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In Praise of La Mitezza

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Norberto Bobbio
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Extract

Among the ancients, ethics was resolved largely through the treatment of virtues. Suffice it to recall Aristotle's Etica Nicomachea, which was for many centuries a prescribed text. In our times such a treatment has almost disappeared. Today moral philosophers discuss values and choices, on both analytical and propositional levels, and their major or minor rationality, as well as discussing rules or norms and consequently rights and duties. One of the last significant writings devoted to the classic subject of virtue was the second part of Kant's Metaphysics of Morals (Die Metaphysik der Sitten), titled The Theory of Virtue (Die Tugendlehre), the first part of which discusses the Theory of Law (Die Rechtlehre). However, Kant's ethics is especially one of duty, and more specifically of inward as distinguished from outward duty, with which the theory of law is concerned. In the former, virtue is defined as the necessary willpower to accomplish one's duty, as the moral strength required by man to fight those defects which prevent or become an obstacle to the accomplishment of duty. Kant's theory of virtue is an integral part of the ethics of duty and, as explicitly and repeatedly declared, has nothing to do with Aristotelian ethics.

Type
Overture
Information
Diogenes , Volume 44 , Issue 176 , December 1996 , pp. 3 - 18
Copyright
Copyright © 1996 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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Footnotes

*

“Meekness”.

References

Notes

1. This article was originally presented on 8 March 1983 in Milan as part of a program of lectures organized by Ernesto Treccani and supported by the Fon dazion Corrente. It has been revised and updated by the author. The original idea was to produce a "Short Dictionary of Virtues," to be examined by a number of prominent contemporaries. Having been invited to participate, the author took "meekness" (la mitezza) as his theme. This article was first pub lished in English in: ConVivio. Journal of Ideas in Italian Studies, Vol. I, No. 1 (April 1995), pp. 21-38. An earlier Italian version appeared in December 1993 in: Linea d'ombra and later in a collection of Bobbio's essays, titled Elogio della mitezza e altri scritti morali, Milan, 1994.

2. A. MacIntyre, After Virtue. A Study in Moral Theory, Notre Dame (Indiana), 1981.

3. R. Bodei, Geometria delle passioni, Milan, 1991.

4. Ibid., p. 17.

5. Ibid., p. 20.

6. G. Zagrebelsky, Il diritto mite, Turin, 1992.

7. The notion of prepotenza derives largely from politics and refers to a "despotic, tyrannical" temperament or character.

8. Aldo Capitini was a professor of education and an anti-Fascist who was repeatedly imprisoned; an organizer of pacifist movements, he is one of the outstanding Italian theoreticians of non-violence.

9. Allusion to Giordano Bruno's famous work Des fureurs héroïques (bilingual ed. with annotations by P.-H. Michel), Paris, 1954.