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. Doing such-and-such out ofspite would always be bad, but this description is not a sample of the always-badrelevant to the discussion about kinds of action in  Modern Moral Philosophy. 2The Admirable Life and the Desirable LifeLinda Zagzebski1 INTRODUCTIONRecently virtue ethicists have given a lot of attention to the connection betweentwo senses of a good life: the moral sense and the sense of a happy or flourishinglife.Socrates insisted that a virtuous life is both necessary and sufficient forhappiness, a claim that is as hard for us to accept as it was for the jury in Socratestrial.Still, many moral philosophers continue to exercise their ingenuity inarguing that the moral life is at least necessary for the happy life, even if notsufficient, but even this weaker claim is unconvincing to many.It seems to methat whenever someone makes a claim that stretches credibility and it continuesto influence countless reflective persons for millennia, it is worth examining themotives behind it.My conjecture is that the reason for the insistence that themoral life is the happy life is that it has the potential to solve two importantproblems in meta-ethics.One is the problem of what grounds the moral.Theother is the why-be-moral problem.I suspect that it is hopeless to argue that thereis a necessary connection between virtue and flourishing as a way to solve eitherone of these problems, although I won t say it is impossible.In this chapter Ishall propose a different approach to the construction of an ethical theory.Oneof its consequences is that virtue is necessary for flourishing, but that is becauseboth virtue and flourishing are connected to something else that is the key tosolving both the grounding problem and the problem of why be moral.How would an argument for a necessary or nomological connection betweenvirtue and flourishing solve the grounding problem? It is typically assumed that the moral needs grounding, whereas flourishing does not.That assumption maybe supported by the naturalistic view that everything evaluative either reducesto, or supervenes upon, the natural.If a notion of flourishing can be devisedthat contains nothing evaluative in it, and if it can also be shown that there issome law-like connection between flourishing in this sense and moral virtue, that 54 Linda Zagzebskiwould be treated as an advance in our understanding of what virtue is.I find thisline of thought dubious on all counts, but one can understand the motive.The second problem motivating the desire to find a necessary connectionbetween virtue and flourishing is the why-be-moral problem.The idea hereis that we take for granted that there is something vaguely called flourishingor happiness, that everyone is motivated to have.By contrast, not everyone ismotivated to be virtuous.If we can show that there is a necessary, or at least a verytight, connection between virtue and flourishing, and if the non-virtuous personis at least moderately rational, we shall have given her a motive to be moral.The grounding problem and the why-be-moral problem are quite different,but I think that they lie behind much of the discussion of the relation betweenvirtue and flourishing.Some theorists are more interested in one problem than theother, and theorists with different interests tend to talk past each other.However,there are also some theorists who aim at a position on the connection betweenvirtue and flourishing that can handle both problems.Rosalind Hursthouseand Philippa Foot, for example, propose a naturalistic account of flourishingthat makes human beings continuous with plants and non-human animals(Hursthouse 1999; Foot 2001).Hursthouse goes on to argue that being virtuousis the  best bet for flourishing.Calling something a  best bet or a  reliablebet , as she also does, is clearly an appeal to motive.On Hursthouse s account,flourishing is both a ground for the virtues and a state that normal human beingspresumably desire to have: virtue is tied to flourishing both in the course ofnature and in human motivation [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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