Character and well-being: Towards an ethics of character

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 26, Issue 2, 2000, Pages 79-98

  Mangini, Michele ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BARI   (Italy)

Author keywords

ethics of character; personal identity; virtues; well being

Indexed keywords

EID: 0010859561     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/019145370002600203     Document Type: Article

References (33)

1. Cf. Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 55.
2. Owen Flanagan, Varieties of Moral Personalities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 135.
3. Ronald Dworkin is a strong supporter of the ‘strategy of continuity’ in opposition to Rawls' ‘strategy of discontinuity’. Dworkin wants to construct a liberal ethics consisting of ‘instincts and convictions about the character and ends of human life that seem particularly congenial to liberal political principles’. See his Foundations of Liberal Equality, the Tanner Lectures (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1990), p. 20.
4. Cf. Flanagan, Foundations of Liberal Equality, p. 52.
5. See for example, Charles Taylor, ‘Atomism’, in Philosophical Papers 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 187 ff.
6. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), Chs 1–2.
7. Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, p. 4.
8. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1981), p. 190.
9. Cf. Martha Nussbaum, ‘Aristotelian Social Democracy’, in Liberalism and the Good, ed. Bruce Douglass, Gerald Mara and Henry Richardson (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 203 ff.
10. For an influential account of the reductivist view see Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
11. The theorist of authenticity has to try a difficult exercise of balance: ‘all ethics of authenticity start from the assumption that in order to be a worthy moral being, we must not deny or try to suppress, but rather acknowledge the urges which deflect us from our principles, while at the same time continuing to orient our conduct to the moral point of view’. Alessandro Ferrara, ‘Authenticity and the Project of Modernity’, European Journal of Philosophy 2(3) (1994): 244.
12. Cf. Alessandro Ferrara, Leudaimonia postmoderna (Naples: Liguori, 1992), p. 171 ff.
13. Flanagan, Leudaimonia postmoderna, p. 332.
14. Cf. Joel Kupperman, Character (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 6.
15. The importance of social recognition and, negatively, of disrespect is at the center of Axel Honneth's recent theorization. He identifies three forms of recognition: (1) self-confidence and trust in the world, acquired through experiencing emotional attachment in the socialization process; (2) self-respect, acquired through a normative understanding of one's self; (3) self-esteem which derives from recognition of one's values in a horizon of cultural traditions. In all these cases disrespect can produce a detrimental effect on a subject's understanding of self. Cf. ‘Integrity and Disrespect’, Political Theory 20(2) (1992): 187–201.
16. Cf. Bernard Williams, ‘Persons, Character and Morality’, in Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
17. Cf. Kupperman, Persons, Character and Morality, pp. 10–12.
18. Flanagan, Persons, Character and Morality, p. 8.
19. On different catalogues of virtues and their alleged relativity to different social contexts, see MacIntyre, After Virtue.
20. Cf. Parfit, After Virtue, pp. 494–7.
21. Cf. Parfit, After Virtue, p. 499.
22. Cf. James Griffin, Well-being (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 17. Thomas Scanlon seems to agree with the general thrust of Griffin's strategy but takes Griffin's informed—desire theory to stop short of giving proper appreciation to the object of value. Cf.
23. T. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), Ch. 2.
24. Cf. Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 308–9.
25. Cf. Dworkin, The Morality of Freedom, p. 62 ff.
26. For this kind of distinction in the variety of goodness we are still in debt to George von Wright, The Varieties of the Goodness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960).
27. David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), Part III, section I.
28. N. J. H. Dent, The Moral Psychology of the Virtues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 83.
29. William Rehg, Insight and Solidarity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 100.
30. Cf. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 3 ff.
31. Cf. Nussbaum, ‘Aristotelian Social Democracy’;
32. Amartya Sen, The Standard of Living (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
33. Cf. Raz's position in The Morality of Freedom, Chs 5–6.