Since the publication of Judith Thomson’s 1976 paper, solving the Trolley Problem has been a favorite preoccupation of utilitarians and deontologists. Why is it permissible to divert a runaway trolley, thereby killing one person to save five others, but impermissible to push a big man onto a track to save five others. To date, virtue ethicists have not shown any interest in the debate. An obvious reason for this lack of interest is that virtue ethicists reject the very idea that there are universal moral rules and principles, according to which actions can be evaluated as permissible or impermissible. It is possible to frame the Trolley Problem in terms of what a virtuous person would and wouldn’t do, but then a further problem emerges, namely, that trolley experiments are not good tests of character. They rule out many of the ways that virtuous people can distinguish themselves from the non-virtuous. I discuss some of these problems in the first part of the chapter. In the second part, and with a few reservations and qualifications in mind, I argue that a virtue ethicist can support our commonsense intuitions in two central cases – Bystander and Footbridge – while also offering a response to Thomson’s Loop challenge.

This chapter shows how competing notions of care shape ethical, political, and amorous life in Shakespearean drama. If care is a virtue, it seems unique among other classically recognized virtues such as courage, justice, and temperance, in that care is more ubiquitous as a feature of normative life and yet less conceptually distinct. While sometimes appearing as a virtue in itself — or as a precondition to the sharpening of any particular virtue — care just as often shows up in Shakespeare’s plays as a demanding expenditure of psychosomatic energies that shades into anxious worry or self-consuming attachments. This chapter in turn illustrates how ancient Greek and Roman virtue ethics inform Shakespeare’s articulations of care as an innate and omnipresent facet of human experience, which can benefit self and others but in its extreme forms also weigh upon body and soul to cause harm. Despite cultivating skepticism concerning our human abilities to know and to exercise the virtues of care, Shakespearean drama also stages encounters with care in its rarest guise: as a benefit that alleviates forms of suffering or distress to which human life is invariably susceptible, and which cultivates our capacities for virtue.

This chapter features a book from the era which marks the culmination of the Ottoman intellectual efforts to reinstate traditional categories of knowledge from an imperial perspective. Ahlak-i Alai [The morals of Ali] of Kınalızade Ali Çelebi showcases the maturation of moral thinking that overlaps the central themes of Shakespearean virtue ethics. Written by a contemporary of Shakespeare and became the representative account of moral thinking in social and political domains of the Ottomans, the book is of interest to the readers of Shakespeare as it accommodates more parallels with the moral world of Englishmen than indicated in Shakespeare’s ‘turning Turk’ in Othello. Ahlak-i Alai follows in form and content the Aristotelian virtue ethics and deals with a broad spectrum of questions from the source of morality and the possibility of an individual’s moral education to the highest good and the moral order in society. It is suggested in the chapter that the common moral ground of Ottomans and Shakespeare is shaped mainly by the Aristotelian virtue ethics whose objective is to operate in moderation what is thought to be the powers of the self.

Emmons explores how a virtue ethics account of gratitude may address ways in which people experience negative effects of gratitude. On the one hand, virtue ethics would question whether harmful expressions of gratitude should be considered gratitude in the first place. But on the other hand, aligning gratitude indiscriminately with the good strips it of meaning and power. To resolve this dilemma, Emmons argues a more careful understanding of gratitude is needed.

Patients who were once unable to have a child without assistance and patients wishing to have a child with desired traits are now eagerly seeking increasingly complex reproductive plans. These plans commonly involve multifaceted ethical concerns that may not be apparent to patients. The clinicians involved in patient care, including the medical team and mental health professionals, while beholden to reproductive ethics, may vary in terms of their perceptiveness of ethical concerns, their working constructs of medical ethics, and their comfort with addressing ethical concerns. This chapter endeavors to increase the clinician’s depth of understanding and skill in navigating and balancing reproductive ethical principles. In an examination of the core constructs of reproductive ethics, the chapter provides nuance on autonomy and challenges the reach of reproductive liberty. The perspectives of virtue ethics, including parental obligation to the child, feminist ethics, care-based ethics, and communitarian ethics are introduced. Finally, a seven-step decision-making process for considering and addressing ethical concerns is provided.

Arthur Jan Keefer discusses the relationship of wisdom literature and virtue ethics. Posing questions of both method and substance, the chapter proposes how interpreters might make use of virtue theories for reading biblical wisdom literature. Of foremost importance are precise definitions for concepts of ‘virtue’, a selection of particular texts that set out an understanding of virtue, and an appreciation of traditional methods of biblical interpretation, all of which guards against vague conclusions and artificial comparison. Within the last decade, several scholars have pioneered the study of virtue ethics and wisdom literature, most notably through Proverbs and Job. Keefer presents this work and then suggests some inroads for similar studies of Ecclesiastes and Ben Sira, which have received less attention with respect to virtue. Lastly, he considers how the possibilities of virtue within each of these books link up with notions of ‘the good’ and a teleological orientation for ethics.

Chapter 1 examines the moralization of work and stigmatization of laziness in the works of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ottoman moralists between the first and the second constitutional period (the 1870s to 1908). At the center of this chapter are Ottoman morality texts, a genre, yet to be fully explored, reconfigured in the nineteenth century. These texts articulated many emerging discourses and anxieties of the Ottoman reform period on a normative level. After an overview of the question of laziness in Ottoman thinking, attention is drawn to how a novel kind of knowledge was produced in the field of morality, expressing a new subjectivity in relation to modern citizenship; the normative nature of morality texts and the way these texts moralized, nationalized, and even Islamized productivity is then studied. Ottoman moralists identified certain beliefs and practices as handicaps for productivity and declared them un-Islamic and antithetical to progress. This chapter rethinks the construction of morality and Islamic knowledge in modern times, by examining deontological discourses on work that later produced the neologism of the “Islamic work ethic.”

The conceptual framework that accompanies stylistic virtue was the product of over two thousand years of rhetorical, critical, and philosophical development, much of which appears to collapse in the first decades of the twentieth century. However, the Afterword suggests that stylistic virtue persisted in constituent and strategically obscured forms: for example, in T.S. Eliot’s analysis of stylistic “impersonality” and I.A. Richards’s conception of the poem as “pseudo-statement.” The Afterword goes on to claim that contemporary virtue theory provides a promising avenue for the continued defense of style, and of aesthetic value more generally, as an ethical good, offering an innovative way of defending the humanities at a moment of contemporary crisis.

The NT displays the greatest intellectual retrieval of Hebraic thought and literature in antiquity. In this chapter, I explore the idea that the New Testament authors largely favor the Hebraic philosophical style and strategically engage the styles of Jewish-Hellenism and Roman philosophy. Any consideration of the philosophical style of the NT authors must reckon with the Hellenistic styles du jour. Hellenism’s philosophies developed into sophisticated Roman rhetorical forms in the first century, forms in which some of the NT authors might have been steeped. In this chapter, I consider which aspects of Hebraic and Hellenistic philosophical styles the gospel authors employ and possible motivations behind their employments.

The volume closes by setting out an agenda for further research that follows from the findings of the case studies in three governance areas of security, environmental, and business governance. Based on the findings, we argue that responsibility should be considered as a methodological tool for scholars of global politics as it bridges the gap between politics, law, and ethics. The role of ethics in particular deserves further engagement, and responsibility as a category of practice provides a suitable approach towards this end. As the literature on ‘virtue ethics’ has highlighted, neither universal benchmarks nor a reliance on consequentialist arguments offer suitable leverage for analysis for communities and norms that develop and are maintained in practice. Rather, it is through an engagement with practices of knowledge creation and embedded ethics of the actors involved that we can shed light on the workings of global politics. Virtue ethics may be used for a critical and emancipatory research agenda that could be expanded to look into, for instance, global North-South relations or non-Western governance proposals.

This chapter discusses international law in context: how it relates to its political environment as well as to ethical concerns, and how the ethics of individual agents may be of relevance

This introductory chapter introduces the topics of the book and its main purposes in light of past scholarship. It emphasises how people hold contrasting perspectives and assumptions about the place of emotions in human social life. These contrasting orientations unfold into different approaches to educating emotions, and for how teachers should treat students, in relation to their emotional experiences and expressions. It first examines some possible assumptions that readers may have about the role of emotions in education. These assumptions are examples of contrasting perspectives about emotions and education. These are (1) that education does not particularly involve emotions, and (2) that emotions are a part of education, but this is non-controversial, with a consensus on the topic established. The chapter explores these assumptions and challenges them. The last section of the chapter explains the goals of this book, and gives an overview of the main contents of the chapters that follow.

This chapter introduces the book’s argument and provide the necessary context for it, addressing ethics in the Old Testament, virtue ethics, objections to this project, the moral philosophers used therein, including Aristotle, Aquinas and MacIntyre, as well as an outline of chapters and methodology.