Moral philosophy can and ought to be a source of moral wisdom. Wisdom is a special kind of understanding, in particular, an ethical understanding of what it is to be a success as a human being, a healthy and fully formed specimen. Such understanding involves both a delicate grasp of the grammar of moral concepts and an appreciation of their import for a human life, including the philosopher’s. Virtue ethics is an important department of moral philosophy, especially for the philosophical goal of becoming wise. It consists in a careful investigation of the concepts of moral virtues (generosity, justice, the sense of duty, and so forth), both in their conceptual contours and in their importance for a human life.

This chapter focuses on four aspects of a critical philosophy of international law. First, there is a paradoxical relationship between international law and philosophy, at the same time natural and a bit tense, if not conflictual. Second, the assumptions at the heart of international law are comprised of notions/values and distinctions: universal/particular, hierarchy/equality, inclusion/exclusion, self/other, and public/private. Third, these assumptions and their interactions have three major characteristics: they have a structuring power that plays a crucial role in the determination of issues of legitimacy; the assumptions are presented as true, but this quality of truth is more posited than demonstrated; the assumptions at the core of international law are not only descriptive but also prescriptive. Fourth, all of this has an impact in terms of the legitimacy of international law. The assumptions/distinctions influence the nature, organization, and practice of the building blocks of international law and its sense of legitimacy.

This chapter rehearses the standard intellectual history of dignity, which begins in antiquity, then moves to the Italian Renaissance philosopher Pico della Mirandola and the eighteenth-century Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant, and eventually reaches the twentieth-century development of dignity as a concept that has a prominent place in national constitutions and international human rights law and in the interpretative texts and legal commentaries thereon. In a final section, the chapter revisits Kant, concluding with the thought that it might not be possible to uproot the ideology of race which Kant helped to legitimate without tracing its connections to his ideas about human dignity.

Competing with Integrity and Ethical Decision-Making challenges students to consider their responsibilities as a business leader more broadly than simply from financial, market, or legal perspective. There can also be human, social, or legal consequences from their decisions. The human and social impact of decisions should be considered at the time these decisions are being made. The distinction between integrity and ethics is explored, and differences between ethical and legal behavior are discussed. Major moral philosophies and ethical frameworks are presented and compared. Examples are provided from multiple industries. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), the Corruption Perceptions Index from Transparency International, and the Integrative Social Contracts Theory (ISCT) are presented. Ethical use of artificial intelligence is seen as an emerging concern for global leaders. The chapter ends with a set of personal guidelines for dealing with ethical dilemmas for global leaders to consider.

The Introduction sets out the study’s main claims and methodological approach and explains the wide use in this study of the term ’mimetic ethical exercises’. In the process, it explains the distinction drawn in this study between ethics and religious morality. Finally, the Introduction addresses the question of genre and theatricality when studying early modern examples of English revenge plays and explains what is unique about the plays selected for analysis.

The Introduction familiarises the reader with Galen, his life and work, and offers essential information on his engagement with ethical philosophical writings. It also provides a brief introduction to practical ethics in antiquity, and foregrounds the contribution of the present study and the methodology through which the study will explore the topic under investigation. Finally, the Introduction gives an overview of the main chapters of the book.

This chapter notes that current scholarship on Augustine’s idea of pagan virtue and current scholarship on his political thought contain different, and conflicting, interpretations of his notions of virtue and vice, or sin. This chapter proposes that to determine which interpretation is correct we need to situate Augustine’s moral thought in relation to the ancient moral tradition of eudaimonism. Oliver O’Donovan and Nicholas Wolterstorff have proposed that Augustine broke with classical eudaimonism, but this chapter argues that their interpretation of the Stoic and Platonic tradition in eudaimonism is incorrect, and that a correct understanding of this tradition leads to the conclusion that Augustine in fact remained faithful to the eudaimonist approach to ethics.

My introduction makes four closely related arguments: that the promise functions as the governing trope of James’s work, that James rearranges the moral landscape of the nineteenth-century novel, that the depictions of promise-giving in James’s fiction challenge a number of moral philosophy’s accounts of the nature of obligation, and that the relation between morality and literature is better posed in terms of form than in terms of content. I explore a range of ethical dilemmas posed by philosophers working in moral philosophy, speech act theory, and the philosophy of identity. In addition I sketch out a short history of the nineteenth-century novel, focusing on the centrality of the promise to British, French, and American writers.

Frederick Denison Maurice’s writings on the history of philosophy, from his 1839 Encyclopaedia Metropolitana article on ‘Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy’ to the various iterations of the multi-volume book that grew out of this text, are a vital and underappreciated aspect of his life’s work. Maurice ran together an idiosyncratic reading of the Old Testament with his marginally less wilful view of ancient Greek philosophy to provide a unique answer to the question of how biblical and classical heritages might be reconciled by Christians. But his history did more than this, building on the ideas of Coleridge to trace essential connections between philosophy, morality, and politics and telling a story about the development of the family, the nation, and the church, in a way that provides distinctive insight into Maurice’s core commitments. The resulting narrative was also capacious enough to change emphasis over different editions, most obviously as Maurice’s interest in various other global religious and intellectual traditions grew, and he began to seek a history that was more about the place of Anglicanism in the world, and not simply about its place in the polity.

The Chinese Civil Code went into effect on January 1, 2021, as the first civil code in the Communist China. Half a century of codification effort finally resulted in this much anticipated code. In its 1260 articles, the Code is divided into seven books. In a break with civilian traditions, the Chinese Civil Code divides obligations into contracts and torts, and it absorbs law of unjust enrichment into the book on contracts as quasi-contracts. Also, the book on law of personality focuses on privacy and data protection in an effort to tackle the legal challenges posed by the advancement of technology. Some of the problems that still need to be addressed for the Code to become successful come from the tensions between the rise of private law and the dominant state sector, the contradictions among legal transplants, and the clash between distributive and commutative justice. The author argues that solutions to some persistent problems require structural change in Chinese economy, doctrinal innovation, and conscientious acceptance of a law that is based upon philosophical ideas that differ from traditional Chinese moral philosophy.

This chapter argues that Cicero’s discussion of decorum in De Officiis (1.93-151) represented a striking innovation—both within Cicero’s Roman milieu and in the Greek tradition of his source, Panaetius—for its importation of an aesthetic term, to prepon, into the sphere of ethics. Panaetius’ adoption of this term for philosophical purposes was clever, and one of several innovations that foreshadowed important trends in later philosophy. For Cicero, writing during dramatic social and political upheaval, Panaetius’ innovation represented an opportunity that suited the times. Caesar’s accession had brought profound changes, encouraging a shift from the traditional activities of public self-display to a focus on private self-care and a self-display predicated on written works; as Cicero himself puts it at Off. 2.3, if Caesar had not abolished republican governance, he would still be delivering speeches, not writing philosophy. Moral behavior at Rome had long been governed by exempla, public acts by (usually) public men. By borrowing Panaetius’ suggestion that moral goodness could also be understood in private (and expressly literary/rhetorical terms), Cicero laid the groundwork for a remarkably durable idea in Roman culture, and one with particular resonance in the Augustan period, as Horace’s Ars Poetica shows.