Sean McAleer

Joshua Glasgow’s (2020) is a beautiful, philosophically rich book. Here I raise five main questions and criticisms. The first argues that holistic gratitude is too demanding: someone who can muster only fragmented gratitude is not failing to do and feel what is required; thus holistic gratitude is morally optional. The second suggests ways in which the metaphors Glasgow uses to express the idea of radiant value are problematic. The third notes that radiant value seems a sort of inverted cousin of the doctrine of organic unities but points to an important analogy between them that problematizes the notion of radiant value. The fourth discusses Glasgow’s giving up on holistic gratitude in s penultimate chapter and briefly explores the strong affinities holistic gratitude to certain features of Roman Stoicism. The fifth draws on a passage from Henry James’ and the classical Chinese notion of harmony to gesture toward a conception of holistic gratitude that might, after all, provide solace for passing away.

The chapter explores the symmetry thesis, which holds that departures from or variations on the paradigms of forgiveness and gratitude are conceptually and evaluatively symmetrical or parallel: where one makes sense and is praiseworthy, the other should be too. So if third-party forgiveness makes sense, so too should third-party gratitude; if propositional gratitude makes sense, so too should propositional forgiveness; if self-gratitude makes sense, so too should self-forgiveness. The symmetry thesis fares reasonably well, initially; both third- party forgiveness and third-party gratitude turn on the quasi-legal notion of standing, and thus rise or fall together; though propositional forgiveness seems at first not even coherent, I argue that it is as coherent and appropriate as its counterpart, propositional gratitude. The symmetry thesis falters, however, at self-forgiveness and self-gratitude, since the former but not the latter is conceptually problematic because of doubts that one can wrong oneself, strictly speaking.

From the publisher: "This book is a lucid and accessible companion to Plato’s Republic, throwing light upon the text’s arguments and main themes, placing them in the wider context of the text’s structure. In its illumination of the philosophical ideas underpinning the work, it provides readers with an understanding and appreciation of the complexity and literary artistry of Plato’s Republic. McAleer not only unpacks the key overarching questions of the text – What is justice? And Is a just life happier than an unjust life? – but also highlights some fascinating, overlooked passages which contribute to our understanding of Plato’s philosophical thought."

: This essay reconstructs and evaluates Aristotle’s argument in Nicomachean Ethics IX.9 that the happy person needs friends, in which Aristotle combines his well-known claim that friends are other selves with the claim that human perception is meta-perceptual: the perceiving subject perceives its own existence. After exploring some issues in the logic of perception, the essay argues that Aristotle’s argument for the necessity of friends is invalid since perception-verbs create referentially opaque contexts in which the substitution of co-referential terms fails.

In “Doing Without Morality” Richard Kraut argues that Aristotle does not work with moral concepts such as moral rightness and duty. One of his arguments is that Aristotle treats wit as a virtue of character but not a moral virtue in Nicomachean Ethics IV.8 and that this treatment should be extended to all the virtues of character. Though sympathetic to his conclusion, I offer three reasons for thinking that wit is ill-suited to play the role in which Kraut casts it: first, what Aristotle says about wit elsewhere in the NE calls its status as a character virtue into question; second, the taxonomy of virtue and vice implicit in NE IV suggests that wit is not a full-fledged character virtue; and third, in Eudemian Ethics III.7 Aristotle holds that wit is not a virtue of character. Along the way I discuss some intriguing complexities in Aristotle’s taxonomy of virtues and vices and suggest that Aristotle has the resources to make a principled distinction between personality and character traits.

In Kant and Virtue Ethics I argue that while Kant himself does not have a virtue ethics, a virtue ethics that is recognizably Kantian is a genuine possibility. In Chapter One I criticize Martha Nussbaum's and Gary Watson's accounts of virtue ethics, and offer my own, according to which an ethical theory is a virtue ethics just in case it takes virtue to be more basic than rightness and at least as basic as goodness. I next consider and reject the arguments of three contemporary philosophers who claim that Kant has a virtue ethics. In Chapter Two I argue that neither the textual evidence Onora O'Neill adduces nor her account of maxims as life-rules supports her virtue-ethical reading of Kant. In Chapter Three I show that Nelson Potter's central argument suffers from an equivocation on its key term. In Chapter Four I argue that Christine Korsgaard is mistaken to hold that Kant offers a "motivational analysis" of rightness. In Chapter Five I argue that Kant cannot have a virtue ethics, because he believes that normative standards must be external, while virtue ethical standards are not external, and because his theory of virtue as strength of will in fulfilling one's duty fails to make virtue more basic than rightness. In Chapter Six I develop a Kantian virtue ethics grounded in autonomy. I rely on Christine Swanton's value-centered theory of virtue , according to which virtues are traits that enable their possessors to promote, express, honor and appreciate value. I argue for the value-centeredness of Kant's ethics and suggest that my Kantian virtue ethics helps us appreciate this aspect of Kant's ethics, which has been recently emphasized by Barbara Herman and Allen Wood.

I discuss Philip Pettit’s argument that appreciation is not a proper response to value because it fails to satisfy the non-iteration constraint, according to which, where V is a value and R is a response to value, R-ing V must not be distinct from R-ing R-ing V. After motivating the non-iteration constraint and conceding that appreciation fails to satisfy the constraint, I argue that the consequentialist’s preferred response to value, promotion, also violates the constraint, leaving Pettit with a dilemma: if he insists on the constraint, then promotion is not a proper response to value; if he does not insist on the constraint, then his argument against appreciation as a proper response to value fails.

In "Virtue and Right" Robert Johnson argues that virtue ethics that accept standards such as Virtuous Agent (A's x-ing is right in circumstances c iff a fully virtuous agent would x in c) are incomplete, since they cannot account for duties of moral self-improvement. This paper offers four solutions to the problem of incompleteness: the first discards Virtuous Agent and counts actions as wrong iff a vicious person would perform them; the second retains Virtuous Agent but counts self-improving actions as countererogatory: wrong but nonetheless good to do; the third replaces Virtuous Agent with a standard appealing to the Mengzian virtue of righteousness, understood as situational appropriateness; the fourth replaces Virtuous Agent with a standard that holds an action right if it promotes the agent's virtue. Each solution accommodates duties of moral self-improvement, so a virtue ethics embracing any of them would not be incomplete.

In “Doing Without Morality” Richard Kraut argues that Aristotle does not work with moral concepts such as moral rightness and duty. One of his arguments is that Aristotle treats wit as a virtue of character but not a moral virtue in Nicomachean Ethics IV.8 and that this treatment should be extended to all the virtues of character. Though sympathetic to his conclusion, I offer three reasons for thinking that wit is ill-suited to play the role in which Kraut casts it: first, what Aristotle says about wit elsewhere in the NE calls its status as a character virtue into question; second, the taxonomy of virtue and vice implicit in NE IV suggests that wit is not a full-fledged character virtue; and third, in Eudemian Ethics III.7 Aristotle holds that wit is not a virtue of character. Along the way I discuss some intriguing complexities in Aristotle’s taxonomy of virtues and vices and suggest that Aristotle has the resources to make a principled distinction between personality and character traits.

This essay reconstructs and evaluates Aristotle's argument in Nicomachean Ethics IX.9 that the happy person needs friends, in which Aristotle combines his well-known claim that friends are other selves with the claim that human perception is meta-perceptual: the perceiving subject perceives its own existence. After exploring some issues in the logic of perception, the essay argues that Aristotle's argument for the necessity of friends is invalid since perception-verbs create referentially opaque contexts in which the substitution of co-referential terms fails.

Philosophical writing on gratitude displays a pronounced preference for targeted gratitude (A’s being grateful to B for x) over propositional gratitude (A’s being grateful that p), treating the latter as a poor, less interesting cousin of the former, when it treats it at all. This paper challenges and attempts to rectify the relegation of propositional gratitude to second-class status. It argues that propositional gratitude is not only not reducible to targeted gratitude but indeed is more basic than it and that propositional gratitude is morally important because of its conceptual connections to the virtue of humility.