Virtue theory

Virtues, broadly understood as stable and robust dispositions for certain responses across morally relevant situations, have been a growing topic of interest in psychology. A central topic of discussion has been whether studies showing that situations can strongly influence our responses provide evidence against the existence of virtues (as a kind of stable and robust disposition). In this review, we examine reasons for thinking that the prevailing methods for examining situational influences are limited in their ability to test dispositional stability and robustness; or, then, whether virtues exist. We make the case that these limitations can be addressed by aggregating repeated, cross-situational assessments of environmental, psychological and physiological variables within everyday life—a form of assessment often called ecological momentary assessment (EMA, or experience sampling). We, then, examine how advances in smartphone application (app) technology, and their mass adoption, make these mobile devices an unprecedented vehicle for EMA and, thus, the psychological study of virtue. We, additionally, examine how smartphones might be used for virtue development by promoting changes in thought and behavior within daily life; a technique often called ecological momentary intervention (EMI). While EMA/I have become widely employed since the 1980s for the purposes of understanding and promoting change amongst clinical populations, few EMA/I studies have been devoted to understanding or promoting virtues within non-clinical populations. Further, most EMA/I studies have relied on journaling, PDAs, phone calls and/or text messaging systems. We explore how smartphone app technology provides a means of making EMA a more robust psychological method, EMI a more robust way of promoting positive change, and, as a result, opens up new possibilities for studying and promoting virtues.

Positive and humanistic psychology overlap in thematic content and theoretical presuppositions, yet positive psychology explicitly distances itself as a new movement, despite the fact that its literature implicitly references its extensive historical grounding within humanistic psychology. Consequently, humanistic psychologists both celebrate diffusion of humanistic ideas furthered by positive psychology, and resent its disavowal of the humanistic tradition. The undeniably close alignment of these two schools of thought is demonstrated in the embracing of eudaimonic, in contrast to hedonic, conceptions of happiness by positive psychology. Eudaimonic happiness cannot be purely value-free, nor can it be completely studied without using both nomethetic and idiographic (i.e., quantitative and qualitative) methods in addressing problems of value, which identifies positive psychology clearly as a humanistic approach, despite its protestations.

In recent years, it has been argued more than once that situations determine our conduct to a much greater extent than our character does. This argument rests on the findings of social psychologists such as Stanley Milgram, who have popularized the idea that we can all be brought to harm innocent others. An increasing number of philosophers and ethicists make use of such findings, and some of them have argued that this so-called situationist challenge fatally undermines virtue ethics. As virtue ethics is currently the most popular underpinning for ethics education in the military, it is important to know to what extent the claim situationists make is correct. Fortunately, a closer look indicates that an interactionist perspective, with our character and the situation interplaying, is more accurate than the situationist perspective.

Whilst media and political rhetoric in Britain is sceptical and often outright damning of the (presumed) morals and behaviours of the White marginalized poor, our aim is to explore the conditions under which successful communities are nevertheless built. Specifically, we examine the features of community and stress its importance both for belonging and bonding around shared norms and practices and for fostering the necessary bridging essential for interacting and cooperating with others. In considering what it means to foster a community that acts as a breakwater against the tides of stigma or disadvantage, we pay special attention to what we will call enabling conditions – essential features that communities either can or should be able to provide or that exist independent of communities and are indispensable for accessing opportunities in the wider society. We detail the dynamics of White poverty and exclusion before turning our attention to possible responses to these challenges.

'Genius, cannot be taught,’ Ralph Waldo Emerson reports, reiterating Socrates’s conclusion in Plato’s Meno. This article considers this claim and its significance for moral education, specifically in modern science, by focusing on Emerson’s account of genius and the virtue of self-trust that perfects it. Genius, for Emerson, does not refer only to extraordinary works or persons. It is also the creative action of the soul to be cultivated by all. Self-trust, in which all the virtues are realized, is its chief virtue. Emerson knows that virtue begins but does not end in imitation. The goal of moral education is not simply to ape the virtues of those we love and admire, but to cultivate the virtues needed to innovate on received models, to excel by pressing beyond exemplars who have gone before. Can genius, then, be taught? Emerson’s answer is not so simple as it may appear at first blush.

Although long-established military virtues, such as honor, courage and loyalty, are what most armed forces today still use as guiding principles in an effort to enhance the moral behavior of soldiers, much depends on whether the military virtues adhered to by these militaries suit a particular mission or military operation. Clearly, the beneficiaries of these military virtues are the soldiers themselves, fellow-soldiers, and military organizations, yet there is little that regulates the behavior of soldiers towards civilian populations. As a result, troops trained for combat in today's missions sometimes experience difficulty in adjusting to the less aggressive ways of working needed to win the hearts and minds of local populations after major combat is over. It can be argued that today's missions call for virtues that are more inclusive than the traditional ones, which are mainly about enhancing military effectiveness, but a convincing case can be made that a lot can already be won by interpreting these traditional virtues in different ways.

This volume offers an integrated approach to the main traditional virtues, exploring their possible relevance and proposing new ways of interpretation that are more in line with the military tasks of the 21st century.

Addressing the ‘virtue conflation’ problem requires the preservation of intuitive distinctions between virtue types, i.e, between intellectual and moral virtues. According to one influential attempt to avoid this problem proposed by Julia Driver (2003), moral virtues produce benefits to others—in particular, they promote the well-being of others—while the intellectual virtues, as such, produce epistemic good for the agent. We show that Driver’s demarcation of intellectual virtue, by adverting to the self/other distinction, leads to a reductio, and ultimately, that the prospects for resolving the virtue conflation problem look dim within an epistemic consequentialist axiology.

Every religious tradition recognises certain persons as being exemplars of a religious life. These religious exemplars are typically described as not only morally and spiritually accomplished, but also as beautiful. I argue that the beauty of religious exemplars consists in their expression in forms of bodily comportment of virtues, thereby endorsing a virtue-centric theory of beauty and connecting it with exemplarist virtue theory.

Several authors have recently begun to apply virtue theory to argumentation. Critics of this programme have suggested that no such theory can avoid committing an ad hominem fallacy. This criticism is shown to trade unsuccessfully on an ambiguity in the definition of ad hominem. The ambiguity is resolved and a virtue-theoretic account of ad hominem reasoning is defended.

The central idea of Philippa Foot’s Natural Goodness is that moral judgments belong to the same logical kind of judgments as those that attribute natural goodness and defect to plants and animals. But moral judgments focus on a subset of human powers that play a special role in our lives as rational animals, namely, reason, will, and desire. These powers play a central role in properly human actions: those actions in which we go for something that we see and understand as good. Many readers of Foot resolutely ignore what she says about the human good being sui generis and obstinately continue to read her as advocating a version of naturalism grounded in empirical study of human nature. One might wonder how else it could count as a naturalistic view unless we could square the view with nature as studied by the empirical sciences. In this paper, I propose a metaphysical response to this question: help can come from turning to recent defenses of Aristotelian essentialism. Foot’s naturalism can square with nature as interpreted through the lens of Aristotelian essentialism. On such a view, the virtues are perfections of human powers including reason, will, and desire.

This paper articulates an egalitarian conception of judicial humility and justifies its value on the grounds that it importantly advances the legal and political ideal of fraternity. This account of the content and value of the virtue of humility stands in sharp contrast with the dominant view of judicial humility as deference or judicial restraint. The paper concludes by discussing some ways in which the account of humility and of its value provided in the paper furthers our understanding of the judicial virtues and of the political implications of giving virtue a role in adjudication.

Tales of unethical reporting, conflict of interest, biases, and corruption
characterize media practice in Zambia today. The advent of technology and the mushrooming of media houses have ironically magnified this trend. Such tendencies have compromised ethical reporting, thus undermining journalistic credibility. While some scholars call for a return to African ethics, others hanker for greater professionalism.
This study offers an overview of the media in Zambia with Zambia National Broadcasting Corporation and The POST Newspaper as its case study. The study looks at how virtue ethics would be effective in reclaiming media credibility. Using qualitative methods, data were collected via theoretical and methodological triangulation. Open-ended questions were designed and distributed among 10 Zambian journalists. The interviews were conducted within a period of one month. Findings indicated that media credibility in Zambia has reached unprecedented
levels of suspicion and that virtue ethics, if well applied, would redeem the lost credibility.

In what precedes, I have argued that Aristotle does not, in his ethics, commit three metaphysical errors sometimes imputed to him: he does not define the good as a fact; he does not claim that human beings move by nature towards their telos; he does not claim, in the ergon argument, that human beings are fixed rather than versatile. Instead, I have shown, he does the opposite in each case: he argues that the good cannot be defined as a fact; he claims that human beings move towards their telos only if they have virtue and virtue is not by nature; he locates, in the human ergon, that which is responsible for human versatility. Finally, I have shown by example that the metaphysical commitments of Aristotle's account of human happiness are not as controversial as they seem. If all of this is true, then perhaps the disorder that has existed in ethics since the enlightenment has been misdiagnosed. Perhaps it is not due to an unhappy choice between end-neutral emotivism on the one hand and Aristotle's bad metaphysics on the other. Perhaps instead it is due, at least in part, to a too hasty rejection of Aristotle's ethics on the grounds of a rejection of his biology.

Discussing the notion of " epistemic emotions " as proposed by Morton (2010), and his argument for which intellectual virtues will be " hard to attain " without those emotions, I introduce the thesis for which epistemic emotions constitute one of the building blocks of intellectual virtues, in order to provide an explanation of the cognitive process that binds the two. Epistemic emotions are building blocks, as: (1) motivational component, and (2) transformative component, and they assay their causal role as necessary components (but not sufficient) of intellectual virtues. Framing the argument within virtue responsibilism, I explain the machinery that leads from epistemic emotions to intellectual virtues, and then from those to affective abilities, stressing the role of training in the process of transformation of the agent in the epistemic journey. Affective abilities, as the refined epistemic emotions that are ready to use within the practice of intellectual virtues, are the secure and beneficial dispositions that enhance the responsible practice of cognition.

The author applies virtue theory (virtue epistemology and virtue ethics in particular) to the question of legal education and examines the prospects of a virtue-based discourse in this context. Following the Aristotelian distinction between intellectual and moral virtues, he argues that law schools need to equip students – besides appropriate skills and knowledge of legal regulations – with intellectual and moral virtues necessary for a socially productive legal practice. Identifying lawyerly virtues and exploring the ways they can be fostered in a university environment might be the first steps to change the exaggeratedly formalistic thinking that seems to characterize legal education and legal practice in the CEE region. El autor aplica la teoria de la virtud (epistemologia y etica de la virtud, en particular) a la cuestion de la educacion juridica, y, en ese contexto, examina las perspectivas futuras de un discurso basado en la virtud. Siguiendo la distincion aristotelica entre v...

The main tenet that this paper aims to establish is that judicial virtue is necessary for successful legal interpretation. Theories of interpretation are exceedingly useful devices to guide and assess judicial reasoning, but they are limited in that the soundness of their outcomes is dependent upon the possession and exercise of judicial virtue. Thus, a theory of judicial character is inextricably linked with a theory of legal interpretation. After sustaining this claim, the paper then provides an account of the structure of judicial virtue according to which judicial virtue is best understood as analogous to a practical skill. Next, it sketches a preliminary account of the kinds of character traits that are necessary for virtuous adjudication. Finally, the essay concludes by explicating the main elements -which are needed to arrive at justified judicial decisions but that no theory of interpretation may supply- that a virtuous judge brings to the process of legal interpretation. What results is a view of constitutional and statutory interpretation in which judicial virtue takes central stage.

Until fairly recently it was not uncommon for political theorists to hold the view that people cannot be expected to act in accordance with the public interest without some incentive. Authors such as Marcus Tullius Cicero, John Locke, David Hume and Adam Smith, for instance, held that people often act in accordance with the public interest, but more from a concern for their honour and reputation than from a concern for the greater good. Today, most authors take a more demanding view, maintaining that people are to be just solely from a love for justice, not from a fear of losing face. In this article today’s prevailing view, which sees honour as something obsolete and archaic and not as a legitimate motive, is contrasted with the older view that honour is important for both knowing what moral is and acting on it. Subsequently, it is argued that the ethics of honour, especially in the form it took in the works of Hume and Smith, can still be of value, exactly because it is less demanding.

Although most cultures have held honorableness to be a virtue of the first importance, contemporary analytic ethicists have just begun to consider honor’s nature and ethical worth. In this essay, I provide an analysis of the honor ethos and apply it to business ethics. Applying honor to business may appear to be a particularly challenging task, since (for reasons I discuss) honor has traditionally been seen as incompatible with commerce. Nonetheless, I argue here that two of the central virtues of the honor ethos—competiveness and magnificence—are perfectly apt ones for rich business executives, who plausibly can be expected to work more for prestige and the thrill of competition than for wealth itself. In addition to making top executives more honorable people, the virtues of competitiveness and magnificence would have positive social effects: honorable competitiveness would intrinsically dispose executives to shun anti-competitive practices, and magnificence would encourage tycoons to redistribute their fortunes voluntarily through philanthropy.

This volume aims to expand the reach of virtue theory beyond the confines of virtue ethics and virtue epistemology, while at the same time revealing how discussions of narrativity and self may inform work in virtue theory. The task we set before us is one that moves discussion forward into issues of philosophical psychology, action theory, and the philosophy of mind. Comparatively little work has been done to show how virtue may inform debates in these important areas of philosophical research. The exercise of virtuous character arises from a disposition to act in certain ways and those dispositions may be formed in part by what is constitutive of the self or the story we tell about ourselves. Similarly, what the self is and how we talk about the self may inform discussion of virtuous character and human flourishing. Virtue theorists have only begun to consider the ways in which research in action theory and the philosophy of mind can enrich theorising about virtue, right action, and human flourishing. Our hope for this volume is to begin a sustained and fruitful dialogue between virtue theorists, action theorists, and philosophers of mind.

A new way to transpose the virtue epistemologist's 'knowledge = apt belief ' template to the collective level, as a thesis about group knowledge, is developed. In particular, it is shown how specifically judgmental belief can be realised at the collective level in a way that is structurally analogous, on a telic theory of epistemic normativity (e.g., Sosa 2020), to how it is realised at the individual level-viz., through a (collective) intentional attempt to get it right aptly (whether p) by alethically affirming that p. An advantage of the proposal developed is that it is shown to be compatible with competing views-viz., joint acceptance accounts and social-distributive accounts-of how group members must interact in order to materially realise a group belief. I conclude by showing how the proposed judgment-focused collective (telic) virtue epistemology has important advantages over a rival version of collective virtue epistemology defended in recent work by Jesper Kallestrup (2016).

Virtue theorists have recently been focusing on the important question of how virtues are developed, and doing so in a way that is informed by empirical research from psychology. However, much of this recent work has dealt exclusively with the moral virtues.  In this paper, we present three empirically-informed accounts of how virtues can be developed, and we assess the merits of these accounts when applied specifically to intellectual (or epistemic) virtues.

RESUMEN En este artículo pretendo ubicar el lugar que tiene la Teoría de la virtud argumentativa dentro de la Teoría de la argumentación contemporánea. Para ello, primero abordo algunas posibilidades que se han abierto al considerar a la argumentación como una práctica comunicativa, considero algunas características de las prácticas argumentativas que son pertinentes para ubicar a la Teoría de la virtud argumentativa, y señalo algunas dificultades a las que se enfrentan los teóricos contemporáneos de la argumentación. En un segundo momento, a partir de las coordenadas anteriores, busco ubicar a los teóricos de la virtud argumentativa como proponentes de un enfoque complementario al enfoque lógico o al enfoque pragma-dialéctico, en tanto consideran a la argumentación como una práctica cooperativa. También, defiendo que la posibilidad importante que se abre con la Teoría de la virtud argumentativa es el análisis y la evaluación moral de nuestras argumentaciones.
ABSTRACT In this paper my purpose is to locate Virtue Argumentation Theory's place within Contemporary Argumentation Theory. There are some possibilities that have been opened in considering argumentation as a communicative practice. I consider some typical features of argumentative practice that are relevant to locate Virtue Argumentation Theory, and indicate some difficulties that are faced by contemporary theorists of argumentation. Then, from the previous coordinates, I seek to locate virtue argumentation theorists as bidders of a complementary approach to the logical approach or to the pragma-dialectical approach, while they consider argumentation as a cooperative practice. Finally, my point is that the possibility opened with Virtue Argumentation Theory is the moral analysis and evaluation of argumentation.

Robert Roberts and Jay Wood criticize St Thomas Aquinas’ distinction between intellectual and moral virtues. They offer three objections to this distinction. They object that intellectual virtues depend on the will in ways that undermine the distinction, that the subject of intellectual virtues is not an intellectual faculty but a whole person, and that some intellectual virtues require that the will act intellectually. They hold that each of these is sufficient to undermine the distinction. I defend Aquinas’ distinction and respond to each of their objections. I then briefly motivate why this is a distinction worth keeping.

This article deals with the notion of honor and its role in today’s military as an incentive in combat, but also as a check on the behavior on both the battlefield and in modern “operations other than war.” First, an outline will be given of what honor is and how it relates to traditional views on military courage. After that, the Roman honor-ethic, stating that honor is a necessary incentive for courageous behavior and that it is something worth dying for, is contrasted with today’s prevailing view which sees honor as something obsolete and archaic and not as a legitimate motive. The article then addresses the way honor continues to have a role in today’s military, despite its diminishing role in society at large. Subsequently, the drawbacks of the military’s use of the honor ethic are addressed, focusing also on the current operation in Iraq. The final section tries to find a solution to these problems.

The following paper sets out a view of humility that is derived from Iris Murdoch but which differs from a strict-Murdochian approach in two important respects. Firstly, any association with self-abnegation is removed; and secondly, the value of a limited form of pride (recognition pride) is affirmed. The paper is nevertheless strongly continuous with her work in the sense that it builds upon her rejection of universalisability on the specific grounds that we have varying moral competences. A liberal commitment to equality should not be allow to spill out of the political domain. We are not all equal when it comes to the demands of morality. Humility is treated as a just discernment of our own limited moral competences. As such, it is a recognition of our particularity and not a form of radical self-effacement.

From what norms does the ethics of belief derive its virtues and vices, its permissions and censures? Since pragmatists understand epistemology as the theory of inquiry, the paper will try to explain what the aims and tasks are for an ethics of belief, or project of guidance, which best fits with this understanding of epistemology. It will support it with the work of William James and several contemporary pragmatists. This paper approaches the ethics of belief from a focus on responsible risk management, where doxastic responsibility is understood in terms of the degree of riskiness of agents' doxastic strategies, which is in turn most objectively measured through accordance or violation of inductive norms. Doxastic responsibility is attributable to agents on the basis of how epistemically risky was the process or strategies of inquiry salient in the etiology of their belief or in their maintenance of a belief already held. Treating the "doxastic strategies" of individual and collective agents as central to the projects of epistemic assessment results in a significantly different account than either the standard epistemological externalists focus on "processes" in the objectively reliable etiology of belief, or than the standard evidentialist focus on an agent's reflectively available "reasons" which lend the agent a certain kind of personal or subjective justification for her belief.

This chapter discusses the role of coherence in a theory of evidence and legal proof.  Sections 2, 3, and 4 discuss three main approaches to coherence: structural coherence, narrative coherence, and coherence as constraint satisfaction. Sections 4, 5 and 6 address some problems concerning the relation between coherence and inference, coherence and virtue, and coherence and truth in the context of legal fact-finding. In section 7 suggests some avenues for further research on coherence, evidence and legal proof.

In my paper I argue that developments within legal ethics—specifically a return to emphasizing the importance of precepts for governing communities capable of forming virtue and for protecting the vulnerable—can contribute to discussions in theological ethics regarding the rule of precepts for the church’s formation of its members in virtue. This concern is especially timely given the recent sex abuse scandals in Protestant and Catholic churches, which have raised wide-spread concerns about the capacity of churches to form character and protect the vulnerable. I consider how this understanding of the relationship between the role of precepts and the community, drawn from legal professional ethics, has important analogical similarities to Aquinas’s description of the virtue of religion. I then consider how Francisco Suarez, SJ, develops Aquinas’s theory to explain how rules are developed within the community, not simply imposed from above, and serve to protect the vulnerable.

How demanding is the virtuous life?  Can virtue exist alongside hints of vice?  Is it possible to be virtuous within a vicious society?  A line of thinking running through Diogenes and the Stoics is that even a hint of corruption is inimical to virtue, that participating in a vicious society makes it impossible for a person to be virtuous.  One response to this difficulty is to claim that virtue is a threshold concept, that context sets a threshold for what is considered virtuous.  On this way of thinking, what counts as virtuous in one society may be more demanding than what passes for virtuous in another.  This response seems plausible when considering that virtue-theoretic terms like `honest' are gradable adjectives.  Many gradable adjectives, like `long' and `expensive,' have contextual thresholds that shift depending on the situation, and so it is tenable that virtue-theoretic adjectives might function with contextual thresholds as well.  A major difficulty for this response, however, is that many virtue terms are absolute gradable adjectives, a variety of gradable adjectives that do not require a contextual threshold.  These absolute gradable adjectives instead draw their truth conditions from their maximal degree, suggesting that Diogenes and the Stoics were correct to think that a number of the virtues are incompatible with even a small degree of vice.

The Stoic understanding of virtue is often taken to be a non-starter. Many of the Stoic claims about virtue -- that virtue requires moral perfection and that all who are not fully virtuous are vicious -- are thought to be completely out of step with our commonsense notion of virtue, making the Stoic account more of an historical oddity than a seriously defended view. Despite many voices to the contrary, I will argue that there is a way of making sense of these Stoic claims. Recent work in linguistics has shown that there is a distinction between relative and absolute gradable adjectives, with the absolute variety only applying to perfect exemplars. I will argue that taking virtue terms to be absolute gradable adjectives, and thus that they apply only to those who are fully virtuous, is one way to make sense of the Stoic view. I will also show how interpreting virtue-theoretic adjectives as absolute gradable adjectives makes it possible to defend Stoicism against its most common objections, demonstrating how the Stoic account of virtue might once again be a player in the contemporary landscape of virtue theorizing.

Resumen: La noción aristotélica de «σεμνότης» ha sido traducida generalmente por «dignidad», y los estados que flanquean a este modo de ser por los extremos, la «αὐθάδεια» y la «ἀρέσκεια», como «arrogancia» y «servilismo». En este artí-culo aporto argumentos para sostener que, en rea-lidad, el fragmento de la «σεμνότης» de la Ética Eudemia mostraba una teoría del «decoro», cuyo defecto era la «grosería», y su exceso, la «obse-quiosidad». El decoro de Aristóteles no equivalía al «decorum» de Cicerón, pero sí a la expresión «guardar el decoro» que cristalizó en el Siglo de Oro español.

Palabras clave: «aréskeia», «authádeia», digni-dad, Ética Eudemia, virtud.

Abstract: The aristotelian notion of «σεμνότης» has been generally translated as «dignity», and the two dispositions that flaks this intermediate way, «αὐθάδεια» and «ἀρέσκεια», as «arro-gance» and «servility». In this paper I will argue that the Eudemian Ethics passage about the «σεμνότης» was, in fact, a «decorum» theory, in which defiency is «rudeness» and excess «obse-quiousness». Aristotle's decorum was not the same as Cicero's decorum, but it was the same as the expression «guardar el decoro», which crysta-llised in the Spanish Golden Age.

Keywords: «aréskeia», «authádeia», dignity, Eudemian Ethics, virtue.

Contemporary virtue epistemologists argue that cognitive acts are knowledge by issuing from capacities that constitute intellectual virtues. This chapter argues that Aristotle rejects this thesis in favour of the view that capacities constitute intellectual virtues by issuing in cognitive acts that are knowledge.

In this paper I shall investigate the nature of education as seen from the neoAristotelian perspective. My thesis is that education should be seen as a part of political activity in the source sense of the term, that is, as an element of human development rooted in the idea of the good, which makes this concept at odds with the modern concepts of politics and education. I start with a brief discussion of the classical concept of politics with special attention being paid to the relation between ethics, education and politics. I then address the changes in the philosophical background of this concept of politics introduced in early modernity, in order to indicate the consequences of this process for education as subordinated to an economy-influenced politics. Following is the discussion of some aspects of contemporary Aristotelianism. I argue for the thesis that education is the basic form of policy understood along Aristotelian lines.

Link to the paper: http://www.klemens.sav.sk/fiusav/filozofia/?q=en/flourishing-vs-market-towards-aristotelian-concept-education

The conflict thesis, the idea that science and religion compete for the same territory, that science is the modern religion par excellence or that theology is not just queen but sole authoritative source for the sciences, remains prominent in education as in the public realm. But this view typically rests on mistaken assumptions about the nature of both science and religion. What we call religion and science in the modern era, and specifically since the mid-nineteenth century, are best understood as social practices which require the virtues for their perfection. 5.1 Beyond Barbour: Ian Barbour's fourfold typology for understanding the relation between science and religion (Conflict, Independence, Dialogue, and Integration), while it moves beyond the mere conflict thesis, does not offer much help (Barbour, 2000). For all four models depend on the same epistemological assumptions that undergird the conflict thesis. The main assumption is that science and religion are primarily characterized by distinct epistemologies. Science enables us to know facts, whereas religion is a source of values, beliefs, or superstitions, which do not provide such reliable knowledge about the world. Or so the story goes. Given this epistemological focus, the question frequently becomes: how do science and religion, facts and values relate? Too often this focus reduces both science and religion to bad epistemologies from the outset. Consider briefly how this assumption of the distinct epistemologies underwrites all four models. The Conflict model presumes that science and religion make mutually exclusive claims about the same domain. The object of inquiry is the same—for instance, how did the earth become a place hospitable to human being? (creation or evolution)—but because of their distinct methodologies, science and religion arrive at rival conclusions. The Independence model assumes that, given the distinct domains, methods, questions, and even objects of each, science and religion work best when they work independently of one another. According to the Dialogue model, any number of things (from similarities in presuppositions, methods, or concepts) may serve as the basis for a shared dialogue between science and religion. This model is an improvement on the others, but leaves open the question of the similarity and the distinction between science and religion. One can embrace the dialogue model while

Anthropologists have been addressing the issue of risk in the  eld since the early 1990s, but have yet to detail on what grounds and in what cir- cumstances such risk is warranted. After surveying developments in epis- temology in anthropology, this article makes two challenges to the disci- pline. The  rst is to consider the strengths of virtue theory for navigating the relationship between ethnographic particularity and broader moral claims. The second challenge is to engage in conversation with religious agents who themselves demonstrate solidarity with the af icted in situa- tions of risk. Throughout, I draw on my fieldwork in northern Uganda and South Sudan.

Education is a process of drawing out human potentialities. Man is capable of developing himself to the fullest and it is in the realization of moral excellence that human fulfillment is attained. When we look deep into the process of man’s becoming morally good or bad, we see education at the helm of the person’s realization of moral excellence and human fulfillment.  The dynamism of education and determining a person’s moral development are all interconnected.  The educational praxis may be shaped and determined by social forces or realities outside the person but must ultimately be based on a profound understanding of the object of its formation: the person. This paper explores the thoughts of Edith Stein confronting the educational problems of her times. Her thoughts on education are perennially useful for examining educational issues already raised in her era, but are resonating anew today albeit in different forms. In this essay,  I examine Stein’s views on how education in being aimed at attaining human fulfillment,  strives ultimately after moral excellence as the highest value that  man can aspire for.

As the financial crisis of 2008-9 has continued to affect the global economy, many wonder whether the proposed solutions contribute to a more stable financial system as well as to better human behaviour. While the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) Report (2011) identified the factors essential to explaining the causes of the financial crisis as having included credit and housing bubbles, nontraditional mortgages, credit ratings and securitization, financial institutions concentrated correlated risk, leverage and liquidity risk, contagion risk, shock and panic, failure in virtue has also been very patent in the crisis, foremost of them being: excessive leverage and imprudent risk-taking, failure in fiduciary duties and in stewardship, as well as greed, lack of moderation, and fraud. The lens of virtue theory is, thus, necessary to analyze and explore the financial crisis' origins and remedies. There exist ways of measuring such virtuousness or lack thereof among managers and finance industry participants, one of them being the creation of a virtue ethics scale. This paper presents the results of a survey of 141 Philippine managers, which sought to elicit from the respondents which of the virtues listed they considered desirable traits. The major responses were: (1) Honesty and competence, (2) Kind-heartedness, (3) Self-confidence, (4) Innovativeness, (5) Ambition, and (6) Security. The study's results can give practitioners an idea of the virtues or character traits that employees in Philippine companies expect or find desirable in their superiors. In addition, they can inform the crisis debate from a virtue theory perspective.