This chapter analyzes the dynamics of political bargaining among a firm’s internal stakeholders and the role of the virtues in addressing structural injustices that inhibit human flourishing, particularly among low-skilled employees subject to exploitative wages and discretionary managerial control. In such environments, workers may cultivate “virtues of resistance” that support practices of mutual aid, adaptive work strategies, and value articulation. These mechanisms partially mitigate the harms of organizational injustice and enhance political agency. Because these virtues are frequently “burdened,” insofar as their development and expression occur under conditions that compromise their connection to human flourishing, there is an obligation for managers to mitigate these injustices, a problem that has been largely overlooked within market ethics. Accordingly, the chapter – and the book – concludes by examining how the virtues of justice, respect, courage, and practical wisdom can inform managerial action aimed at redressing workplace injustice and promoting modes of organizational life that foster moral development or Bildung.

In the deliberation entitled, “Love Does Not Seek Its Own,” Kierkegaard develops his notion of distinctiveness [Ejendommelighed] vis-à-vis neighbor love. He introduces a dialectical tension between the duty to seek one’s own as a human task implicated by the divine gift of distinctiveness and the imperative to seek only the neighbor’s own. This chapter unpacks Kierkegaard’s notion of Eiendommelighed, its relationship to courage, Frimodighed [bold confidence], the love commands, and self-sacrifice. Despite his strongly self-sacrificial rhetoric, love demands the cultivation of one’s own distinctiveness, which itself must be understood dialectically as both being one’s own and not one’s own. A dialectical approach affords a more nuanced reading of Works of Love that better reflects the existential complexity of navigating the tension of self-development and self-sacrifice on the ground. To fulfill the duty to develop distinctiveness in both self and other, love must both seek and not seek its own.

Courage is the virtue of acting when we would rather not. This chapter looks at some of the classic situations where courage is needed, such as war and emergency response. It suggests that we need to show the sort of courage that comes from treating climate change as an emergency. Drawing on specifically Christian examples, we also consider the courage of the martyrs.

This chapter analyzes the Selbstzeugnisse of the eight merchants at the center of this study, along with a few others still in manuscript or not available in the source collection deployed in this book, to sketch the model of mercantile honor the men claimed. The chapter emphasizes that the training the merchants received was fundamental to their sense of self and that they fashioned a model of mercantile honor based on their hard work, courage, skill, honesty, and prudence. As they described their life in trade, the merchants also often took the opportunity to describe the dishonorable behavior of other merchants, thus drawing a clear contrast between themselves and the men who failed to meet their standards.

In Tusculans 2 the interlocutors discuss the value of physical pain. They swiftly agree that it is not the greatest evil but take longer to consider whether it is bad or, as the Stoics think, merely indifferent. Enduring pain is taken to be an indication of courage and manliness (virtus) and this is undermined by the claim that physical pain is not bad. Therefore neither the Epicureans nor the Stoics provide a wholly satisfactory account of the value of physical pain and its relationship to virtue.

The virtues whose function is to regulate impulses, emotions, thoughts, and habits in the interest of larger purposes, including ethical ones, are courage, patience, perseverance, and self-control. They have a different grammar from the virtues of caring. Because they are not concerns, they are not defined by the motives or reasons for action or emotion that such concerns supply. Instead, they are differentiated by the kind of impulses that they manage. The situations they address are not outward, like the ones to which the virtues of caring respond, but are states of the self. Thus, self-control is the paradigm. They contribute to our integrity, our self-possession, and our freedom as authors of our character. They don’t in themselves have moral worth, are often used for non-moral purposes, and may even be used for evil. But in the context of good character they function in support of the virtues of caring.

What does Heidegger mean by “curiosity” and why does he characterize it as a kind of epistemic vice, when most contemporary accounts view it as a virtue? Being and Time disparagingly notes that curiosity “concerns itself with a kind of knowing, but just in order to have known” (BT 217/172); the curious person busies herself with “entertaining ‘incidentals’” (BT 358/310). Building on previous work – wherein I argue that virtues are best understood as tendencies to cope well with existential obstacles to flourishing (McMullin 2019) – I show that curiosity as Heidegger frames it is an epistemically vicious misunderstanding of self and world arising in large part from our tendencies toward impatience, arrogance, and fear. Because Heidegger’s account of curiosity in Being and Time is not well-developed, we will look at nearby texts to get a better understanding of this sometimes-overlooked concept in Heidegger’s corpus.

Civil war soldiers worried a lot about cowardice in combat, something few historians have been willing to admit. The Introduction explains its importance and sets up how this book will explore the topic by focusing on two civil war regiments accused of cowardice and the lasting effects such allegations had on them. It also discusses what historian Drew Faust calls “war stories” and how constructed celebratory tales of martial glory often hide war’s chaos and horrors.

In Either/Or I, the aesthete, A, gives us the following diagnosis of his predicament: “I think I have the courage to doubt everything; I think I have the courage to fight everything. But I do not have the courage to know anything, nor to possess, to own anything.” In this chapter, I explore A’s fascinating claim that knowledge requires courage by way of juxtaposing the aesthetic life with Cartesian skeptical doubt. I show that just as the Cartesian doubter seeks refuge from radical skepticism in the safety of introspective knowledge – what is directly present to consciousness – so the aesthete seeks solace in the moment and what is sensuously present to him. Both methods ultimately prove ineffective and spurious, however: Cartesian introspection imprisons us in a mental cage with no beyond, just as aestheticism holds us captive in a self-spun world where our self dissolves. Consequently, what both the aesthete and the Cartesian need to do is to develop the strength to confront and overcome the anxieties that have motivated the flight from “the outer” (the flight from the world) in the first place.

This final chapter provides words of encouragement and hopefully inspiration.

Socrates here draws on the cyclical and kinship arguments to further explain nearly every claim made earlier in the defense speech (Chapter 3). He provides an interconnected account of virtue, happiness, moral psychology, reincarnation, and soul–body interaction. He first describes how coming to know the divine will ultimately allow the philosopher’s soul to spend the afterlife with the gods, eternally happy. By contrast, non-philosophers reincarnate because their desire for the body-like pulls them into a new body after death. Understanding this mechanism requires clarifying how Socrates thinks of the impurities in non-philosophers’ souls. After examining this, the chapter turns to how the body deceives the soul into desiring things that are not good for it. Socrates develops the account of true courage and temperance from the exchange passage (69a–e) to explain how the philosopher avoids and resists the body’s insidious effects so that the soul can pursue wisdom and so be eternally happy.

The introduction to this volume captures virtue's dizzying variety by explaining its roots in classical ethics, transformation through theological appropriation, and engagement with global wisdom traditions. We propose that the work of Shakespeare patches together virtue's many realizations, active both on the horizontal axis of Aristotelian capacity and dynamism and the vertical axis of Judeo-Christian valuation. Threading together exemplary passages from Shakespeare and previews of the volume's contributions, the introduction proposes that Shakespeare creates virtue ecologies -- worlds that allow for person-affirming capacities to be tested and flourish. Alive to virtue's textual and performative dimensions, we establish a vocabulary and background for the essays that follow.

This chapter argues that As You Like It draws from early modern and classical educational theory to stage the acquisition of virtues such as courage, justice, and sympathy, which are, in turn, central to the romance’s resolution. The play explores a classroom exercise known as ethopoeia (or “character-making”), which frequently asked students to inhabit, write from, and perform from the subject position of other genders. Inhabiting other genders can prime students’ capacities to sympathize across categories of difference, enlarging prosocial other-orientation by cultivating the sense of justice necessary to understand how hardship affects people differently and the courage to give voice to the feelings of others. The analysis closes by considering the value of ethopoeia in contemporary liberal education.

How do we strengthen our underlying character, so that we can practise law without fear? Aristotle insightfully insisted that character (virtue) does not suddenly appear; it does not just arrive one morning (in an email). We develop our character by applying ourselves to that task, usually over years. We can become ‘habituated’ to goodness by reflecting on the good and bad experiences we all have. Let us not forget that as lawyers we are guaranteed to be put under formidable pressure by clients, other lawyers and even police, to do the wrong thing. The key virtues for lawyers are wisdom and knowledge, courage and justice – they are a stable foundation for modern legal ethics. To those who say virtue ethics is too subjective, or paternal or fails to give adequate action guidance when it is needed (compared to Western duty-based frameworks), we say that virtue ethics looks first at the actor and then the act. If the actor is good, so also will be the act. Nevertheless, reflection on the connections between your virtues and various lawyer ‘types’ (the zealous advocate; the responsible lawyer; the moral activist; and the ‘relationship of care’), will strengthen your character further.

It is not too difficult to claim, in a cocktail party type of way, that global governance should be more virtuous, and that those who run our lives and our institutions should be decent human beings. That is the easy part, if only because it makes intuitive sense that what could possibly be useful in some settings (professional sports, for example) is not so appropriate in other settings. We accept ruthlessness in our professional athletes – indeed, to the point that it might be difficult for them to become truly exceptional without a ruthless streak. But we do not think that quite the same applies to judges, or high-ranking civil servants, let alone religious leaders. Not even our statespersons, even if we would want them to serve the national interest (whatever that may be), are expected to display quite the same amount or sort of ruthlessness. Michael Jordan and Cristiano Ronaldo may be single-minded and ruthless; the Dalai Lama or the Pope may not, and neither may Germany’s long-serving prime minister Angela Merkel.

The five widows of the executed conspirators and the five wives whose men were transported leave poignant records of both impoverishment and courage. Before the trials, most couples seem to have been faithful to each other, William Davidson excepted.Left with 26 children to care for between them, the women had no support other than radicals’ charity. Most disappeared miserably from history.But Susan Thistlewood and Arthur’s illegitimate son Julian made good in the long run: Julian became a Parisian painter and fathered a noted impressionist. And Ings the butcher’s letters to his wife Celia suggest a loving marriage, and she lived adequately as a widow.