OLD IDEAS: WISDOM, VIRTUE AND MORAL FORMATION

Running head: VIRTUE ETHICS AND MORAL IDENTITY Exploring the Relationship between Virtue Ethics and Moral Identity

The concept of moral identity based on virtue ethics has become an issue of considerable import in explaining moral behavior. This attempt to offer adequate explanations of the full range of morally relevant human behavior inevitably provokes boundary issues between ethics and moral psychology. In terms of the relationship between the two disciplines, some argue for “naturalized (or psychologiz...

On Hope as a Moral Virtue

Collective Wisdom Old and New

Jeremy Waldron (1995) has felicitously labeled this argument “the doctrine from the wisdom of the multitude.” Most commentators agree that the mechanism accounting for the superiority of a group over any of its members is, in Aristotle’s view, the pooling of information and arguments that occur in deliberation. The idea of collective wisdom is new, on the other hand, to the extent that it has r...

Relationship between Big Five Personality Traits and Virtue of Wisdom: The Mediating Role of Patience

Background and Objectives: Patience and wisdom are highly respected moral virtues in Islamic culture. The former (patience) is of utmost importance in the Islamic religion and the latter (wisdom) is one of the six basic virtues both in the recent classification of positive psychologists and Islamic-Iranian culture. These moral virtues are considered important in individuals’ wellbeing and can h...

Against Moral Character Evaluations: the Undetectability of Virtue and Vice

I defend the epistemic thesis that evaluations of people in terms of their moral character as good, bad, or intermediate are almost always epistemically unjustified. (1) Because most people are fragmented (they would behave deplorably in many and admirably in many other situations), one’s prior probability that any given person is fragmented should be high. (2) Because one’s information about s...