Enrico Galvagni

The resurgence of virtue ethics in the last 50 years has often been guided by Aristotelian approaches. Recently, however, several scholars have attempted to develop an ethics of virtue inspired by Hume. One element that hindered the development of full-fledged Humean virtue ethics is the lack of a Humean account of something akin to phronesis or practical wisdom. In this paper, I propose an account of practical wisdom inspired by Hume. I argue that such an account avoids implausible ontological commitments of Aristotelian approaches, while preserving a role for practical wisdom in our moral life. In Sect. 2, I identify two important functions that phronesis plays in Aristotelian accounts. While some Humeans contend that practical wisdom is not an essential element of virtue ethics, in Sect. 3, I argue that Humean virtue ethics needs something like phronesis to be a plausible normative view. In Sect. 4, I reconstruct four proposals for what could play the role of phronesis in Humean virtue ethics. In Sect. 5, I evaluate the effectiveness of these proposals against the two identified functions of phronesis and argue that the most promising candidate for practical wisdom in Humean virtue terms is a set of features possessed by a sensible, sensitive, experienced, knowledgeable, and unprejudiced person.

Responsibility gaps arise when harm is caused by autonomous systems and we are unable to appropriately assign moral responsibility for that harm. This occurs because (i) no human being can be held accountable given the autonomous nature of the system that created the harm; and (ii) the system itself lacks the relevant features to be considered a responsible agent. Neither the humans who developed and deployed the system nor the machines themselves are responsible. Hence, the gap arises: there is no one to be held responsible for the harm, yet (unlike cases of natural disasters) we have the intuition that someone should be responsible. In this paper, we tap into the literature on conceptual engineering to explore two strategies regarding this issue. On the one hand, we can identify the risks of gaps and attempt to ameliorate the concept of moral responsibility in the hope of removing them. On the other hand, we can highlight the risks of conceptual revision and aim to preserve our current concept as it is. In this paper we explore the underutilized strategy of preservation with respect to RESPONSIBILITY and highlight the upsides of such an approach.

This paper identifies an overlooked puzzle in Hume’s moral philosophy. Given Hume’s account of moral evaluation and his description of envy, an absurd conclusion follows: we sometimes ought to evaluate virtuous agents as vicious. I substantiate the problem by reconstructing Hume’s account of moral evaluation based on sympathy with the agent’s narrow circle and his account of envy as a form of pain generated by comparison. I argue that Hume’s view is that envy spreads with special force in one’s narrow circle. This, in turn, poses a threat to sound moral evaluation. I propose a partial solution to this puzzle in Hume’s account of decency, the virtue that, by limiting one’s display of pride, undercuts the psychological mechanism of comparison that generates envy. The paper ends with some reflections on the potential of my discussion to advance the present-day debate about envy as a moral emotion.

William King’s De Origine Mali has recently started to attract some attention in early modern scholarship. In a recent paper devoted to King’s theory of free will, Kenneth Pearce identifies a “lacuna” in his text, namely the fact that King “never explicitly describes the process whereby election leads to action” (Pearce, “William King on Free Will”, 4). In this paper, I analyse King’s theory of ‘election’ (roughly, free choice) and Pearce’s interpretation of it. I discuss his claim that there is a lacuna in King’s account and argue that the text provides us with important suggestions on how election generates action. Therefore, no speculative proposal to fill the lacuna is needed. This, in turn, allows me to develop a reading of King’s text that avoids a textual puzzle unsolved in Pearce’s interpretation: while he maintained that every election is “with reason”, my account can take King’s text at face value and explain how some elections are reasonable while others are not.

Over the past two decades, virtue ethicists have begun to devote increasing attention to applied ethics. In particular, the application of virtue ethical frameworks to the environmental ethics debate has flourished. This chapter reviews recent contributions to the literature in this field and highlights some strengths and weaknesses of thinking about climate change through a virtue ethical lens. Section “Two Benefits of Virtue Ethical Approaches to Climate Change” explores two benefits of applying virtue ethics to climate change: (a) we can better capture the phenomenology of our moral experience, and (b) we avoid the problem of inconsequentialism. Section “A Catalogue of Environmental Virtues” analyzes various practical proposals that have been put forward in the form of specific environmental virtues. Section “An Objection to Virtue-Oriented Approaches to Climate Change” reconstructs a fundamental objection to the idea of using a virtue ethical normative approach to tackling the urgent and imminent dangers of climate change.

Vanity and pride have been condemned by Christian thinkers for centuries. Therefore, it may seem curious that Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach, one of the fiercest critics of religion, decried these passions. Holbach’s work is interspersed with remarks about vanity and pride which have gone unnoticed in the literature. This chapter analyzes Holbach’s account of vanity, delving into the role it plays in the establishment and maintenance of religion. I show that the desire for prestige is at the very core of religious practices, which aim to justify the alleged superiority of man over nature. Holbach’s well-known critique of religion, therefore, cannot be fully understood without reference to his lesser known account of vanity and pride. The study of these passions is also essential to grasping Holbach’s conception of philosophy and how the philosophe should be: an individual free from prejudices, who has abandoned every trace of vanity in order to move forward in their journey towards the truth.

In this paper, I reconstruct Hume's account of decency, the virtue associated with a limited display of pride, and show how it presents a significant challenge to standard virtue ethical interpretations of Hume. In section I, I explore his ambivalent conception of pride as both virtuous (because useful and agreeable to oneself) and vicious (when excessive and disagreeable to others). In section II, I show how the virtue of decency provides a practical solution to these two clashing aspects of pride. In doing so, I demonstrate that decency is a merely behavioural virtue that requires no virtuous motive and consists of nothing more than "a fair outside." I argue that this account of decency represents a serious and underexplored challenge to standard interpretations of Hume as a virtue ethicist committed to the idea that actions derive their moral value from underlying motives. In section III, I reply to some objections.

Anger is arguably one of the most important emotions in a human being’s life. An array of contemporary studies show that, far from being detrimental, anger can foster one’s self-esteem, improve their social interactions, and even benefit physical and mental health. In his Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume explicitly recognized the importance of anger. And yet, few topics have been so neglected in the Hume scholarship as his account of this passion. The following chapter aims to fill the gap in the literature by showing that Hume’s analysis of anger is worth studying and strictly connected to some of the most intriguing problems in his philosophy.

Luxury is one of the main polemic targets of Baron d’Holbach. It brings one to run after imaginary needs they cannot fulfill, dooming them to live an unhappy, grim life. This critical view of luxury is no news and was shared by many others _philosophes_. In this paper, however, I argue that in d’Holbach’s account, luxury is more than an economically and morally disruptive force. It is also a tool to reinforce oppressive power. First, I reconstruct d’Holbach’s well-known account of luxury contained in his _Politique Naturelle_. Secondly, I show that a closer reading of his later work _Morale Universelle_ discloses a new element: according to d’Holbach’s social philosophy, luxury is a mystification strategy used by tyrants to be seen as gods and consequently dominate their subjects. Finally, pivoting on the continuity between human nature and modern society in the _Système de la Nature_, I show that luxury is inscribed into a natural process. It is nothing mysterious nor supernatural. This naturalization of luxury allows people to unmask the god-like tyrant as a common human being, showing that understanding how nature works can set man free not only from religion, but also from oppressive political power.

Pride is a fundamental element in Hume's description of human nature. An important part of the secondary literature on Hume is devoted to this passion. However, no one, as far as I am aware, takes seriously the fact that pride often appears in pairs with vanity. In Book 2 of the Treatise, pride is defined as the passion one feels when society recognizes his connection to a ‘cause’, composed by a ‘subject’ and a (positive) ‘quality’. Conversely, no definition of vanity is provided. Despite Hume's fluctuating vocabulary, I hold that a conceptual difference between pride and vanity exists. To support this claim, I analyse the common features of these two passions, showing that both pride and vanity (a) are indirect passions, (b) are self-regarding passions, and (c) have the same structure. Supported by textual evidence, I then claim that vanity is a desire of reputation, a desire to feel pride, when pride is not (yet) in place, because its cause is only imaginary and not real. Nonetheless, I underscore that, at times, ‘vanity’ means simply pride and call for greater attention on this ongoing oscillation. In conclusion, I explore the implications of this account of vanity for social interactions in Hume's philosophy, which illustrates its intrinsic ambivalence.