PH101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Intellectual Virtue, Exact Sciences
Document Summary
"indebted to teaching for its production and growth" It is hence concerned with theoretical enquiry: moral virtue. The child of habit: moral virtues are acquired through practice (and not through theoretical reflection alone) They can thus, in a sense, be "trained" This shows that they are not natural phenomena (like e. g. gravity: we become just by performing just actions" Hence, education is of supreme importance: right conduct, dependence on circumstance. The exact answer to the question of what qualifies as a moral action will very much depend on the particular circumstances. Hence, it is possible only to give a rough outline of a general theory of conduct. Ethics is not an exact science: pleasure and pain. True education is about how to find pleasure and pain in the right thing: moral virtue is incorporated in actions, which are always accompanied by pleasure or pain. That is to say: when thinking about ethics, the first-person perspective matters crucially.
