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(2011) Material ethics of value, Dordrecht, Springer.
It is the aim of material value-ethics to exhibit the a priori content peculiar to each virtue, and to extend our knowledge of the virtues as we extend our knowledge of the values in which they are founded. Hartmann's phenomenology of the virtues has an historical orientation as a heuristic procedure, but their a priori content is independent of their historical appearance. He begins with a description of the Platonic and Aristotelian virtues, proceeds to the Christian virtues, and then to those which appeared only in modern times. The Aristotelian doctrine of the mean is given special consideration; Hartmann will supplement Aristotle by introducing the specific values that are opposed to the vices of which a given virtue is the mean, arguing that a virtue is a state of moral tension between four values. These oppositional relations among these four values/disvalues require a synthesis of them. Such a synthesis may assist us in coming to grips with material value-ethics' rejection of obligation as the central category of ethics and its replacement not by a virtue-theory of morals, but an ethical personalism that grows equally out of virtue theory and the phenomenology of the person.
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-1845-6_8
Full citation:
Kelly, E. (2011). Virtue ethics, in Material ethics of value, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 151-180.
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