germany, or why Sergio Vieira de Mello decided to persuade Cambodian refugees to return to their country of origin.

While virtue ethics is distinguished from deontology and consequentialism by its focus on the actor and their character rather than specific acts, it can nonetheless be illuminating to analyze particular acts through a virtue ethics prism. Such an analysis may be helpful in coming to understand why, in a specific situation, the actor came to their act. The point here is not so much to appraise the act and assess whether it was good or bad but rather whether the act can be made understandable – and perhaps justifiable – in light of the circumstances of the case and the agent’s character. Put differently, and perhaps more accurately, the idea underlying what follows is that their conduct tells us something about the individual concerned and simultaneously suggests how difficult situations can be approached – atypical though they may be. Much conduct is hemmed in by the context in which it takes place, and thus there is little point in copying other people’s conduct. But it may be possible to draw broader lessons from looking at specific situations and how people responded.

The virtues may not only be inspiring or exemplarist in the way discussed in the previous chapter but may also help define or circumscribe what can be expected from persons in particular positions. If it is true that being an accountant entails different things from being a doctor, it may (or must) be possible to provide at least a rough description of the position in terms of the virtues. And this, in turn, can be achieved by looking at various occupants of a position and distilling what is worthy of emulation and what is best not repeated. This is a difficult task in that circumstances are rarely the same – a positive and definitive job description, valid for all times and situations, will not be possible. But what might be possible is to provide a rough description – things to pay attention to when appointing individuals and monitoring their performance.

As highlighted earlier, whenever things go wrong, the immediate and inevitable response is to call for better rules, new rules, different rules, new institutions, or better institutions to apply the rules that already exist – or a combination of the above. This is curious, as usually there are some rules in place, and often enough, those rules were considered perfectly fine before things went wrong. Moreover, there is not always a lack of institutions to apply them either, whether on the international or domestic level. Still, time and again, rules are manipulated, ignored, stretched, departed from, bent, or reinterpreted. Even relatively clear and settled rules can suffer this fate, let alone rules that are less clear. It is the general argument of this book that a focus on virtue ethics may well come to be of assistance.

Throughout his political works, Plato takes the aim of politics to be the virtue and happiness of the citizens and the unity of the city. This paper examines the roles played by law in promoting individual virtue and civic unity in the Republic, Statesman, and Laws. Section 1 argues that in the Republic, laws regulate important institutions, such as education, property, and family, and thereby creating a way of life that conduces to virtue and unity. Section 2 argues that in the Statesman, the political expert determines the mean between extremes and communicates it to citizens through laws that guide their judgment and conduct, so that they become virtuous themselves and the city is unified; this account of the role of law suggest how even non-expert legislation can contribute to virtue and unity. Section 3 argues that the Laws affirms and develops the idea that citizens should know and accept the laws to become virtuous themselves and to unify the city, and explains how the persuasive preludes and the sanction for violation attached to laws contribute to citizen virtue and civic unity.

In the Hippias Minor, Socrates argues that the expert in a given domain is the one in a position to voluntarily violate the rules of that domain. For example, the expert archer can ensure that her arrows miss the target, whereas the novice archer might accidentally hit the target she’s trying to miss. Socrates claims, shockingly, that this point holds for justice as well: it is the expert in justice who will have the power to deliberately act unjustly. Though some accuse Socrates of drawing this conclusion on the basis of uncritical reliance on the craft analogy, I argue that in fact Socrates is identifying common ground between a variety of forms of practical normativity. In any activity that can be assessable as going well or badly, those who intentionally flout the norm, by erring on purpose, are better at it than those who unintentially flub the norm, by erring accidentally. Socrates’ argument places powerrather than the exercise of powerat the heart of ethics. The Hippias Minor shows why Socratic ethics is an ethics of virtue, rather than an ethics of virtue activation.

Neil Sinhababu is interested in showing the significance of TSZ for today’s philosophical work in moral psychology. According to Sinhababu, this book is the only place where we can find Nietzsche’s most compelling critique of the rationalist idea that reason is independent of the passions and constitutes a person’s true self as well as the ground of his virtue. Through a close examination of two chapters from the start of TSZ, Sinhababu shows how Nietzsche defends the Humean claim (as perhaps absorbed from his reading of Schopenhauer) that the bodily passions use reason as their tool and constitute a person’s self and virtues. He also shows how Nietzsche anticipates and rebuts the recently influential counter-arguments of Christine Korsgaard and John McDowell. In Sinhababu’s analysis, Nietzsche would have rejected Korsgaard’s unified agent requirement and would have argued that the phenomenology of bodily passions is sufficient to explain McDowell’s idea of perceptual saliences.

Comedies rely on the union of opposites – whether those opposites might be literally characters of two different races or oppositional ideas about the fate of the young nation. Comedy often rests on juxtapositions in which incongruity creates a sense of the absurd. However, with the distance of time, the humor becomes harder to read. It may be because the comedy now appears offensive to contemporary audiences in the ways it approaches material related to identity – whether it be race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religion. This chapter explores a combination of American-authored comedies and popular British works that continued to circulate in the American repertoire throughout the early national period. It also touches on some forms of comedy – particularly circus and pantomime performance – that audiences imagined as more “democratic” and accessible.

Chapter abstract (Philosophical Foundations for the Study of Wisdom): A person with practical wisdom reliably grasps how to live and conduct themselves. But what is practical wisdom, how can we get it, and how can we study it? This chapter will introduce some prominent philosophical arguments and answers to these questions. After distinguishing practical wisdom from other types of wisdom, the chapter explains why studying wisdom requires combining both philosophy and empirical science. To illustrate the contribution of philosophy, the chapter motivates a core philosophical conception of wisdom and invites the reader to think through some philosophical puzzles it gives rise to.

Does Plato in the Republic restrict to philosophers alone the possibility of achieving happiness in this life and the next? It is often thought so. But if that were the case, the dialogue would fail on its own terms, in its task of persuading the interlocutors Glaucon and Adeimantus that they should cultivate justice, not (as Thrasymachus argues) injustice. They are not philosophers, nor envisaged as likely to achieve the level of rational understanding that is the precondition of happiness. In truth, however, there is plentiful, if scattered, evidence that an approximation to perfect happiness is available for various categories of people figuring in the Republic who have not attained what the dialogue counts as knowledge, ranging from Socrates himself, to trainee philosophers and warriors, to farmers and craftsmen. The requirement to be satisfied is the habit of respect for the law, not from fear of its punitive powers, but internalised as the way to lead a life of justice.

This chapter argues that in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions (c. 1770s–1790s) republican conceptions of liberty were put into service of both antislavery and proslavery discourses. Focusing on the American, Dutch, French, and Haitian revolutions, it distinguish three lines of republican reasoning that informed arguments against slavery: the 'extension' of political freedom to enslaved people; the idea that the institution of slavery leads to corruption; and third, the notion of republican liberty as a reward for military courage and sacrifice. It then identifies three ways in which republican conceptions of liberty were widely reconciled with the existence of chattel slavery: only a certain delineated group in society could responsibly enjoy republican liberty; enslaved people were a form of property and therefore not part of a society of free citizens; and finally, the idea that enslaved people who did not resist their slavery, basically acquiesced in their unfree status and were unworthy of republican liberty. Eighteenth-century republican arguments about liberty did not necessarily contradict chattel slavery, but could also form part of the legitimization of slavery. The chapter, then, demonstrates not so much the limits but the versatile employability of the republican discourse of liberty.

This chapter examines Milton’s discourses of liberty, slavery, and hierarchy in order to test Quentin Skinner’s claim that the theory of neo-Roman liberty is positively and intrinsically connected with equality. Neo-Roman liberty was an important element in Milton’s political arguments, as was the terminology of slavery which was used to encapsulate the absence of that freedom from domination. However, neo-Roman liberty for Milton is less aptly defined as freedom from the will of another than as freedom from arbitrary domination. Milton’s commitment to the existence of rightful hierarchies, and to the Aristotelian principle that the superior should rule the inferior, meant that many (whether wives, servants, actual slaves, or inferior or wicked citizens) could not appeal to the principle of neo-Roman liberty to free them from subjection to another, as that subjection was rightful rather than arbitrary. Milton’s emphasis on free will and virtue meant that expected hierarchies might be disrupted by exceptional virtue or vice, but these exceptions caused a certain dissonance in Milton’s texts, and his use of the language of slavery and subjection was not entirely consistent.