Browsing by Subject "Virtue."
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Item Courageous activity and the virtue of courage.(2014-09-05) Cleveland, William Scott.; Roberts, Robert Campbell, 1942-; Philosophy.; Baylor University. Dept. of Philosophy.Chapter one uses vignettes to illustrate a set of distinctions central to this work. I claim that the full exercise of the virtue of courage, what I call paradigmatic courageous activity, is exhibited only when a courageous action is performed with a courageous manner for an appropriate reason. Chapter two engages and criticizes rival accounts of courage that reduce the virtue of courage to good dispositions regarding some but not all of the excellences of courage identified above. For example, I discuss views on which paradigmatic courageous activity involves, on the one hand, overcoming one’s emotions by means of will-power and, on the other, emotionlessness. Chapter three employs an account of emotion to argue that a courageous manner of acting requires the contributions of the emotions of fear, hope, and daring. Fear is necessary for properly responding to a significant threat, hope is necessary for properly pursuing a significant but obstacle-laden goal, and daring is necessary for properly confronting the significant threat as a means to attaining the significant goal. Each emotion principally assists at a stage of courageous activity. An advantage of my view is that it can account for how courageous activity requires both fear, an emotion of suspect value to some, and fearless daring, a common view of courage, and how the transition from fear to fearless daring is both good and accomplished without suppressing fear by means of will-power. Chapter four lays the groundwork for defending the counterintuitive claim that courageous activity requires pleasure. This groundwork consists in a general account of pleasure, an account of courageous action, and a defense of my way of distinguishing naturally virtuous agents from continent agents on the basis of the distinction I made above between a reason for action and a manner of action. I further defend the difference between naturally virtuous and continent agents on the basis of their experiencing different kinds of pleasure in the choice of their actions. I apply these accounts to defend the surprising claim that courageous activity requires at least two kinds of pleasure: the pleasure of the naturally virtuous and the pleasure of the continent. Chapter five develops the claim of chapter four that courage requires two kinds of pleasure and evaluates other candidate pleasures that may be required for courageous activity. While I identify an additional pleasure that is characteristically present, I argue that no other pleasure is required.Item Like the green bay tree : the necessity of virtue for happiness.(2009-06-01T20:17:59Z) Wise, Jonathan D. Sands.; Roberts, Robert Campbell, 1942-; Philosophy.; Baylor University. Dept. of Philosophy.It is a generally accepted truth that the wicked flourish, as the psalmist has it, "like the green bay tree": their evil ways, far from hurting them, actually contribute to their well-being and vicious contentedness. From Socrates till Kant, on the other hand, every major moral philosopher believed that a person had to be virtuous to be happy. I explore why Aristotle accepted this thesis and the role that it played in his account of the good life, then turn to our contemporary accounts of happiness to determine if our concept shares any similarities with that employed by Aristotle. Happiness, most contemporary accounts would have it, is nothing more than a psychological state; I argue that this is reductive and that we still share much of Aristotle’s perspective wherein happiness tracks objective features of our character and fit with our environment as well. Even if I am right about happiness, why should we accept that virtue is necessary for happiness? Joseph Butler, though often misunderstood, provides significant support for this thesis using specific theistic premises, which, unfortunately, are no longer available to us today. Bernard Williams and Alasdair MacIntyre, on the other hand, provide a complex account of ethics that allows us to respond to the serious challenges our central thesis still faces, most notably cultural relativism and the apparent counterexamples provided by the green bay trees that surround us all. I conclude that there is substantial support for the thesis that some list of virtues, explorable but not entirely known by us, is necessary for the sort of happiness that we are concerned to plan for and achieve in our ethical lives, and that virtue ethics should accept this thesis as it has several important roles to play, especially in education and reflective endorsement. Justice, as a personal virtue, proves an interesting test case as I explore whether it particularly is necessary for happiness.Item Virtue in the tragic vision of Cormac McCarthy.(2011-01-05T19:42:11Z) Mangrum, Benjamin.; Ferretter, Luke, 1970-; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.Cormac McCarthy's novels evoke a more complex perspective than many conventional descriptions—e.g., redemptive or nihilistic, modern or postmodern—allow. Focusing primarily on his Western novels, I demonstrate in contrast that the author's vision is essentially tragic. This vision rejects hopes in the ability of humanity to escape violence and contingency, while it simultaneously affirms that human beings may pursue the good in a tragic world. McCarthy's Western novels evoke this vision through interaction with the virtues, the states of character necessary to endure inevitable tragedy. The social values underlying the American West conceive of these dispositions in problematic ways, but McCarthy affirms the virtuous life in opposition to the cultural wasteland of the region by articulating a concept of the logos. I specifically trace the dialectic between McCarthy's cultural critiques and his tragic vision through the virtues of courage and justice—a dialectic that exposes the discontents of liberal democracy.