VIII. Highlight the following expressions and say what vices or virtues they suggest.
1) to fly off the handle;
2) knowing yourself and your limits;
3) relying upon intimidation to make up for a sense of powerless;
4) looking good by making others look bad;
5) exercising patience with other’s occasional bad days;
6) always taking, never reciprocating;
7) relying upon force and coercion to get the job done.
IX. Which expressions from ex. VIII best describe the following situations?
a) She is so kind, she always tries to understand and to share other people’s feelings.
b) She is such a weird person who always asks people to give her either books or money but she never does herself.
c) Our boss is too demanding and he always makes us do excessive job; he is too much worried about the job done.
d) –How do you find your colleague P.?
- Oh, I don’t like her, I even try to avoid her as she speaks and behaves in such a way that people can’t but feel her superiority.
e) He is difficult to deal with. Whenever somebody speaks to him, he gets angry unreasonably.
f) I don’t think that he is a good person as he always tries to keep people tense and frightened.
g) Everybody appreciates the people who don’t show off and know their worth; these people understand and admit what they do know and what they don’t.
Reading
X. a) Read the following text and find the answers to the following questions in it .
1) Is there any difference between character traits and moral virtues?
2) What is referred to moral virtues?
3) How does Aristotle interpret vice and virtue?
4) Why did Aristotle think that mildness was the virtue related to anger?
5) What can virtue ethics be used to determine?
Text 1. Vice and Virtue in Everyday Life
What is primary is whether the person acting is expressing good character (moral virtues) or not.
A person’s character is the totality of his character traits. Our character traits can be good, bad or somewhere in between. They can be admirable or not. The admirable character traits, the marks of perfection in character, are called virtues, their opposites are vices.
Character traits are
1) dispositions or habit-like tendencies that are deeply entrenched or engrained. They have been referred to as second nature – “first nature” referring to tendencies with which we are born. Character traits are not innate – we were not born with them. Thus infants are neither virtuous nor vicious.
2) formed as a result of more or less freely selected actions of a certain kind. We are not born honest or liars, but we become so by repeatedly telling the truth or by repeatedly lying.
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Moral virtues:
1) are admirable character traits; generally desirable dispositions, which contribute, among other things, to social harmony
Craft knowledge is a technical virtue specific to a particular line of work (rhetoric or the art of effective persuasion, the housebuilder’s art, the computer programmer’s art, the accountant’s art). The moral virtues have a more general scope.
2) enable us to act in accordance with reason
You cannot be morally reasonable in the fullest sense, you cannot have the virtue called prudence, unless you are morally virtuous. The person who is not morally virtuous is sometimes ruled by his or her appetites or passions. Her/his emotions get in the way of doing the reasonable thing or even recognizing what the reasonable thing might be.
3) enable us to feel appropriately and have the right intention
The person whose character is less than virtuous may do what looks, from the outside, like the right thing to do, but his/her motives will leave something to be desired. A truthful person will usually tell the truth, and he will do so because it is the right thing to do, not because he fears the negative consequences of being found out.
4) are orientations towards the mean, rather than the extremes (vices relate to extreme).
In Aristotle’s famous study of character, a frequent theme is the fact that a virtue lies between two vices. The virtue of courage, for example, lies between the vices of rashness and cowardice. The coward has too much fear, or fear when he should have none. The rash person has too little fear and excessive confidence. The courageous person has the right amount.
While courage is the virtue related to the emotions of fear and confidence, mildness is the virtue related to anger. A person who gets angry too quickly will be irascible; a person who never gets angry, even when s/he should, is inirascible (the term does not matter). The virtuous person will get angry when s/he should, but not excessively and not contrary to reason. Aristotle calls the virtue of appropriate anger mildness or gentleness.
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