Moral Development and Self-Knowledge in Aristotle

Steve Makin, (Sheffield) gives a talk for the Power Structualism in Ancient Ontologies podcast series Abstract: Aristotle emphasises the role of habituation in our acquiring moral virtues, as well as other abilities. I discuss an independently engaging problem concerning the acquisition of abilities through practice, formulated in the context of Aristotle’s account of virtue development. The problem consists in a tension between two plausible claims, one [A] concerning what is required for an agent to be acting on a decision, the other [B] concerning the view a novice should have of whether they could ever possible be making the decisions required for moral development. I recommend a solution: the self-blind novice response. That solution implies that self-blindness should be pervasive among Aristotelian moral developers. And that implication is confirmed by the fact that the necessarily rare state of self-aware expertise is an important part of the Aristotelian virtue of magnanimity.

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Moral Development and Self-Knowledge in Aristotle is an episode from Power Structuralism in Ancient Ontologies by Oxford University.

This episode is 48:19 long.

This episode was published on Feb 13, 2014.

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