La realtà è iconoclastica: forme del realismo in Iris Murdoch (e C.S. Lewis)

The purpose of this paper is to highlight that the word ‘realism’ has a complex status in Iris Murdoch’s thought, since it refers to different (while converging) meanings: a metaethical thesis, a methodological practice and an existential position which is surprisingly analogous to that phenomenologically described in C.S. Lewis’s work A Grief Observed. I have therefore three tasks: i) giving and account of the debate on moral realism as a metaethical theory in Iris Murdoch; ii) analyzing her ‘methodological’ and ‘existential’ realism; iii) showing the symmetries among Murdoch’s existential realism and C.S. Lewis’s on

Virtue ethics: an anti-moralistic defence

open1The aim of this paper is to single out four main kinds of ethical moralism, which might be associated to virtue ethics, and to offer a virtue-ethical response to each. By doing so, I aim at defending virtue ethics, properly understood, from the intrinsic danger of a moralistic drift. I begin by proposing a definition of moralism and a list of its main forms. I define moralism as the "perception of a moral judgment as coming from outside the agent", and I single four main forms out, which I label Inflexibility moralism (IM), Pervasivity moralism (PM), Extremeness moralism (EM) and Unentitlement moralism (UM). Then, I list the main features of the virtue-ethical perspective I embrace, and finally, I argue that such normative approach can prevent a moralistic drift, insofar as it effectively avoids the mentioned charges. Thus, I conclude that a virtue-ethical approach, thanks to its capacity of reconciling reasons and motives, and to its proposing a first-personal perspective on morality, has an advantage in presenting moral requirements in a non-moralistic fashion.openVaccarezza, SVaccarezza,

Santi, eroi e l’unità delle virtù. Una proposta esemplarista di educazione morale

This article sheds light on moral education from an exemplarist perspective. Following Linda Zagzebski's Exemplarist Virtue Theory, we relate several fundamental exemplarist intuitions to the classical virtue ethical debate over the unity-disunity of the virtues, to endorse a pluralistic exemplar-based approach to moral education ("Empe"). After a few preliminary remarks, we argue that Empe amounts to defending "a prima facie" disunitarist perspective in moral theory, which admits both exemplarity in all respects (moral sainthood) and single-domain exemplarity (moral heroism). Then, we evaluate the effectiveness of heroes and saints for moral education, according to four criteria derived from Empe. This analysis allows us to conclude that moral education should value both kinds of exemplars and, therefore, adopt weaker standards of exemplarity than the unitarist's ones

Ergon and Practical Reason. Anscombe’s Legacy and Natural Normativity

One of Elizabeth Anscombe’s most decisive legacies is the rejection of modern legalistic morality, in the name of a rescue of Aristotelian-inspired natural normativity. However, as I will argue in this contribution, this legacy does not seem to have been fully collected, neither by those who, like Philippa Foot, are explicitly inspired by Anscombe’s work, nor by those who, while apparently opposing its assumptions, have also somehow recovered it by different routes, as emblematically does Christine Korsgaard in her constitutivist proposal. In more detail, I aim to explore the relationship between teleology and normativity at the crossroads between neo-Aristotelian naturalism and constitutivism: both theories, though opposed, rest normativity on a link between function (the Aristotelian ergon) and practical reason and fail precisely in declining this relationship convincingly

Virtue

Was Iris Murdoch a virtue ethicist? At first sight, it would appear that she was not. She does not offer an explicit definition of account of the term ‘virtue’, and there are significant differences between her views and those of standard Aristotelian virtue ethicists. There is no reason, however, to think that the standard Aristotelian view represents the only legitimate form of virtue ethics. In this chapter, I begin by recalling (in section 1) the main commonalities between Murdoch’s criticisms of the prevailing moral theories of her time and those of other first-wave virtue-ethicists. I then highlight (in section 2) some cornerstones of Murdoch’s peculiar approach to morality, which represent the background against which her account of virtue is developed, and I propose to trace these cornerstones back to a more diverse range of influences than the standard version of Aristotelianism. In section 3, I sketch the basics of Murdoch’s account of virtue, and I argue that there are at least three routes to vindicate it as a genuine virtue-ethical approach: the Buddhist, the Kantian and the Socratic-Aristotelian. I explore each of these routes in turn in sections 4, 5, and 6. In conclusion, I argue that the virtue-ethical field would benefit a great deal from the kind of pluralistic account of virtue that Murdoch offers

Virtue ethics: an anti-moralistic defence

The aim of this paper is to single out four main kinds of moralism, which might be associated to virtue ethics, and to offer a virtue-ethical response to each. By doing so, I aim at defending virtue ethics, properly understood, from the intrinsic danger of a moralistic drift. I begin by proposing a definition of moralism and a list of its main forms. Then, I list the main features of the virtue-ethical perspective I embrace, and finally, I argue that such normative approach can prevent a moralistic drift. Thus, I conclude that a virtue-ethical approach, thanks to its capacity of reconciling reasons and motives, and to its proposing an agent-related perspective on morality, has an advantage in presenting moral requirements in a non-moralistic fashion