Paul Van Tongeren, The Art of Living Well: Moral Experience and Virtue Ethics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A major theme is the perfectionist idea of life as a work of art: "ethics is not about living in the sense of survival, but about the art of living well in such a way that life has quality, that it is good, worthwhile, 'beautiful' as a work of art" (p.75).This theme is reminiscent of Nehamas' Nietzsche: Life as Literature.The book begins with two chapters on ethics, meaning, and hermeneutics.The sub-topics covered are varied."Ethical cases" criticizes trolley problem approaches to morality."Subjective vs. objective" rejects the utilitarian equation of happiness with pleasure."Hermeneutics of moral experience" argues that moral intuitions are not explained as facts, but as interpretations.The third chapter is central, as it introduces the author's approach.It presents Aristotle's virtue ethics and contemporary thinkers like Hadot -a French expert in Hellenistic thought who regarded philosophy as a way of life.Lesserknown figures are also considered, such as Wilhelm Schmid and Joep Dohmen.Tongeren sees a gap, however, between ancient ethics and late modern advocates of the art of living well.The latter inhabit a disenchanted world where people are inevitably individuals with no foothold in tradition, social structures, or teleological views of nature (p.67).The fourth chapter discusses medieval Christians such as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, and the fifth discusses Nietzsche as part of the virtue-ethical tradition.Contra MacIntyre, who saw Nietzsche as a challenge to virtue ethics, Tonderen sees him as showing "how Greek-Christian virtue ethics can develop in a post-Christian and postmodern culture" (p.132).I would agree.Tongeren doesn't offer any novel reading here, and he avoids exclusive partisanship: "Human life cannot be captured in only one interpretation"; "ethical theories are different interpretations" of life; "hence, it is important to try to think about morality from several perspectives" (p.71).The final chapter is a bit disappointing.Rather than culminating with a synthesis of previous virtue ethics or a statement of the author's own view, we get criticism of Appiah's proposal (Experiments in Ethics, 2008) for grounding ethics in experimental psychology and the social sciences, and the suggestion
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".