Michelle Mason

Contempt as a moral attitude

It is a common lament that moral philosophers often deny, misdescribe, or simply overlook significant features of the ethical landscape as everyday agents perceive it. Contemporary moral philosophers, sensitive to the charge, have increasingly taken up questions of moral psychology and moral emotion they might otherwise have neglected. For all the improvement, however, the cast of characters on offer in contemporary moral philosophy and the attitudinal repertoire they command remains, to my mind, fairly uninspired if not uninspiring. Indeed, it may well be the moral philosophers’ concern to inspire us that accounts for omissions we might otherwise attribute, on a less charitable hypothesis, to mere lack of imagination. Among the perhaps uninspiring attitudes that contemporary moral philosophers largely have continued to neglect is that which I take as my focus in what follows: contempt. I focus on contempt not only to

Teach the Children Well

What connection is there between living well, in the sense of living a life of ethical virtue, and faring well, in the sense of living a life good for the agent whose life it is? Defenses of a connection between exercising the virtues and living a good life often display two commitments: first, to addressing their answer to the person whose life is in question and, second, to showing that virtue is what I call a reliability conferring property. I challenge both commitments. I propose we take up the question from the dialogical point of view implicit in contexts where one person (an “ethical trustee”) is charged with the care of the character of another (an “ethical trustor”) and argue that virtue is what I call a status conferring property. Ethical trustees benefit their trustors by inculcating the virtues because in doing so they bestow on them a status that is necessary for a good life.

Book ReviewsChristine Swanton, .Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View.New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. 312.

Christine Swanton’s book is the latest in a distinguished lineup of recent contributions to the development of a systematic virtue-theoretic ethics. With its arrival, it is fair to say that contemporary virtue ethics has entered its “second wave.” Swanton follows a first wave of writers—Philippa Foot and Rosalind Hursthouse most prominent among them—who took up a challenge that Elizabeth Anscombe issued in her 1958 watershed “Modern Moral Philosophy” (Philosophy 33 [1958]: 1–19). That challenge was to equip modern moral philosophy with an adequate philosophy of psychology, one that might eventually enable us to think profitably about ethics through an understanding of ethical virtue and its exercise. Swanton’s book is likely to prove a watershed of its own, widening the predominantly neo-Aristotelian focus of contemporary work in virtue ethics, such as that of Foot and Hursthouse, to include the more pluralistic view of Swanton’s title. Swanton herself is hesitant to provide a potentially constraining definition of what qualifies a candidate ethical theory as a species of virtue ethics, as opposed to a species of consequentialism or Kantianism. Nonetheless, perhaps most ethical theories that embrace the name would align themselves with the kind of dissatisfaction with consequentialist and rule-based (among them, Kantian) ethical theories that helped fuel Anscombe’s challenge (pp. 4–5). Swanton shares this dissatisfaction but expresses greater concern to develop her own views than to argue against consequentialist or Kantian alternatives (pp. 4–5). The result is a book that covers a comprehensive range of topics of concern to virtue ethics, from the moral psychology of virtue and the objectivity and demandingness of the ethical standpoint to a virtue-ethical account of right action. Overall, Swanton’s work provides an important view of the prospects for a novel account of ethical virtue. Swanton’s species of virtue ethics owes much to Nietzschean depth psychology, as well as to empirical psychology. Its relationship to Swanton’s neoAristotelian contemporaries is more complicated, representing both developments of and significant departures from the latter work. Among the primary desiderata noted in Anscombe’s original challenge was an account of the type of characteristic a virtue is. Swanton agrees with Foot and Hursthouse in placing an answer to this challenge at the center of her virtue ethics. According to Swanton’s definition, “a virtue is a . . . disposition to respond to, or acknowledge, items within its field or fields in an excellent or good enough way” (p. 20). Items within the “field” of a virtue are those objects with which the virtue is concerned. According to Swanton, these objects demand certain responses from us. Agents who possess the virtue concerned with the relevant objects thereby possess a disposition to respond to the objects in the way that those objects (or, as Swanton