Tag Archives: Aristotle

poverty, willpower, and virtue ethics

Recently, philoso­pher Michael Cholbi tweeted this story: “Why Can’ More Poor Peo­ple Escape Poverty?”, along with the sug­ges­tion that the find­ings described therein could have impli­ca­tions for virtue the­ory. To make a long story short: “In the 1990s, social psy­chol­o­gists devel­oped a the­ory of “depletable” self-control. The idea was that an individual’s capac­ity for exert­ing willpower was …

June 9, 2011 – 9:56 am | By pamela j. stubbart | Posted in ethics, moral character, moral psychology, psychology, virtue ethics | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (11)

how not to think about cutting in line: a crash course in normative ethics

While I was at the IHS sem­i­nar last week, some­one men­tioned in pass­ing the issue of whether or not it is morally per­mis­si­ble to allow peo­ple to go ahead of you in a line. What pre­cip­i­tated this ques­tion was the fact that we were using the same din­ing hall as a num­ber of groups of …

August 6, 2009 – 8:41 pm | By pamela j. stubbart | Posted in applied ethics, ethics, virtue ethics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (4)