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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 April 2013
Ought you to cultivate your own virtue? Various philosophers have argued that there is something suspect about directing one's ethical attention towards oneself in this way. These arguments can be divided between those that deem aiming at virtue for its own sake to be narcissistic and those that consider aiming at virtue for the sake of good behaviour to involve a kind of doublethink. Underlying them all is the assumption that epistemic access to one's own character requires an external point of view that is, in principle, available to anyone. If cultivating virtue is concerned with forming one's dispositions as these appear to the external point of view, then these charges of narcissism and doublethink can be brought. However, there is another kind of access to one's own character. Since character is manifest in the practical structure of experience, reflection on that practical structure itself is reflection on one's character. Neither the charge of narcissism nor the charge of doublethink can be brought against this phenomenological cultivation of the practical structure of experience. Although not sufficient alone to provide all the information required for the task, phenomenological reflection is essential to the ethical cultivation of virtue.
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31 This paper was developed through talks given at the Human Nature and Experience conference at the University of the West of England in August 2011, South Place Ethical Society in October 2011, and a workshop on Charles Larmore's The Practices of the Self at Tilburg University in May 2012. I am grateful to the organisers and participants of those events for discussions that refined the ideas in this paper, and to Clea Rees for comments on an early draft.
