Love, knowledge (wisdom) and justice: Moral education beyond the cultivation of Aristotelian virtuous character

ABSTRACT

There could hardly have been a more influential twentieth-century philosophical essay than Elizabeth Anscombe’s ‘Modern moral philosophy’, in which she condemned the prevailing and competing ethics of duty and utility of her day and urged moral philosophers to abandon the search for any general conception of ‘morality’ in favour of return to Aristotle’s more particular focus on virtue and virtues as powers or qualities of good human character. While moral philosophers have not been slow to rally to this banner—with timely and useful attention to a wide range of character virtues—it was inevitable that moral educationalists would also soon turn towards understanding virtuous character to be a prime if not main concern of moral education. However, without denying that recent moral philosophical attention to virtue and virtues has been worthwhile, it is crucial to appreciate that in and of themselves such qualities mostly fall short of moral status and value and that some independent criterion of the moral cannot, as Anscombe recommended, be renounced. In this spirit, the present paper also attempts to comprehend such moral and educational significance by reference to interlinked concepts of love, knowledge and justice.

KEYWORDS:

• Virtue
• character
• morality
• love
• knowledge
• justice
• education

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

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Notes on contributors

David Carr

David Carr is Emeritus Professor of the University of Edinburgh and was until recently Professor of Ethics and Education at the University of Birmingham (UK) Jubilee Centre for the Study of Character and Virtues. He is author of four books, editor or co-editor of several major collections of essays on philosophy and/or education and his papers have appeared in such journals as Mind, Philosophy, Philosophical Quarterly, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Philosophical Studies, Journal of Value Inquiry, British Journal of Aesthetics, Educational Theory and Oxford Educational Review. Much of his work has explored aspects of virtue ethics and, more recently, the impact of literature and various other arts on moral character.