Virtue and beyond in Plato and Aristotle

Southern Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 43, Issue SUPPL, 2005, Pages 97-114

  Broadie, Sarah ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949384683     PISSN: 00384283     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.2041-6962.2005.tb01981.x     Document Type: Review

References (7)

1. EE VIII.3 (I am following the text of Walzer and Mingay [Oxford, 1991]).
2. The whole chapter (with particular attention to its implications on Aristotle's evaluation of theoretical activity) is discussed in S. Broadie, Ethics with Aristotle (New York, 1991), 373-88.
3. for an interpretation partly on similar lines see also Jennifer Whiting, "Self-love and Authoritative Virtue," Aristotle, Kant, and the Stoics, ed. S. Engstrom and J. Whiting [Cambridge, 1996], 162-99, esp. 166-7). It is true that the text itself tends to support this conflation at 1248b34-7, 1249a5-6, and 1249a14-16. These passages seem to present the kalosk'agathos as distinctively carrying out his particular acts for the sake of the fine. For the moment (optimistically perhaps, but at least for the purpose of this paper), I assume that these are imprecise formulations, and that their meaning is that what the kalosk'agathos endorses as fine, and values for its own sake, is virtue or virtuous agency as a whole way of being. (Thus I take, for example, 1249a14-16 to be saying that the Spartan type adheres to a set of practices or patterns of behavior which are as a matter of fact fine, but justifies his adherence by pointing to their ulterior consequences.) The thought that the Spartan type of EE VIII. 3 necessarily lacks "virtue in the full sense" seems to be driven by the idea that (A) the orientation toward the fine that, for Aristotle, governs particular manifestations of genuine virtue is identical with or necessarily reflected in (B) a correct second-order understanding of the value of virtue itself. But this is a disputable assumption. A main thesis of this paper is that A occurs without B in the mere (but genuine) agathos. (Magna Moralia II.9 muddles the distinction' between mere agathos and kalosk'agathos.) On the meaning of "acting for the sake of the fine," v.i. footnote 37.
4. Cf. Plato, Euthydemus, 280b1 ff. and Meno, 87e5 ff., where wisdom is the archê tôn agathôn; Laws II, 660e1 ff., where it is justice; see also Kant on the bonum supremum (Critique of Practical Reason 5:110). (I discuss this doctrine of the Good in "On the Idea of the Summum Bonu," forthcoming in Virtue, Norms, and Objectivity: Issues in Ancient and Modern Ethics, ed. Christopher Gill [Oxford, 2005].)
5. Thus Whiting ("Self-love and Authoritative Virtue," 188; cf. 168) is clearly right not to rest (in the end) much weight on any supposed parallel between the EE VIII.3 distinction, and the NE VI (EE V) distinction between phusikê and kuria arête (1144b1-16). Phusikê arête in the latter contrast is presented as a sort of natural good (in the sense of EE VIII.3) which may actually be harmful in the absence of nous; thus there is a world of difference between it and Spartan "mere" virtue of EE VIII.3. However, Whiting does assimilate the latter (called a hexis politikê at 1248b37-8) to the "political," timocratic, form of apparent courage presented at EE III. 1, 1229a13 and NE III.8, 1116a15-29. But this type's fixation on honor and shame makes it importantly different from the Spartan type of EE VIII.3, since the latter's ultimate values comprise the natural goods in general.
6. An exception is M. F. Burnyeat in "Plato and the Dairymaids" (unpublished).
7. Thus Prichard ("Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?," Moral Obligation [Oxford, 1949], 1-17) sees Plato as trying to persuade us of the truth of (b) so that we should be more motivated to do particular right acts.