Browsing by Subject "Virtue ethics"
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Item Open Access Moral development(Elsevier, 2012) Berges, Sandrine; Chadwick, R.This article introduces the concepts of moral development, developmental psychology, and character development. It begins by providing an overview of the history of these concepts, focusing on ancient philosophy and the philosophy of the Enlightenment. It then discusses in more detail a leading theory of moral development and objections that have been made against it. It concludes with some suggestions regarding how we might expect theories of moral development to evolve from those objections.Item Open Access Re-thinking twelfth-century virtue ethics: the contribution of Heloise(Taylor & Francis, 2013-07-25) Berges, S.Twelfth-century ethics is commonly thought of as following a stoic influence rather than an Aristotelian one. It is also assumed that these two schools are widely different, in particular with regards to the social aspect of the virtuous life. In this paper I argue that this picture is misleading and that Heloise of Argenteuil recognized that stoic ethics did not entail isolation but could be played out in a social context. I argue that her philosophical contribution does not end there, but that she departs from both the stoics and her teacher, Abelard, in her defence of the ideal of moderation. By insisting that virtue must strike a mean between two extremes, she shows that Aristotelian virtue ethics were present in the intellectual life of the twelfth century.Item Open Access Understanding the role of the laws in Plato's statesman(Society for the Advancement of Philosophy, Zagreb, Croatia, 2010) Berges, S.In the Statesman, Plato seems to be advocating that in the absence of a true king who will rule independently of laws, the next best thing as far as just rule is concerned is to adhere rigidly to existing laws, whatever they are. The rule of the true king is given as an example of virtuous rule in the sense that virtue politics or jurisprudence holds that laws cannot always deal justly with particular cases. But Plato's view of what we must do when there are no true kings forthcoming seems to preclude a virtue theoretical understanding of politics and laws. In this paper I will investigate the view that the image of the true king, who relies on written laws for convenience only, provides a model for a more realistic appeal to virtue in jurisprudence, that is, a respect of laws that is compatible with equity, in the sense understood by Aristotle.