| Popis: |
In this chapter I do three things. First, to the extent that virtues and vices involve behavioral dispositions, I argue that this entails that emotion has a key role in explaining the presence of virtues and vices. Second, I argue that if the virtues and vices in question have emotional bases, then this has implications for the cultivation of virtue. Third, I relate the idea that emotions are the categorical bases for virtues and vices to a well-known objection to virtue theory. The objection begins with the observation that virtues are supposed to be traits or behavioral dispositions that are reliably exercised in a wide range of trait-relevant situations. The objection goes on to claim that what we actually find is much more situation dependent than this, that is to say, we find only people who in some situations behave well and in other situations behave poorly. I will show how viewing emotion as the categorical basis for people’s behavioral dispositions is able to explain the situation-dependent nature of people’s behavioral dispositions. But I will also argue that if emotions serve an important regulatory role by way of ensuring our behavioral dispositions are sensitive to the particularities of our situations, as I argue in Chapter 5, then virtue theorists have an obvious way of responding to the ‘situationist-challenge’, albeit one that requires them to identify virtues with what are commonly known as local, not global, traits of character. |
