Bibliographic record
Abstract
A Neo-Aristotelian EducationTraditional virtue ethics characteristically treats a range of topics which seldom, if ever, form the central concerns of various versions of deontology and utilitarianism.These topics include such items as moral motivation, moral character, moral education, moral wisdom, friendship and family relationships, the role of the emotions in the moral life, as well as questions about what sort of person one should be and how one should live.But the extent to which virtue ethics forms a distinctive category of ethical theory is complicated, not only by the fact that deontologists and utilitarians continue to make revisions to their theories which take into account standard objections made on behalf of virtue ethics, but also because there is more than one version of virtue ethics.So where Aristotle provides us with one brand of virtue ethics, Nietzsche gives us another, and the differences between them can be as significant as the difference between any one of them and some particular deontological or utilitarian theory.Such complications then should serve as warning shots across the bow of any attempt to give a short and quick answer to the question "What is virtue ethics?"What is needed instead is a detailed concrete working out of a particular version of a virtue ethic.Then we can see how it differs from or is similar to a particular version of deontology or utilitarianism.It is with these matters in mind that Rosalind Hursthouse in her new book, On Virtue Ethics, explores a particular virtue based ethical theory; a theory which she describes as neo-Aristotelian.Obviously her approach has its roots in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, but nonetheless deserves the "neo," not only because it does not share Aristotle's views about slavery and women, but also because the standard list of virtues includes items not found in Aristotle's list (e.g., charity and benevolence.)Moreover, contemporary ethical theory needs to consider issues about which Aristotle had little or nothing to say (e.g., can an Aristotelian ethical naturalism survive sceptical criticisms of it?)In what follows I want to consider certain aspects of Hursthouse's neo-Aristotelianism, especially as they bear upon our conception of moral education. Right ActionOne of Kohlberg's objections to a moral education based on the virtues is that recognition of a trait as a virtue provides no guidance as to what one ought to do.So even though we may agree that honesty is a genuine virtue, doing so does not help determine whether, for example, one ought or ought not to tell a friend who has been seriously injured in a car accident that the accident had killed the rest of her family.For Kohlberg, knowing the right thing to do is a matter of appealing to a defensible principle rather than, as an agent-centred virtue ethics would have it, appealing to what a virtuous agent would
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".