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17Moral Transformation as Shifting (Im)PossibilitiesThe Journal of Ethics 1-16. 2024.The phenomenon of moral transformation, though important, has received little attention in virtue ethics. In this paper we propose a virtue-ethical model of moral transformation as character transformation by tracking the development of new identity-defining (‘core’) character traits, their expressions, and their priority structure, through the change in what appears as possible or impossible to the moral agent. We propose that character transformation culminates when what previously appeared as…Read more
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57Why Practical Wisdom Cannot be EliminatedTopoi 1-16. forthcoming.Practical wisdom eliminativism has recently been proposed in both philosophy and psychology, on the grounds of the alleged redundancy of practical wisdom (Miller 2021 ) and its purported developmental/psychological implausibility (Lapsley 2021 ). Here we respond to these challenges by drawing on an improved version of a view of practical wisdom, the “Aretai model”, that we have presented elsewhere (De Caro et al. 2021 ; Vaccarezza et al. 2023 ; De Caro et al. forthcoming ). According to this mod…Read more
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122Virtue ethics: an anti-moralistic defencePhilosophical Inquiries 7 (1): 29-44. 2019.The aim of this paper is to single out four main kinds of moralism, which might be associated to virtue ethics, and to offer a virtue-ethical response to each. By doing so, I aim at defending virtue ethics, properly understood, from the intrinsic danger of a moralistic drift. I begin by proposing a definition of moralism and a list of its main forms. Then, I list the main features of the virtue-ethical perspective I embrace, and finally, I argue that such normative approach can prevent a moralis…Read more
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111VirtueIn Silvia Caprioglio Panizza & Mark Hopwood (eds.), The Murdochian Mind, Routledge. pp. 183-196. 2022.Was Iris Murdoch a virtue ethicist? At first sight, it would appear that she was not. She does not offer an explicit definition of account of the term ‘virtue’, and there are significant differences between her views and those of standard Aristotelian virtue ethicists. There is no reason, however, to think that the standard Aristotelian view represents the only legitimate form of virtue ethics. In this chapter, I begin by recalling (in section 1) the main commonalities between Murdoch’s criticis…Read more
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136Let the donkeys be donkeys: in defense of inspiring envyIn Sara Protasi (ed.), The Moral Psychology of Envy, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. pp. 111-127. 2022.Once upon a time, Aesop says, there was a donkey who wanted to be a pet dog. The pet dog was given many treats by the master and the household servants, and the donkey was envious of him. Hence, the donkey began emulating the pet dog. What happened next? The story ends up with the donkey beaten senseless, chased off to the stables, exhausted and barely alive. Who is to blame for the poor donkey’s unfortunate fate? Well, there could be disagreement upon this, but we think emulation is to blame. A…Read more
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106Emotional skillfulness and virtue acquisitionIn Daniel Dukes, Andrea Samson & Eric Walle (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development, Oxford University Press. pp. 503-512. 2022.In this chapter, we will offer a sketch of the state of the art as concerns existing accounts of virtue acquisition in relation to automaticity. In particular, we will focus on the so-called “skill model,” which we aim to improve by questioning its rather common underlying dualistic picture of the mind. Then we will propose an account of skillful emotions by identifying the features that make them both automatic and embedded in an intelligent practice. Finally, we will show how this view can hel…Read more
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20Special Issue on Sin and Vice (edited book)TheoLogica: An International Journal for Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology. 2023.
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20Editorial: Sin and ViceTheoLogica: An International Journal for Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology 7 (2): 1-6. 2023.
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140Ergon and Practical Reason. Anscombe’s Legacy and Natural NormativityActa Philosophica 32 (2): 400-406. 2023.One of Elizabeth Anscombe’s most decisive legacies is the rejection of modern legalistic morality, in the name of a rescue of Aristotelian-inspired natural normativity. However, as I will argue in this contribution, this legacy does not seem to have been fully collected, neither by those who, like Philippa Foot, are explicitly inspired by Anscombe’s work, nor by those who, while apparently opposing its assumptions, have also somehow recovered it by different routes, as emblematically does Christ…Read more
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203The exemplary and the right. Contemporary virtue ethics, action guidance, and action assessmentRivista di Storia Della Filosofia 1 148-164. 2023.In this paper, I will account for the importance of the notion of exemplarity within the contemporary virtue-ethical debate, both in its classic formulation (e.g., Hursthouse 1999) and in the recent exemplarist moral theory advanced by Linda T. Zagzebski (2015; 2017). Despite their differences, which I will discuss extensively, both theories are centered on a characterization of an exemplary virtuous agent that serves as a standard for determining what, in a given situation, is right, wrong, dut…Read more
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155The Dark Side of the Exceptional: On Moral Exemplars, Character Education, and Negative EmotionsJournal of Moral Education 48 (3): 332-345. 2019.This paper focuses on negative exemplarity-related emotions (NEREs) and on their educational implications. In this paper, we will first argue for the nonexpendability of negative emotions broadly conceived (section 2) by defending their instrumental and intrinsic role in a good and flourishing life. In section 3, we will make the claim more specific by focusing on the narrower domain of NEREs and argue for their moral and educational significance by evaluating whether they fit the arguments prov…Read more
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27Civil Deliberation Unpacked: An Empirical InvestigationJournal of Media Ethics 38 (4): 211-223. 2023.In recent decades, the digital age and the Third Industrial Revolution have attracted significant attention in terms of their benefits and risks. Scholars have explored the impact of these changes on autonomy, freedom, human interactions, cognition, and knowledge sharing. However, the influence of the digital communicative environment on civic interactions and public deliberation processes has received limited attention from virtue theorists. This paper aims to address this gap. First, we discus…Read more
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128"Le donne tramano qualcosa". Iris Murdoch e l'etica delle virtùla Società Degli Individui 76 (26): 24-37. forthcoming.In this paper, I will highlight the role played, within the group of Oxonian philosophers who revived virtue ethics beginning in the 1950s, by perhaps the most heterodox and elusive figure, Iris Murdoch. In particular, I will discuss whether Murdoch can be considered, like Anscombe and Foot, a promoter of virtue ethics, or whether points of contact with that strand are limited to the polemical goals that the philosopher and novelist shared, for a thirty-year period, with her colleagues and frien…Read more
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3IntroductionIn Michel Croce & Maria Silvia Vaccarezza (eds.), Connecting Virtues: Advances in Ethics, Epistemology, and Political Philosophy, Wiley-blackwell. 2018.No Abstract.
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281Wittgenstein's Non-non-cognitivismIn Roberta Dreon (ed.), SENZA TRAMPOLI Saggi filosofici per Luigi Perissinotto, Mimesis. pp. 1-8. 2023.In this paper, we present one of the main starting points of naturalism in ethics: Geach’s challenge against non-cognitivism. We try to find an answer to Geach’s challenge in the notion of family resemblance applied to ethics. In doing so we recover a not much-discussed influence of Moore on Wittgenstein’s conception of family resemblance, which leads us to define Wittgenstein as non-non-cognitivist in ethics. Pre print (some changes in the published edition)
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An eye on particulars with the end in sight : an account of Aristotelian phronesisIn Michel Croce & Maria Silvia Vaccarezza (eds.), Connecting Virtues: Advances in Ethics, Epistemology, and Political Philosophy, Wiley-blackwell. 2018.
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13Virtù, legge e fioritura umana: saggi in onore di Angelo Campodonico (edited book)Mimesis. 2022.
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153La Pretesa Del Bene: Teoria dell'azione ed etica in Tommaso D'Aquino (edited book)Orthotes. 2012.Da un lato al bene, ovvero a ciò che ci compie, non possiamo non tendere sempre, dall’altro il bene stesso esercita un’attrazione e una pretesa sulla nostra vita.
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615Civility in the Post-truth Age: An Aristotelian AccountHumana.Mente - Journal of Philosophical Studies 39 (39): 127-150. 2021.This paper investigates civility from an Aristotelian perspective and has two objectives. The first is to offer a novel account of this virtue based on Aristotle’s remarks about civic friendship. The proposed account distinguishes two main components of civility—civic benevolence and civil deliberation—and shows how Aristotle’s insights can speak to the needs of our communities today. The notion of civil deliberation is then unpacked into three main dimensions: motivational, inquiry-related, and…Read more
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31Practical Wisdom: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives (edited book)Routledge. 2021.Featuring original essays from leading scholars in philosophy and psychology, this volume investigates and rethinks the role of practical wisdom in light of the most recent developments in virtue theory and moral, social and developmental psychology. The concept of phronesis has long held a prominent place in the development of Aristotelian virtue ethics and moral education. However, the nature and development of phronesis is still in need of investigation, especially because of the new insights…Read more
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55Virtues, Democracy, and Online Media: Ethical and Epistemic Issues (edited book)Routledge. 2021.This book addresses current threats to citizenship and democratic values posed by the spread of post-truth communication. The contributors apply research on moral, civic, and epistemic virtues to issues involving post-truth culture. The spread of post-truth communication affects ordinary citizens' commitment to truth and attitudes toward information sources, thereby threatening the promotion of democratic ideals in public debate. The chapters in this volume investigate the importance of helping …Read more
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7Emozioni e virtù. Percorsi e prospettive di un tema classico (edited book)Orthotes. 2014.A partire dalla metà del Novecento, dopo una modernità dominata da prospettive di stampo deontologistico o utilitaristico, la filosofia pratica contemporanea ha visto il sorgere di una ripresa di interesse per un’etica “in prima persona”, in grado di offrire una prospettiva integrale sul soggetto e centrata sullo sviluppo del suo carattere e della sua personalità; in breve, si è assistito a un nuovo potente ingresso in scena dell’idea del bene, e, con essa, della virtù quale via maestra per cons…Read more
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196Paths to flourishing: ancient models of the exemplary lifeEthics and Education 15 (2): 144-157. 2020.The current “exemplarist turn” within virtue ethics is increasingly shedding light on the importance of exemplars both as enabling one to identify the virtues and for the importance they bear for orienting one’s conduct, as well as for educating the novice. However, even if categorizations of exemplars have already been proposed, there seems to be a lack of discussion on the kind of imitation different exemplars are supposed to elicit. In order to offer a preliminary answer to this question, in …Read more
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27Morality and Interpretation: the Principle of Phronetic CharityEthical Theory and Moral Practice 23 (2): 295-307. 2020.The recent discussions on the unity of virtue suffer from a lack of reference to the processes through which we interpret each other as moral agents. In the present paper it is argued that much light can be thrown on that crucial issue by appealing to a version of Donald Davidson’s Principle of Charity, which we call “Principle of Phronetic Charity”. The idea is that in order to treat somebody as a moral agent, one has first to attribute to them, at least pro tempore, a significant degree of pra…Read more
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43Admiration, moral knowledge and transformative experiencesHumana Mente 12 (35). 2019.In this paper, I examine the role played by the emotion of admiration in formulating moral judgments. First, I discuss whether and when admiration is a reliable source of moral knowledge, or, on the contrary, it misleads the subject, leaving her prey to forms of uncritical devotion to unworthy objects of admiration. To do so, I try to elucidate which underlying theory of emotions best allows one to characterize admiration as a reliable source of moral knowledge. Second, I introduce the notion of…Read more
Areas of Specialization
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Objections to Virtue Ethics |
Topics in Virtue Ethics |
Moral Emotion |
Aristotle: Ethics |
Thomas Aquinas |
Philippa Foot |