Expansive other-regarding virtues and civic excellence

ABSTRACT

This paper is concerned with the civic significance and cultivation of three constructs that involve different ways of having an expansive and virtuous concern for others. Identification with all humanity involves caring for an expansive domain of others, identifying with humanity generally and not just with one’s ingroup. Others-centeredness involves caring about others to an expansive extent, putting others’ interests ahead of one’s own. Last, the virtues of intellectual dependability involve caring for an expansive range of others’ goods, including their intellectual goods. Our aims are to explain the nature of these traits in further detail, to present evidence of their relationship to certain kinds of civic engagement, and to identify strategies for cultivating them and educating for them.

KEYWORDS:

• Identification with all humanity
• intellectual virtue
• civic engagement
• others-centeredness
• altruism
• civic education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See The Morality of Happiness by Julia Annas (1993) for further description of the Stoics’ views of other-concern and its development (pages 267–270).

2. The book is (Byerly, 2019); the articles (Byerly 2014; Byerly & Byerly, 2016).

Additional information

Funding

Our research leading to this paper was supported through a subaward from the Self, Virtue, and Public Life Project at the University of Oklahoma, which was funded by a grant from the Templeton Religion Trust TRT0169. We gratefully acknowledge this support. The views expressed here are our own and are not those of these funders.

Notes on contributors

T. Ryan Byerly

T. Ryan Byerly is Senior Lecturer in the Philosophy Department at the University of Sheffield. His research focuses on virtue theory and philosophy of religion. His most recent books in these areas are Intellectual Dependability: A Virtue Theory of the Epistemic and Educational Ideal (2021) and Putting Others First: The Christian Ideal of Others-Centeredness (2019), both with Routledge Press.

Megan Haggard

Megan Haggard is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Francis Marion University. Her research focuses on virtue development, influence of religion on socio-political beliefs and behaviors, and the role of virtue in everyday life. She has contributed to volumes regarding the psychological understanding of humility and curiosity.