In Behemoth, Hobbes says "that what one calls vice, another calls virtue, as their present affections lead them" and that "[t]he virtue of a subject is comprehended wholly in obedience to the laws of the commonwealth." This claim is debunking – nothing more to virtue than obedience to law – and commendatory – understanding that’s one duty is to obey the law is the mark of virtue. Any tension can be resolved by supposing that while virtue does not exist outside of civil society, once civil society is established, virtue becomes possible though the ability of subjects to conform their actions to their sovereign’s law. Yet Hobbes also says that the "Science" of the laws of nature is the "true and onely Moral Philosophy", and thus also the "science of Vertue and Vice," that the laws of nature oblige in the state of nature (in conscience), and suggests in various ways both that it is possible (though dangerous) to be a virtuous or "Just man" in the state of nature and that such men may have an important role to play in establishing civil society. This chapter explores the puzzles raised by Hobbes’s discussion in Leviathan of virtue and duty to obey the law.

Implicitly addressing the French Revolution, most of these Tales advocated avoiding revolution in Britain by changing the culture and composition of the ruling class. Critiquing the mores and rule of the aristocracy, Eliza Parsons, Maria Hunter, Mary Ann Hanway, Mary Charlton and anonymous others advocated admitting capable, genteel, nouveau riche merchants and professionals, or sometimes humane and competent country gentlemen, into the ruling elite. They also intimated that elite culture should consist of the proto-Victorian values championed by their exemplary merchants, professionals and/or country gentlemen and independent working women and by the marriage of “manners and morals” they modeled. Placing their exemplary protagonists in the wealthy mercantile, professional and gentry classes and showing these groups socializing and intermarrying accords with recent scholarly accounts of the conduct of these classes in the provinces, as they began to consolidate into a Victorian upper middle class.

This chapter offers a close reading of Part II of Heinrich von Ofterdingen. The second part of the novel introduces the reader to a sightly later period in Heinrich’s life, after the tragic event of Mathilde’s death. Heinrich is now a wandering Pilgrim who has returned to a dream-like version of his homeland in Thuringia. He has a vision of Mathilde and their child that awakens his wish to be reunited with his beloved. Heinrich meets Cyane, who, he learns, was his sister in a previous life. Cyane then introduces Heinrich to Doctor Sylvester, and the two engage in conversation about nature, evil, virtue, and conscience.

Many in the founding generation believed that a virtuous citizenry would protect against abuses of power in a democracy. But their experience during the period of the Articles of Confederation revealed the limits of republican virtue as a check on abuses of power and underscored the challenge of limiting the opportunities for minority and majority factions to impose their will on their fellow citizens.

This chapter serves as a reference point for the subsequent discussion of Kant in two ways. First, it systematically examines a reciprocal relationship between the idea of committing oneself to a normative principle of action and the concept of moral character. On one hand, by committing to a normative principle, a person not only decides how to act in the present moment but also views this decision as a precedent for future actions, thus projecting themselves as a consistent character into future situations of choice. On the other hand, to genuinely commit to a principle, a person must act in accordance with it consistently and non-accidentally. As will be explored in later chapters, Kant can be interpreted as defending similar claims, thereby aligning with our common-sense understanding of character. Second, the chapter offers a more detailed outline of the Aristotelian conception of moral character and its underlying motivation, also linking character to commitment to a normative principle. This outline serves as a contrast for the discussion of Kant in the chapters that follow.

Drawing from both the medieval Scholastic philosophical-theological tradition and Aristotelian virtue ethics, Thomas Aquinas offers a comprehensive and nuanced account of the virtuous life – one that suggests fruitful relationships not only with contemporary philosophical and theological discussions but also with recent empirical work. In this short chapter, I sketch the big picture using an Aristotelian, four-causes approach. Section 1 mainly addresses the final cause or telos of virtue: ultimately, perfect happiness in eternal life – although a good earthly life affords “a certain participation” in happiness. Section 2 considers virtue’s quasi-material causes: reason and the appetites, including the intellectual appetite or will. Section 3 focuses on the formal causes (modes) of virtue in general and of the cardinal and theological virtues in particular, as well as the relationships between various virtues in the larger structure of Thomistic virtue ethics – including the possibility of a unity of the virtues. And Section 4 discusses proposed efficient causes of such virtues, drawing on the various ways in which virtues are developed and related to each other in the Thomistic picture. Throughout, I consider connections between Aquinas’s account of the virtuous life and contemporary work in ethics, psychology, and education.

Following Allen Wood, Leibniz’s theodicy can be seen as both totalitarian – it claims that divine wisdom informs every single part of creation – and wholesale – it proves this only in general terms. This chapter explores the criteria Leibniz considers to be criteria of goodness and how he argues, in wholesale fashion, for their instantiation. Leibniz’s criteria can be divided into two categories: metaphysical, which concern properties and features of being as such, and anthropocentric, which bear on the morality and happiness of human beings. What unites them is an overarching conception of goodness as rational intelligibility: a maximally good world provides a maximal number of actual opportunities for rational creatures to appreciate its goodness and thereby perfect themselves. Closer attention to Leibniz’s handling of criteria, however, reveals a danger that anthropocentric ultimately dissolve into metaphysical criteria, the practical into the theoretical. As a result, Leibniz’s project is threatened with dialectical contradiction: the existential concerns that govern his theodicy’s underlying motivation cannot be articulated in the theoretical terms of its execution.

This chapter begins the work of showing how the Phenomenology effects a transition from Kantian to Hegelian theodicy. It begins with Hegel’s exposition of self-consciousness, since this sets the terms for his subsequent analyses. Indeed, the famous ‘Self-Consciousness’ chapter thematises the very possibility of criteria of goodness by unfolding elementary structures of human autonomy. The chapter then turns to Hegel’s developmental account of Kant’s understanding of freedom as autonomy, which functions simultaneously as a critique: he presents Kant’s practical thought as the result of a progressive, rational development, while also diagnosing it as the product of a series of abstractions and reifications, whereby Kant conflates his insight into the nature of freedom with a certain methodologically individualistic metaphysics of the human being. The chapter focuses on the first of three key phases in the Phenomenology that engage with Kantian theodicy and its underlying view of the will, namely the somewhat satirical presentation of ‘Virtue’, which Hegel classifies as a shape of ‘Reason’. By charting the interrelated views of goodness and the will that produce and are produced by ‘Virtue’, we can uncover a developmental logical that leads to the Kantian idea of freedom as self-authorship.

Dante traces the question of happiness to our nature, knowledge of which is available.His decision to persist in rational inquiry is not arbitrary as rests on such knowledge. At the heart of Paradiso Dante speaks with his ancestor Cacciaguida about Florentine politics and nobility because the needed self-knowledge is gained through reflection on political life. From the contemplative unity characteristic of the previous Heaven to the political conflict in Mars is an ascent.

The key discussion concerns how candidly Dante’s poem should express the truth. The literary question points to the political problem of posed by the enduring tensions among human goods, and these tensions disclose the conflicts inherent in an embodied mind. Among beings that desire and reason, that are “mortal” and aware of their mortality, there is decisive inequality, inequality regarding the willingness and ability to discern truth.The scope of this difference defies the possibility that good can be understood by deduction from a principle or law, making it a matter for inquiry. The life devoted to this inquiry, as indicated in these central Cantos, is available here and now and grounds every genuinely common good. Dante calls his epic of self-reflection a “comedy.”

While many scholars have argued that Augustine’s theology of grace underwent a shift around 418, making the grace of faith more inward, Chapter 5 proposes that instead, Augustine’s vocabulary of faith simply expands to encompass hopeful and loving faith, which are due to inward graces. Augustine’s expanded vocabulary can be seen especially through his distinction between three different senses of credere (believing). Credere Christum – believing truths about Christ – is necessary for true virtue, since faith orders actions to their ultimate end, but is not sufficient for it. Credere Christo – believing Christ – justifies when motivated by hope. Hope is both the desire for the grace to love and the first beginning of love by grace. Hope therefore explains many puzzles in Augustine’s mature theology of grace. Lastly, credere in Christum – believing in Christ – is a synecdoche for faith, hope, and love. It signifies not merely the means to righteousness but participation in Christ and the very essence of human righteousness.

This chapter explores Aristotle’s intellectual development, methodological distinctiveness, and ethical thought, particularly as expressed in the Nicomachean Ethics. It begins with an account of Aristotle’s biography, including his long association with Plato, his departure from Athens, and the eventual founding of his own school, the Lyceum. A crucial distinction is drawn between the genres of Platonic and Aristotelian texts: Plato’s dialogues are literary-philosophical compositions, while Aristotle’s surviving works are mostly lecture notes. The chapter argues that this difference in genre has shaped interpretive traditions. Central to Aristotle’s ethics is the idea that observation of human life, rather than abstract theorizing, grounds our understanding of the good. Ethics, he argues, must be treated with appropriate imprecision due to its practical and variable subject matter. Happiness (eudaimonia), for Aristotle, is not pleasure or honor but a life of activity in accordance with virtue, achieved through habituation and deliberate choice. Virtue is conceived as a mean between extremes and guided by phronêsis (practical wisdom). The chapter concludes by emphasizing Aristotle’s belief in the divine dimension of human flourishing and his view that ethics, properly understood, is inseparable from civic life and human interrelation within the polis.

This chapter explains and defends Kierkegaard’s conception of neighbor love as a duty against Kant’s well-known claim that a duty to love is “absurd,” because we do not have volitional control of our emotions. For Kierkegaard, neighbor love is a “passion of the emotions” that requires humans to love all other humans. I distinguish short-term occurrent emotions from long-term, dispositional emotions, and neighbor love is the latter kind of emotion, which Kierkegaard calls a “higher immediacy” or “immediacy after reflection.” We do not have volitional control of the former, but the long-term dispositional character of the latter means that over time they can be fostered or inhibited. Emotions are understood using Robert Roberts’s view that emotions are “concern-based construals.” The ground of neighbor love is a recognition of the “inner glory” that all humans possess as creatures made in God’s image. Neighbor love is good because it recognizes the value that humans possess, but it is a duty because it is required by God, who has the standing to make such a demand on humans. God has this standing both because God has created humans from nothing but also because God is love and destines humans for a loving relation with him that “does not end at a grave.” God requires humans to love their neighbors both because it is good, and because God knows that human sinfulness requires that love be a duty. Although neighbor love is a duty, it is also a virtue, though one that requires divine assistance to acquire. It is a virtue not only because of its goodness, but because it contributes to human flourishing by securing three goods humans naturally desire: perseverance of our loves, autonomy, and meaning or significance. To the degree that neighbor love is actualized as a virtue, its status as a duty becomes less important, though it does not cease to be a duty for anyone short of eternity, unless that person is a perfected saint.

Melissa Merritt aims to locate one of the limits of Kant’s Aristotelianism. While it is widely supposed that Aristotle is the most relevant ancient reference point for Kant’s conception of virtue as “moral strength of will” (6:405), Merritt argues that Kant draws primarily on Stoic ethics. Much of what may seem Aristotelian in Kant’s remarks about virtue — such as his likening it to “the state of health proper to a human being” (6:384) — should be read as nods to a pervasive tendency of ancient Greek thought, which views ethics as a dimension of natural teleology. Ethics, so conceived, is centrally concerned with how the human being develops naturally towards the telos of virtue, conceived as the completion of our essentially rational nature. While this is a feature common to Aristotelian and Stoic ethics, Merritt argues that Kant favors a specifically Stoic approach, one that has a notion of “appropriate” or completion-promoting action — officium — at its heart.