For being the reputed “father of capitalism,” Adam Smith had many criticisms of commercial society. Smith’s concerns were so numerous, in fact, that some commentators argue that Smith is properly considered as on the political left rather than on the political right. Given the seemingly unending stories of business malfeasance and corruption, many today wonder whether there can even be such a thing as what we might call “virtuous business.” Despite his concerns about business, perhaps there might nevertheless be something relevant to contemporary concerns in Adam Smith. Smith recommends political-economic institutions that can provide a framework enabling us to address what a just and humane society is, as well as the role virtuous business might play in it. This chapter investigates how the Smithian system might plausibly provide such a framework and suggests that it can offer guidance today for what we might call “virtuous business.”

Machiavellis last successor is Montesquieu, whose great work The Spirit of the Laws is analyzed and its secret design exposed for the first time.

In this chapter, we look at Mesoamerican views on human activity and life. How did precolonial Mesoamerican philosophers think about proper or right action, in the case of the individual and the wider community? This includes issues such as the role of the state, the ruler, and the individual’s duties toward each. The chapter focuses on key ethical concepts and views in Mesoamerican traditions, such as those concerning humility, sacrifice, and the situational and temporary nature of goodness.

Thomas Hoccleve has long been identified both as an autobiographical poet and as a poet who hoped that his writings would speak on his behalf to prospective readers and patrons. This chapter builds upon these insights by suggesting that Hoccleve felt certain literary materials could exercise a quasi-religious or even quasi-legal force, or “vertu,” in the social world. I argue that Hoccleve’s faith in this idea was motivated by his familiarity with two other late-medieval discourses in which certain words were believed to possess a direct and unmediated kind of power: the language of Lancastrian bureaucracy, which Hoccleve knew firsthand from his work at the Privy Seal, and the language of the church, and in particular sacramental language. I suggest that, in the Series, Hoccleve attempts to write a kind of poetry that will exercise an analogous kind of “vertu” upon his audience. By composing a book that will speak directly to the “prees” on his behalf, he hopes to circumvent the skepticism with which his own words have been received by his readers and patrons in the wake of his “wilde infirmitee”—even if he doubts that, in the end, the Series will do exactly what he wishes.

Cicero’s De Officiis is the only surviving extended Stoic-style treatment of practical deliberation, offering guidance on what counts as well-judged decision-making. This chapter explores two questions raised by this feature of the work: (1) what is the general form of Stoic thinking on valid practical deliberation? (2) how far does Cicero’s De Officiis reflect the Stoic view of deliberation? On the first question, after considering recent scholarly discussions which stress the importance for Stoic deliberation of gaining advantages (‘preferable indifferents’), the chapter highlights the relevance for Stoic thought of a modern virtue ethical treatment of deliberation, which stresses the criterial role of virtue. On the second question, the chapter brings out how the structure and argumentation of De Officiis reflect the Stoic conception of deliberation, as presented here (that is, as centred on virtue).

Book 2 of De Officiis is devoted to an exploration of the utile, what is beneficial or advantageous for humans in pursuing desirable objectives, and the resources needed to achieve them. As Section 1 discusses, it focuses on the human resource that someone intent on a successful political career will best harness, and on outlining the methods for attaining it. That outline then provides Cicero with a basis for the main body of the book, which has two main parts, the first expounding the methods he endorses for achieving glory, with an accent on the need for justice in pursuing it, the second examining liberality, and good and bad ways of exercising it. Section 2 turns to the detail of his analysis of the complexities of liberality and its vocabulary. Section 3 asks whether glory is the main pay-off he sees as the fruit of liberality, and argues that gratitude is of no less importance. A brief conclusion notes that the cohesion of the res publica emerges as the primary object of appropriate human concern, and comments on Cicero’s view that in its safeguarding lies simultaneously our main advantage and the ultimate focus of the social virtues of justice and beneficence.

Ethics has tended to concentrate on (1) what we should do, (2) virtues of character, or (3) the importance of motivation in appraising actions. All three are ethically important. But there is a dimension of moral responsibility that should have a place beside obligations to act, virtues of character, and appraisals of actions in relation to their motivation. It is the manner of actions. This can be right or wrong, an object of intention, and behavior for a reason. Interpersonal relations are not a behavioral grid with fixed points representing only act-types. This chapter explores manners of action. The result is a wider conception of acting rightly than the common understanding on which (despite the adverb) it is simply doing the right thing; a partial account of how acting rightly figures in the content of intention; and a sketch of the moral dimensions of the manners in which we act.

In this chapter, I suggest that sexual ethics as it is present in much sex education fails to address some common and formative aspects of many people’s sexual lives. I argue that the foundation of sexual ethics, as part of the ethical life more broadly, is best captured by the metaphor of vision. Any sexual ethics that treats isolated moments of sexual action as the focus of what it means to be sexually moral is insufficient because it ignores the influence that the way people see the world can have on their sexuality (and vice versa). Moral vision is shaped by character, and the way people engage their sexuality is a formative arena for character. So, sex education must address issues of character, and, conversely, attempts at character education must address the power sexuality possesses in the formation of persons.

In this chapter, I outline Aristotle’s theory of moral education and the central role friendships can play in the cultivation of virtue in students. I pay special attention to what are referred to as friendships of virtue, or perfect friendships, or character friendships. I examine the necessary connection Aristotle sees between virtue and a flourishing life, as well as how Aristotle believes virtue is developed in human beings. Then, I discuss the way friendships can contribute to the virtue-formation process. Finally, after examining Aristotle’s theory of friendship I discuss the implications of his theory for contemporary educational settings, and I make a case for how educators might encourage moral growth in their students by helping them develop the right kinds of friends.

In this chapter, I offer some of the reasons to think that Plato has a substantial contribution to make to contemporary thinking about moral education. To allow a sense of how wide the range of reasons is, I start by listing ten miscellaneous reasons that one can compellingly offer, some of which scholars have offered. Then I present my preferred reason, which involves a way of approaching Plato that is new and unorthodox. When you approach Plato this way, you don’t try to interpret him correctly. Instead, you use his writings simply as a tool for theorizing, and what you theorize about is how best to carry out the Socratic project of leading other people to self-examination.

Virtue ethics has been a key concern of some important modern thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum, and Alasdair MacIntyre. Anthropologists have disagreed strongly over whether the categories developed by such writers are useful or a source of ethnocentric distortion when applied to ethnographic and comparative work. This chapter argues for a middle course. Virtue seems to be a universal concern, but in order to understand it cross-culturally it will be necessary to develop a ‘virtue ethics as such’: an understanding that transcends the culture-bound assumptions of modern virtue ethicists. At the same time, those thinkers were concerned to escape from certain limited ways of thinking about ethics that have also stunted anthropological work on morality, so they may provide a uniquely useful starting point for our investigations. Having set this challenge, the chapter goes on to provide some preliminary thoughts on how an anthropology of virtue ethics as such could be pursued, considering concepts such as ‘exemplarity’ and ‘the fragility of the good’ from a comparative point of view, drawing on Confucian, Buddhist, and other traditions.

The Stoics break with Plato and Aristotle, who envisaged the value that makes a life worth living as a degree or part of the value that makes a life happy. Instead, they establish two separate axiological scales, one that determines whether a life is happy, and another one that determines whether it is worth living. The former contains virtue and vice, or what is good and bad, whereas the latter is defined by the so-called preferred and dispreferred indifferents, such as health, wealth or renown. This allows for the possibility that a virtuous and happy person sometimes ought to depart from life, when they do not have a prospect of a life worth living, while a vicious and unhappy person ought to stay alive, when they have such a prospect. This decoupling of the happy life from the worthwhile life is consistent with the Stoic view that life itself is a preferred indifferent, and hence the deliberations about staying alive should be referred to other preferred indifferents rather than to virtue and vice.

In contrast to Plato, Aristotle allowed and argued for the possibility that all human lives have some non-instrumental value. This valuation of life is premised on his teleological conception of nature: insofar as all human lives are natural ends of some sort, they are thus a good. However, this non-instrumental value of mere living is in itself not sufficient to make a life worth living. As in Plato, whether a life is lived well or badly is the decisive factor, and again the state of virtue or vice is the most important consideration. Vice makes a life worse than death, regardless of the other good things in it, but fully fledged virtue is not necessary for a life worth living. In contrast to those who are fully virtuous, other non-vicious humans may need other goods, or at least freedom from other bads, such as serious illness or grave misfortunes, to pass the threshold of a life worth living. In contrast to Plato, Aristotle is less optimistic about the chances of the non-educated elite having a life worth living, though he does not flatly deny that possibility.

This chapter addresses the relationship between divinity, cosmology, morality and religion in the Timaeus and the Laws. It argues that the ideal of godlikeness becomes both the main ethical and the central religious principle in these dialogues. In particular, Plato finds in religion the institutional environment for achieving moral improvement as much as leading a good civic life, provided that the ordinary citizens will imitate the character traits of the traditional gods. However, the highest level of moral achievement lies in the assimilation to the cosmic gods via cosmological understanding, which can be achieved by the intellectual elite. Thus, this ideal has two sets of assimilative objects, two ways of imitating the gods, and it appeals to two different groups of people.

This chapter investigates Thucydides’ views about morality and justice and the role that these concepts play in his work. It argues that Thucydides’ own ideas about justice were conventional, but that his understanding of the role of justice in shaping human affairs was more novel. The chapter explores the methodological problem of reconstructing Thucydides’ views about justice and morality, given that most statements on these themes are made by characters rather than the author. It then analyses the text’s representation of key ideas about justice, morality and other virtues; it explores how these are manifested in Thucydides’ characterization of individuals in the work; and it surveys the differences between Thucydides’ representation of Spartan and Athenian approaches to justice and morality.

Chapter 5 locates Montesquieu in an intellectual context he fashioned through his own choice of interlocutors in The Spirit of the Laws – his world of ancient political writers and lawgivers. Montesquieu turns to the classical world in search not of models for imitation but knowledge of the science of politics. This chapter considers the relationship between Montesquieu’s critique of the substantive ideals of classical politics and his significant debts to the Aristotelian mode of regime analysis.

This chapter clarifies the philosophic dimension of Montesquieu’s essay on Rome, which comes to sight when, in chapter 18, Montesquieu makes explicit that he is presenting here a preeminent case study vindicating the contention that “it is not Fortune that dominates the World”; there are “general causes, some moral, some physical, which operate,” and “all the accidents are subject to these causes.” This foreshadows the claim with which Montesquieu opens his Spirit of the Laws: “I have posed the principles, and I have seen the particular cases unfold therefrom as if by themselves; the histories of all the nations are nothing but the consequences.” These statements signal the emergence of the modern philosophy of history, as a major component of Enlightenment rationalism’s most ambitious project and hope: to show that human reason can provide a system of universal causal explanation that will leave no room for plausible evidence of governance by supra- and contra-rational providential and legislative divinity (which is profoundly opposed not only to revealed religion but to ancient political rationalism.)

How did Montesquieu, born into a noble family in rural Bourdeaux, become a world-historical figure? In what particulars was he a man of his own times? That he lived when he did and where he did is obvious. How he managed to escape the limitations imposed upon him by time and place is not. The volume opens with a chapter introducing the reader to the development of Montesquieu’s thought throughout his literary and philosophical career. The essay will situate this account within the relevant biographical and historical context. It will consider the relationship between the major works and pursue insights into Montesquieu’s intellectual development derived from the study of minor works such as his Reflections on Universal Monarchy in Europe and Pensées.