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Alessandro Piccolomini (1508-1579) drove the most ambitious programme of vernacular philosophical writing and translation of the sixteenth century. Among the earliest of these works, the Institutione (1542) is presented as a comprehensive ethical handbook, based primarily on Aristotle’s Ethics and Rhetoric. Despite the reliance on Aristotle, the work gives a privileged position to love, a topic on which Aristotle had little to say. Effectively correcting Aristotle’s omission by way of Plato, Piccolomini utilises a number of syncretic strategies to demonstrate the harmony between Plato and Aristotle on all relevant issues, thereby offering his readers a complete philosophy of love that is fully integrated into the broader Aristotelian ethical program he promotes. As Piccolomini argues love to be the most important element in man’s happiness – the final end of Aristotelian ethics – the Institutione represents a particularly ambitious example of philosophical syncretism in the period, demonstrating the creativity of authors seeking to reconcile Plato and Aristotle for their own ends.

This chapter discusses two of the three Aristotelian Ethics, which are the Eudemian Ethics and the Nicomachean Ethics. The Nicomachean Ethics have been considered as the ethics of Aristotle for many centuries, while the Eudemian Ethics were once regarded as false by scholars in the 19th century. Several ancient writers and their respective quotations and commentaries of the Ethics of Aristotle are discussed in detail in the final sections of this chapter.

Contemporary philosophers have grown increasingly skeptical towards both morality and moral theory. The skepticism concerning morality stems from the argument that moral considerations are not always the most important considerations and that it is not always good to be morally better. The skepticism concerning moral theory stems from the argument that moral theory is a radically misguided enterprise—one that does not illuminate moral practice and fulfills no useful functions. The succeeding chapters provide a response to the arguments of both “antimorality” and “antitheory” skeptics. The aim is to defuse such skepticism by putting forward alternative conceptions of morality and moral theory—conceptions that owe more to central texts within the canon of Western philosophical ethics (particularly Kantian and Aristotelian) than to sheer conceptual virtuosity.

This chapter examines what Émile Durkheim could have meant by his statement that sociology is a “moral science” and whether the project it implied is a defensible one. Durkheim's goal was not only to study morality scientifically; he also proposed to put morality on a scientific footing—a goal that most contemporary sociologists would be uncomfortable with. This chapter argues that Durkheim's vision of “moral science” was inspired primarily by Aristotelian ethics and that it anticipated many of the ideas of virtue ethics and related schools of thought and research. It considers a number of reasons why there is a connection between Durkheim and Aristotle and why that connection has received so little attention. Finally, it explains why Aristotelian ethics was much better suited to Durkheim's purposes than was Kantianism or utilitarianism.

Chapter 2 elaborates what is entailed in a first-person version of virtue ethics in an explicitly debating style. It argues that it is important to look at the contrasts between a first-person virtue ethics and a third-person discursive one inspired especially by Foucault. It examines ways that these positions challenge rather than support one another, despite their many areas of overlap. It particularly highlights conceptual divides regarding the status of the “self.” Although the chapter pays special attention to anthropological voices, the question raised—why we need a first-person version of virtue ethics—speaks to a much broader interdisciplinary conversation.

This chapter concerns whether the best account of virtue will involve the idea that an agent can ‘go beyond’ duty in a morally praiseworthy way. The chapter begins by outlining Henry Sidgwick’s view that supererogation involves an immoral paradox, since it seems to allow a morally blameless agent to do less morally than she might. The conditions of supererogatory action are set out, and the origins of the idea in Christian doctrine are explained. An Aristotelian account of virtue, relating duty to ‘fittingness’, is set out, and claimed to be preferable to an account allowing for supererogation. The chapter closes with responses to Urmson’s arguments in favour of supererogation in his famous paper ‘Saints and Heroes’.

The Introduction summarizes the basic tenets of Target Centred Virtue Ethics. It begins with an account of the fundamental concepts of virtue ethics in general and shows that virtue ethics is a family of normative ethical theory with several genera and species. The target-centred version of virtue ethics developed in the book is one species of virtue ethics opposed to the orthodox neo-Aristotelian version in many respects. Central to all forms of virtue ethics is ‘Thick Concept Centralism’, and the ‘Centrality of Virtuousness’, whether the notion of virtuousness is applied to character, actions, rules or motives. The Introduction outlines these theses, and the notion of the targets of virtues, before summarizing the contents of the book, including the metaphysics of Target Centred Virtue Ethics, the nature of Target Centred Virtue Ethics, and broad issues surrounding the application of Target Centred Virtue Ethics.

This chapter considers and responds to five objections to the internal coherence of a neo-Aristotelian account of supererogation. I particular, it considers the objections that the account is incompatible with the doctrine of the mean, that it makes virtue optional, that supererogation requires a logical relation among ethical concepts that Aristotelians cannot make sense of, that it is problematically non-action-guiding, and that it is incompatible with Aristotle’s claim that the virtuous person is the measure of right action. In each case, it argues that the most plausible interpretation of the Aristotelian claim under discussion is compatible with the neo-Aristotelian account of supererogation defended in the book.

This chapter develops and defends the following neo-Aristotelian account of supererogation: An action is supererogatory iff it is overall virtuous and either (1) the omission of an overall virtuous action in that situation would not be overall vicious, or (2) there is some overall virtuous action that is less virtuous than it and whose performance in its place would not be overall vicious. This account is non-ad-hoc insofar as it is based on virtue ethical accounts of right and wrong action that are motivated from within the tradition, and thus fully deserving of the label “neo-Aristotelian.” And it is intuitively defensible: it correctly identifies both heroic and saintly actions as supererogatory and gives a plausible explanation of their status as supererogatory. It also correctly identifies those instances of more mundane supererogation as supererogation and explains their status as supererogatory.

The Introduction outlines the aims, the object of the research, the methodology, the scope, and the limit of the book. The aims of the book are to propose a methodological framework for an ethical reading of Old Testament narrative and to demonstrate the benefits and the validity of such a framework by providing exemplary readings. When ethics is understood within the Aristotelian tradition, narrative can play a crucial role in Old Testament ethics. The critical methodology employed is synchronic literary criticism anchored in discourse analysis. With this methodology, the objectivity of literary criticism can be enhanced because it can be built upon linguistic observations. This book is about neither ethics of reading (a pragmatic reflection regarding the ethical responsibility of the reader) nor discourse ethics (as proposed by Habermas).