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Good and Evil in Recent Discussions - Good and Evil in Virtue Ethics

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Abstract

Talk about evil resonates in ways that are culturally inherited. Historical and religious dimensions of “evil” often seem to be front and center. Nevertheless, we argue that it would be too quick to dismiss the study of evil within secular ethics. We defend an outlook that is inspired by ancient ethics—also called virtue ethics—which accepts the so-called Guise of the Good account of motivation. For an agent to be motivated to perform an action, something about the action must look good to her. We argue that evil actions do not constitute exceptions to the Guise of the Good. To preserve this framework, we entertain a privative account of evil, according to which evil is the absence of the good, and yet (falsely) appears in a positive light to the agent who performs an evil action. We reject the view that evil is quantitatively extreme badness. An account of evil should permit that some instances of evil are from a third person perspective not extremely bad. On this picture, evil is agent-relative; something can be evil relative to one person without being evil relative to another person. Accordingly, several qualities—rather than only one distinctive quality—can make an action evil.

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Notes

  1. Ironically, ethicists took Anscombe to argue for a turn to “moral” psychology, though Anscombe herself speaks of philosophy of psychology.

  2. Ross’s 1908 translation of the Nicomachean Ethics, which speaks of “moral virtue” instead of the virtues of character, is to this day the most affordable edition. German translations, seemingly in the grip of Kant, fall into a similar trap and find “Sittlichkeit” in the Nicomachean Ethics.

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Correspondence to Katja Maria Vogt.

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Haas, J., Vogt, K.M. Good and Evil in Recent Discussions - Good and Evil in Virtue Ethics. ZEMO 5, 83–88 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42048-022-00122-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42048-022-00122-1

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