No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 June 1970
I begin with a difficult passage from the Nicomachean Ethics. “… Anyone who is to listen intelligently to discussion about what is good or just or, in general, of social concern must have been brought up in good habits. For the starting-point is the “that”, and if this is plain enough to him he will not need the “because” as well. And a person so brought up either has or can easily get starting-points.”
1 Ar., Nic. Eth. 1095 b 4–8. Translation (here and elsewhere) mine. (It is to be noted that Ross’s translation inserts “at the start” after “not”. Although this is not misleading, it is gratuitous.)
2 Ibid., 1095 a 30–2.
3 The general debate that took place on the themes of charity and chastity a few years ago was an example of a morally educative one in this sense. In our own society, moral education in this sense goes on all the time, in more or less restricted areas of experience. A more special example would be the discussion in which doctors engage about the ethics of communication with their patients.
4 Ibid., 1103 a 32–3.
5 For example, generosity, as a habit, is important, but seeing when to be generous is important too. One can go wrong here.
6 Φεσικ ρετ Ibid., 1144 b 2.
7 Ibid., 1179 b 22–3.
8 Ibid., 1144b 7–8.
9 Think of considering for the first time what an extension of responsibility in university government would be like—of accepting as right the increasing involvement of other people in one’s affairs.
10 Loyalty to some institution may become over-loyalty, and as such a vice: a return to the mean can be a liberation—of oneself and others.
11 Thus the logician, inasmuch as he values consistency as such, may naturally go on to recommend the revision of a moral system in which inconsistency has been pointed out. But his recommendation is still made from a logical point of view, and not from that of social morality (see below). Similar considerations apply to the other kinds of professional assessment which I have mentioned: the values in question there might be held to represent a more concrete kind of consistency. (I am indebted for discussion of these points to Mr N. L. Cooper.)
12 Cf. G. R. Grice, The Grounds of Morality (Cambridge, 1967), p. 36.
13 Compare ‘what anyone in your position ought to do’ and ‘what you in your position ought to do’.
14 In speaking of the higher morality I have in mind saintliness rather than heroism, at any rate if ‘heroism’ be denned in the terms adopted in a recent, very interesting, magazine article on the subject: namely, “selfless actions involving an irrational element of risk” (Auberon Waugh, “Why You might be a Hero”, The Daily Telegraph Magazine, 11 April 1969). The meaning of the term ‘irrational’, as here used, is complex, but the stress is on what is unreflective if not unreflecting. However, in the higher morality as I am trying to depict it, reflectiveness plays an important part: what I have in mind is a way of life which may be highlighted by certain striking actions, rather than a striking action or striking actions which may highlight a life without constituting a way of life. The article cited makes much of the connection between heroic acts and training (i.e., training in duties and drills of one professional sort or another). I shall allow that the higher morality is by no means unconnected with training, in the shape of “habituation”, but this parallel makes no difference to the present point.