According to Rosalind Hursthouse's virtue based account of right action, an act is right if it is what a fully virtuous person would do in that situation. Robert Johnson has criticized the account on the grounds that the actions a non-virtuous person should take are often uncharacteristic of the virtuous person, and thus Hursthouse's account of right action is too narrow. The non-virtuous need to take steps to improve themselves morally, and the fully virtuous person need not take these steps. So Johnson argues that any virtue based account of right action will have to find a way to ground a moral obligation to improve oneself. This paper argues that there is an account of virtue that can offer a partial solution to Johnson's challenge, an account where virtue is a type of practical skill and in which the virtuous person is seen as having expertise. The paper references the account of skill acquisition developed by Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus. Their research demonstrates that novices in a skill have to employ different strategies to act well than the strategies used by the experts, and so the 'virtue as skill' thesis provides support for Johnson's claim that the actions of the non-virtuous will differ from the virtuous. On the other hand, their research suggests that there is no separating the commitment to improve yourself from the possession of expertise, and so the 'virtue as skill' thesis has the resources for grounding the obligation to improve oneself in an account of virtue.
This article argues for greater realism in political theory with respect to judgements about what politicians ought to do and how they ought to act. It shows that there are major problems in deducing what a given politician should do from the value commitments that are common to liberalism and it...
We investigated relations among strengths of character in 881 students from Croatian universities. We also examined links between strengths and various well-being indices. Our conceptualization was based on the Values in Action classification system with 24 strengths organized within six superord...
This article examines a familiar urban dynamic - gentrification - in the less familiar setting of Nashville, Tennessee. In recent years, gentrification processes are accompanied by legitimating appeals to civic design trends and new cultural dynamics, particularly those associated with the New Ur...
In comparison to 2D maps, 3D mobile maps involve volumetric instead of flat representation of space, realistic instead of symbolic representation of objects, more variable views that are directional and bound to a first-person perspective, more degrees of freedom in movement, and dynamically chan...
Many environmental problems are longitudinal collective action problems. They arise from the cumulative unintended effects of a vast amount of seemingly insignificant decisions and actions by individuals who are unknown to each other and distant from each other. Such problems are likely to be eff...
Research on virtues and character strengths has increased over the past decade. The virtues in action classification (VIA; Peterson & Seligman, 2004) is a comprehensive catalogue of 24 strengths organized under six broad-band virtues purported to be ubiquitous across time and culture. This study ...
This article analyzes whether democratic deliberation enhances such as political knowledge, efficacy, trust, and preparedness for political and other collective action. The empirical analysis is based on an experiment held in November 2006 in Finland. The topic of this citizen deliberation experi...
Professionalism remains a challenging part of the medical curriculum to define, teach and evaluate. We suggest that one way to meet these challenges is to clarify the definition of professionalism and distinguish this from medical ethics.MethodsOur analysis is two staged. First, we reviewed influ...
We argue against the knowledge rule of assertion, and in favour of integrating the account of assertion more tightly with our best theories of evidence and action. We think that the knowledge rule has an incredible consequence when it comes to practical deliberation, that it can be right for a pe...
Lsquo;Compassion’-an engaging yet troublesome word? Recent studies on Thomas Aquinas prompt a reconsideration of the place of compassion as an emotion and a virtue in his treatment of the Christian moral life. Through an analysis of relevant texts in Thomas and in relation to contemporary a...
