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Examples of "nameless" virtues are discussed by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics. They are also found in the Confucian Analects. This paper explores what makes a virtue nameless in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Analects, and then argues that restrained speech is best understood as a nameless virtue in the Analects. It further argues that the virtue of restrained speech merits careful study because it contributes to our understanding of nameless virtues generally, while also deepening our understanding of Kongzi's ethics by showing why he thought it was important to cultivate certain virtues. Indeed, many of the things that make restrained speech valuable hold in a contemporary setting as well, making restrained speech a virtue that is important for us today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While ideals are by nature unrealizable, there are, nevertheless, many contexts in which their pursuit can be of enormous benefit. It may seem ironic but is a fact of life that the guidance afforded by "unrealistic" ideals can prove to be of enormous practical benefit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I will argue that a false assumption drives the attraction of philosophers to a divine command theory of morality. Specifically, I suggest the idea that anything not created by God is independent of God is a misconception. The idea misleads us into thinking that our only choice in offering a theistic ground for morality is between making God bow to a standard independent of his will or God creating morality in revealing his will. Yet what is God is hardly independent of him, and in coupling a perfect being theology with the doctrine of divine simplicity we discover that God's "reason" is God. Accordingly, obeying the truths of goodness that we humans speak of as contained in the divine wisdom hardly impugns the divine sovereignty. By modifying divine command ethics to give primacy to God's love or justice, thinkers such as Robert M. Adams, Philip L. Quinn, and Edward J. Wierenga admit the repugnance of this picture in spite of their verbal allegiance to divine command ethics. Accordingly, they implicitly concede that basing morality on God's sheer power should not be the preferred option for the Christian theist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the prominence of the concept of virtue in contemporary ethical theory, accounts of virtue have often left readers with the impression that the virtuous person is an unattainable ideal or is just psychologically implausible. This article argues that reviving the ancient Greek idea that virtues are like practical skills can help provide a more plausible account of virtue and the virtuous person. The moral knowledge of the virtuous person is analogous to the practical knowledge of the expert in a skill. Instead of relying on a reconstruction of an ancient account of skills for the comparison to virtue, this paper adapts a modem account of skill acquisition developed by Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus in their research on artificial intelligence and human expertise. The skill model of virtue offers a promising direction for virtue theory, by using the research on skills to illuminate the otherwise murky concept of virtue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reflects on the moral approach towards principlism. This approach was defined in a document called the Belmont Report, the principles of which include respect for persons, beneficence and justice. According to the author, ideals along with practicality will help to determine the specification and balancing of these principles, and it will lead to a society that is morally progressive and respects the beauty and essentiality of pluralism, variance and moral respect.

Commentators often construe Foucault as an anti-Enlightenment thinker; much of this criticism assumes that Foucault inherits early German Romanticism in some sense. This essay examines these claims by assessing the role the German Romantics play in Foucault's work, both early and late. After a brief consideration of the meaning of the term "Romanticism," the essay examines the role that language and literature plays in Foucault early texts before examining the place of self-formation or Bildung in his later work. I conclude that examining the relationship between Foucault and the German Romantics can help us better understand Foucault's texts and thereby avoid what Foucault terms the "blackmail of the Enlightenment," the idea that one must be either for or against Enlightenment ideals rather than critically interrogating them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental ethics has been dominated by an idealist logic that limits its positive impact on the natural world about which environmental philosophers care deeply. Environmental ethicists need to alter the ways we think and talk about what we value and the relations among ideas, values, and actions. Drawing on the sociology of religion and Marxian philosophy among other sources, a new approach may increase our understanding of how ideas are lived out and how we might increase the impact of our ideas about the value of nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows that Thomas Aquinas has a compatibilist position on the freedom of the will, where compatibilism is understood as the doctrine that determinism does not preclude freedom. Thomas's position concerning free will is compatibilist regarding both the divine and human wills. Thomas pioneers the idea that human freedom is an image of divine freedom. It is on account of the notion that god is the exemplar toward which human beings proceed that it is much easier to understand why, if the freedom of god's will is compatible with the determinism of omnibenevolence, it is acceptable that the freedom of the human will is compatible with the determinism that ensues from what Thomas calls the ‘natural necessity’ of the human will. The evidence for his compatibilist stance on divine freedom emerges from Summa Contra Gentiles (SCG) 1.74–91, whereas the strongest evidence for Thomas's compatibilist position about human freedom derives from the Summa Theologiae (ST) and Quaestiones Disputatae DeMalo (QDM) 6. This paper establishes a compatibilist reading of Thomas's account of the freedom of the divine will and shows that Thomas's theory of human freedom is modeled upon his treatment of divine freedom. Finally, I argue that the position maintained in QDM6 does not abandon the theory presented in ST but instead is a clarification of it. Thus, Thomas presents a theory of freedom that is uniformly compatibilist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to show that for Aristotle god is, and is not, virtuous. I consider first the arguments of the EN to show that the gods do not have virtue—beginning with an account of the divisions of the faculties of soul, and of the virtues that belong to those divisions. These arguments suggest that now is a divine virtue, and so in the second section I consider now, as a faculty of soul and as a virtue, and examine the differences between now as a human virtue, and now as a virtue which is also a substance, and with which the first divine principle is identified. In the third and final section I ask what kind of difference Aristotle takes the difference between human and divine now to be—and in particular whether this is a difference in kind or in degree. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In any realm, perfection designates the highest possible satisfaction of a standard of value. Moral perfection essentially consists of a person's practicing his moral principles as fully as he is able. This paper defends moral perfection as a proper ideal. Perfection must be understood contextually, however, as relative to the capacities of a particular individual. The tendency to dismiss perfection as unattainable is problematic for three primary reasons: it undercuts morality's ability to perform its function; the corresponding failure to abide by one's principles exacts a severe psychological toll; by excusing immorality, it undermines the gravity of morality. The paper suggests two general sources of skepticism toward perfection's possibility and addresses several specific objections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]