Virtue, Narrative, and Self

Explorations of Character in the Philosophy of Mind and Action

Edited by
Joseph Ulatowski and Liezl van Zyl
For Ron Flood
Contents

Acknowledgments vii
List of Contributors ix

1 Virtue, Narrative, and Self: An Introduction 1

JOSEPH ULATOWSKI AND LIEZL VAN ZYL

2 Virtue Ethics and Narrative Virtue 21

CHRISTINE SWANTON

3 Narrative Virtues and Second-Order Reasons 37

GARRETT CULLITY

4 Narrative Virtue Ethics? 55

RAMON DAS

5 How Self-Narratives and Virtues Cause Actions 71

DAVID LUMSDEN AND JOSEPH ULATOWSKI

6 Virtue Ethics, Narrative and Revisionary Accounts of Rightness 91

JASON KAWALL

7 Virtuous Perception: A Gibsonian Approach 115

RICHARD PAUL HAMILTON

8 Virtue Ethics, Blameworthiness, and Role Failure 137

JUSTIN OAKLEY
9 Well-Being, Narrative Value, and Virtue Ethics 149
NICHOLAS RYAN SMITH

10 On the Value of Moral Failure 167

DAMIAN COX

11 Who Wrote Nietzsche’s Autobiography? 181

ELIJAH MILLGRAM

12 The Abnegated Self 207

NELLIE WIELAND

13 Integrity and Messy Lives 223

TIM DARE

Name Index 239

Subject Index 244
Acknowledgments

We are grateful for the financial support we received from the University of Waikato’s Faculty of
Arts and Social Sciences Dean’s Office to host a conference in 2017 on “Virtue, Narrative, and
Agency.” The work that appears here is a consequence of conversations and discussions that
arose during and after that conference. We would like to acknowledge the generous support of
Allison Kirkman, the Dean’s Office staff, and the Philosophy Programme’s administrative assistant
Paula Maynard. We also want to thank the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute. Much
of the work associated with the volume’s assembly would not have been possible without the
generous support Joseph received as a Visiting Faculty Research Fellow at the Institute.

We also greatly appreciate the editorial team at Routledge, especially Andrew Weckenman and
Allie Simmons, who deserve special recognition for their unwavering support for this project and
helping see to its completion during a global pandemic that has manifested in some selves the
most virtuous conduct but in others the most vicious and callous behaviour.

Finally, Liezl would like to thank her family, Paul, John, Alex and Tessa, for their love and kindness,
and occasional technical support. Joseph is grateful to his family, Tiffany, Lucjan, and Anja, who
were an immutable source of love, encouragement, and inspiration while he was drafting,
revising, and finishing his contribution to this volume. Without them, no narrative merits to be
told and no virtuous character worthy of cultivation.

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viii
List of Contributors

Damian Cox is a philosopher who specializes in the areas of ethics, particularly virtue theory, and
philosophy and film. He has co-authored three books and published over forty journal articles.
With Michael Levine he is author of Thinking Through Film (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012); with
Michael Levine and Saul Newman, he is author of Politics Most Unusual: Violence, Sovereignty
and Democracy in the War on Terror (Palgrave, 2009), and with Marguerite La Caze and
Michael Levine, he is author of Integrity and the Fragile Self (Ashgate, 2003). Cox has written
on the virtue of integrity, as well as, more generally, the prospects of a theory of ethics based
on virtues. His recent work in virtue ethics includes a defence of “vice ethics,” an account of
right action framed in terms of the avoidance of vice. Cox’s recent work includes a defence of
psychoanalytic approaches to film criticism and emotional self-knowledge. He uses film and
television as case studies for philosophical work, emphasising the potential of doing
philosophy through film. Recent work has also included examination of ethics in the academy.
He has written on egalitarianism, competition and contest within university environments and
has outlined a theory of academic virtues.

Garrett Cullity is Hughes Professor of Philosophy at the University of Adelaide. He taught

previously at the universities of Oxford and St Andrews. A moral philosopher whose work
ranges across the theoretical and applied parts of the discipline, he has addressed topics
including the nature of moral judgement, the sources of moral knowledge, the relationship
between reasons for action and rationality, the content of the moral virtues, the moral
emotions, human rights, fairness and collective action, and the ethical issues surrounding
international aid, climate change, and our activities as consumers. He is the author of Concern,
Respect and Cooperation (Oxford University Press, 2018) and The Moral Demands of Affluence
(Oxford University Press, 2004) a co-editor of Ethics and Practical Reason (Oxford University
Press, 1997), and an Associate Editor of the journal Philosophy and Public Affairs.

Tim Dare is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Auckland. He is also a lawyer and
former research clerk to the New Zealand High Court. He is the author of The Counsel of
Rogues? A Defence of the Standard Conception of the Lawyer’s Role (Routledge, 2016), and of
articles and book chapters in the philosophy of law and applied and professional ethics,

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 including pieces on vaccination, parental rights to consent to their children’s medical
treatment, oncologists’ views about giving information about unfunded treatments beyond
the means of their patients, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, and the ethics of use of
predictive risk modelling in social policy contexts. He is committed to the practical value of
philosophy. Dare works as a data ethics adviser to New Zealand’s Ministry of Social
Development and provides ethical advice to other social service agencies in New Zealand and
internationally.

Ramon Das is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy in the School of History, Philosophy, Political
Science and International Relations, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Das
works mainly in moral and political philosophy; his interests include foundational questions in
ethics as well as more practical topics such as the ethics of humanitarian intervention and
climate change. Other research interests include evolutionary debunking arguments, free will,
and the philosophy of law. He is currently writing a book on “companions in guilt” arguments,
which try to show that arguments for moral scepticism prove too much, undermining our
scientific and ordinary perceptual beliefs if they work at all.

Richard Paul Hamilton is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Ethics in the School of Philosophy
and Theology, University of Notre Dame Australia. He completed a doctorate at Birkbeck
College, University of London under the supervision of Jennifer Hornsby and Susan James. In
2015-16 he held a visiting position as a Senior Research Fellow at the University currently
known as Rhodes, in Makhanda, South Africa. Hamilton works on moral and political
philosophy, with particular interests in virtue ethics, the theoretical foundations of
professional ethics and the contribution of the life sciences to our understanding of the human
condition. He is currently completing a monograph that attempts to place contemporary
naturalistic virtue ethics on a properly naturalistic trajectory while also pushing it in politically
radical and emancipatory directions.

Jason Kawall is Professor of Philosophy and Environmental Studies, and former director of the
Lampert Institute for Civic and Global Affairs at Colgate University. He has twice been a visiting
fellow at the Centre for Ethics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs at the University of St Andrews.
His research focuses on virtue ethics and epistemology, with a particular emphasis on their
application to environmental and sustainability issues, the nature of right action, and the
epistemically virtuous life. Kawall has published extensively in these and related areas, with
his work appearing in such journals as American Philosophical Quarterly, Canadian Journal of
Philosophy, Environmental Ethics, Ethics, Policy and Environment, European Journal of
Philosophy, and Philosophical Studies, and in a number of edited volumes, including The
Handbook of Virtue Ethics and The Routledge Handbook of Virtue Epistemology.

David Lumsden studied philosophy at the University of London (Bedford College and University
College) and at Princeton University, where he was awarded his PhD. He taught at the
University of Waikato, New Zealand for 36 years. His research has mainly been in the
philosophy of language with an emphasis on reference and pragmatics and in the philosophy
of mind with an emphasis on intentionality, mental symbols and narrative approaches to the

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 self. His publications have appeared in Philosophia, Philosophical Studies, Erkenntnis,
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review, Philosophical Psychology, Journal of Pragmatics,
Philosophy Psychiatry and Psychology, Southern Journal of Philosophy, Metaphilosophy, and
elsewhere.

Elijah Millgram is the EE Ericksen Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah.
His research focuses on rationality, theoretical reasoning, and practical reasoning. He is the
author of John Stuart Mill and the Meaning of Life (Oxford University Press, 2019), The Great
Endarkenment (Oxford University Press, 2015), Hard Truths (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), Ethics
Done Right (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and Practical Induction (Harvard University
Press, 1997) and editor of Varieties of Practical Reasoning (MIT Press, 2001). Millgram is
currently working on a book on Nietzsche. He has held fellowships from the National
Endowment for the Humanities, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences,
and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Justin Oakley is an Associate Professor and Deputy Director of Monash Bioethics Centre, at
Monash University. He is the author of Morality and the Emotions (Routledge, 1993, 2020),
co-author (with Dean Cocking) of Virtue Ethics and Professional Roles (Cambridge University
Press, 2001), editor of Bioethics (Ashgate, International Library of Essays in Public and
Professional Ethics, 2009), and co-editor (with Steve Clarke) of Informed Consent and Clinician
Accountability (Cambridge University Press, 2007). He has published articles on a variety of
topics in ethics, applied ethics, and moral psychology, including virtue ethics, virtue
attribution, shame, role-based evildoing, informed consent, surgeon report cards, surrogate
motherhood, and the ethics of pharmaceutical advertising. Oakley is also co-editor of the
quarterly refereed journal Monash Bioethics Review and is currently working on a book-length
project on policy applications of virtue ethics in professional practice.

Nicholas Ryan Smith is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Academic Literacy and
Linguistics at the Borough of Manhattan Community College of the City University of New
York. He holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Auckland, under the guidance of
Christine Swanton, Rosalind Hursthouse, and Glen Pettigrove. Smith’s research falls primarily
in moral philosophy, especially virtue ethics and accounts of right action. His work has
appeared in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy and the Journal of Value Inquiry.

Christine Swanton is an Honorary Academic in Philosophy at the University of Auckland, New

Zealand. She is the author of Target Centred Virtue Ethics (Oxford University Press,
forthcoming), The Virtue Ethics of Hume and Nietzsche (Wiley, 2015), Virtue Ethics: A Pluralist
View (Oxford University Press, 2003), and Freedom: A Coherence Theory (Hackett, 1992), and
has contributed numerous articles to journals and reference works. Swanton is regarded as
one of the leading academic figures currently working within the field of virtue ethics.

Joseph Ulatowski is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Director of the Experimental Philosophy
Research Group at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. His research covers three areas
in metaphysics and philosophy of language, including truth, facts, and self, and he often

xi
 employs empirical methods to explore traditional philosophical disputes. Ulatowski is the
author of Why Facts Matter (forthcoming) and Commonsense Pluralism about Truth: An
Empirical Defence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), and his work has appeared in Behavioral and
Brain Sciences, Diametros, Erkenntnis, Mind and Language, Philosophia, and Southern Journal
of Philosophy. His collaborative work with David Lumsden has investigated the topics of self-
narrative, the plurality of selves, disunified agency, and virtue. He has had visiting fellowships
with the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute and the University of Aberdeen, and
has held a number of visiting professorships.

Liezl van Zyl is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Waikato, New Zealand.
She holds a PhD from the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. Van Zyl is the author of
Virtue Ethics: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge, 2018) and Death and Compassion: A
Virtue-based Approach to Euthanasia (Routledge, 2000), and co-author (with Ruth Walker) of
Towards a Professional Model of Surrogate Motherhood (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). She has
published articles on topics in moral philosophy and applied ethics, including virtue ethics and
right action, euthanasia, abortion and surrogate motherhood. She is an Associate Editor of
the Journal of Philosophical Research.

Nellie Wieland is a Professor of Philosophy at California State University Long Beach. She
received her PhD from the University of California San Diego in 2007. She works primarily in
the areas of philosophy of language and social metaphysics. She has written on problems of
agency, autonomy, and authority in both of those areas. She also works on quotation and
other metalinguistic phenomena as a way of theorizing about the nature of language.

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 Virtue, Narrative, and Self: An Introduction

Joseph Ulatowski and Liezl van Zyl

1. Introduction
After a long dormant period, the late twentieth century saw a renewed interest in both moral
and intellectual virtue. Foundational work on virtue ethics began with the works of Plato and
Aristotle. However, from the Middle Ages to the middle of the twentieth century there were few
contributions of original work that advanced the discussion of virtue theory. Much of the work
looked at “virtues” as if they were intellectual artefacts created by Plato, Aristotle, and other
Greek and Roman philosophers (cf. Foot 2002, Hursthouse 1999, MacIntyre 1981, Slote 1992,
Williams 1985). In moral philosophy, especially during the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, virtue ethics was eclipsed by utilitarianism and deontology. The pioneering work of
Immanuel Kant in the Enlightenment and of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill during the
Industrial Revolution diverted ethicists’ attention away from virtue and the important role it plays
in moral philosophy. Instead, the focus of modern moral philosophy was on discovering a
criterion of right action.

The study and recognition of the importance of virtue returned to moral philosophy in the 1950s.
It was ushered in by Elizabeth Anscombe, and capitalised upon by Philippa Foot, Alasdair
MacIntyre, Iris Murdoch, and Rosalind Hursthouse. Not only did the study of virtue resurface in
debates of moral philosophy but it also became a part of the epistemological conceptual arsenal
in the 1980s, following on work by Ernest Sosa.

This volume aims to expand the reach of virtue theory beyond the confines of virtue ethics and
virtue epistemology, while at the same time revealing how discussions of narrativity and self may
inform work in virtue theory. The task we set before us is one that moves discussion forward
into issues of philosophical psychology, action theory, and the philosophy of mind.
Comparatively little work has been done to show how virtue may inform debates in these
important areas of philosophical research. The exercise of virtuous character arises from a
disposition to act in certain ways and those dispositions may be formed in part by what is
constitutive of the self or the story we tell about ourselves. Similarly, what the self is and how
we talk about the self may inform discussion of virtuous character and human flourishing. Virtue
theorists have only begun to consider the ways in which research in action theory and the
philosophy of mind can enrich theorising about virtue, right action, and human flourishing. Our
hope for this volume is to begin a sustained and fruitful dialogue between virtue theorists, action
theorists, and philosophers of mind.

In this introduction, we intend to justify the expansion of virtue theory into the domains of
philosophy of mind and philosophy of action. First, in §2, we provide some exegesis on the recent
history of virtue theory. “The Virtue Turn,” as we call it, may be traced to two sources: Elizabeth
Anscombe in ethics and Ernest Sosa in epistemology. This return to virtue theory has sparked
some significant and fascinating debates. In §3, we defend expansion of virtue-theoretic talk into
discussions of narrative and the self, and vice versa. All of our arguments revolve around the
broad connections we may make between virtue, narrative, and the self. For example, we show
how living well involves the cultivation of good character, which makes telling a story of one’s
self equally worthwhile. We firmly believe that what the self is and how we author stories we
tell about events that occur in a lifetime is deeply enriched by the virtuous (or vicious) character
that one has nurtured over a lifetime. Finally, in §4, we provide summaries of each contribution.

2. “The Virtue Turn”

If there is a watershed moment in analytic philosophy marking the return to virtue theory, and
virtue ethics in particular, it is the publication of Elizabeth Anscombe’s seminal paper, “Modern
Moral Philosophy” (1958). Anscombe challenged the two dominant moral philosophies of the
day, utilitarianism and deontology. She regretted the fact that virtues and vices, conative states,
moral character and its education, as well as questions over how we should live were no longer
centrestage in philosophical analyses of morality, and that debates in moral philosophy had
become preoccupied with abstract moral principles that presuppose the existence of a supreme
lawgiver. Anscombe argued for a return to the rich vocabulary of virtues and vices, which would
be informed by an understanding of human nature and human flourishing. She also insisted that
moral philosophy should turn to philosophical psychology to gain clarity on notions such as
“action,” “intention,” and “desire.”

Anscombe’s essay paved the way for work in virtue theory and moral psychology, as well as a
renewed interest in questions about human nature and human flourishing. The literature on
virtue in moral philosophy has broken new ground by showing how virtue figured prominently in
the work of major historical figures in philosophy other than Aristotle, such as Immanuel Kant
(Baxley 2010, Betzler 2008, Cureton and Hill 2014, 2018, Herman 1996, O’Neill 1996), David
Hume (Slote 2001; Swanton 2015), and Friedrich Nietzsche (Swanton 2003, 2011, 2015). Others
have attempted to defend Plato as a virtue ethicist. While it is no doubt that Plato, and through
his dialogues Socrates, was a virtue theorist, some ink has been spilt to revive him as a virtue
ethicist (Annas 1999; Kamtekar 1998; Prior 1991; Reshotko 2006). Given how such studies of
prominent philosophers have flourished, there is no doubt that such research will continue to
expand within and beyond the confines of western philosophy.

On top of the historical work, new virtue-theoretic accounts began to arise in moral philosophy
and epistemology to invigorate debates that had become stale. “Virtue” need not be thought of
as a relic of the past but a fecund concept that may spawn new and interesting veins of
philosophical research. The cultivation of good character through the habituation of acting
virtuously may play an important contributory role in the development of moral and epistemic
theories.

By the middle of the twentieth century moral theorising had been belaboured by the overly
systematised and reductivist styles of Kantian deontology and Millian utilitarianism (Darwall et
al. 1992). Although there are various forms of virtue ethics, they have in common the view that
the virtues play a central role in the evaluation of actions and agents. Instead of reducing
morality to a single abstract principle, virtue ethicists focus on a plurality of virtues and vices, and

2
emphasise the complexity and specificity of moral reasoning. The most popular versions of
virtue ethics include (i) eudaimonist, (ii) agent-based, and (iii) target-centred virtue ethics (cf.
Hursthouse and Pettigrove 2018, van Zyl 2018). Eudaimonist virtue ethicists follow ancient Greek
and Roman philosophers by grounding virtue in the good or happy life (eudaimonia) and by
emphasising practical wisdom as a requirement for virtue (Hursthouse 1999, Annas 2011,
Badhwar 2014, Bloomfield 2014, LeBar 2013). Agent-based virtue ethicists have contended that
forms of normativity, such as right action, justice, the value of eudaimonia, and practical
rationality, may be explained by motivational or dispositional qualities of agents (Slote 2001,
Zagzebski 2004). Finally, the target-centred approach to virtue ethics was developed by a
contributor of this volume, Christine Swanton (2003). It defines virtue as a disposition to respond
to or acknowledge items within a field in an excellent way. Although Swanton denies that the
virtues are grounded in eudaimonia, she accepts that there is a strong link between them. As we
will explain shortly, some of the virtue ethicists who are contributors to this volume draw on the
literature on narrativity to develop or enrich their account of role-specific or “narrative” virtues
(see Swanton this volume and Cullity this volume), or to consider the nature and structure of a
good life or eudaimonia (see Smith this volume and Cox this volume). Yet others consider the
role of narrativity or narrative virtues in the evaluation of actions or agents (see Kawall this
volume and Oakley this volume).

Outside of virtue ethics, the study of virtue has expanded other philosophical concepts, such as
knowledge. In “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” Edmund Gettier (1963) had shown that there
was no hope for a traditional justified true belief conception of knowledge -- a view of knowledge
that had been around since Plato. Gettier used a counterexample to show that one may have a
justified true belief without also having knowledge. Suppose Valerie has a justified belief that
“Mallory will win the Bachelor.” She also knows that she and Mallory like to ride horses, so she
concludes that “the person who wins the Bachelor likes to ride horses.” In fact, Valerie wins the
contest. Valerie’s belief “the person who wins the Bachelor likes to ride horses” was justified and
true, but Valerie does not know that the person who wins the Bachelor likes to ride horses
because her justification for that belief has to do with Mallory’s liking to ride horses. Following
Gettier's challenge, a cottage industry of articles offered replies to the counterexample in order
to resurrect the orthodox conception of knowledge. Alvin Goldman, for example, proposed that
justification for a belief had to be caused in the right way (Goldman 1967). In later work, he
argued that justification had to be reliably formed, a view which he subsequently extended to all
knowledge (Goldman 1979, 1986).1 None of the proposed replies fared any better because they
suffered from their own deficiencies. In the 1980s, Ernest Sosa introduced the idea that an
“intellectual virtue” may help to resolve the ongoing tension between foundational and
coherentist theories of knowledge. Since that time, various veins of research on virtue
epistemology have grown and blossomed not only in the work of Sosa but also Jonathan Kvanvig
(1992, 2003) and Linda Zagzebski (1996).2

3. Expansion Beyond Ethics and Epistemology

As we said at the outset, the aim of this volume is to expand the influence of virtue to action
theory and philosophy of mind by exploring links connecting virtue with the notions of narrative
and self. We have already spoken of the history of virtue and its expansion into territories and

3
debates within moral philosophy and beyond that into epistemology. So, in this section our task
is to persuade the reader that the notions of narrative and self may be informed by virtue
theoretic considerations, and vice versa.

The concept of narrative and the concept of self tend to be points of discussion in metaphysics,
philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, and practical reasoning. For example, since the 1980s,
there has been a fruitful discussion of narrative in the philosophy of mind (e.g., Carr 1986,
Dennett 1992, MacIntyre 1981, Ricouer 1992, Schechtman 1996). Recently, around the middle
2000s, that discussion has expanded to include issues in moral philosophy. So, in this
introduction, we would like to take stock of the state of these three subdisciplines and how it is
that we have come to envision how they have become entangled.

First, given that the discussion of virtue has infiltrated discussion of theories of knowledge, there
seems to be no reason for us to rule out that such discussions will be fruitful for other areas of
philosophical interest. Epistemology had been fatigued by its inability to make progress with
respect to the Gettier problem. Sosa’s turn to questions of intellectual virtue spawned a new
means of contending with the problem. There is no reason to believe that we should not expect
the same to occur in action theory. For example, a relatively common line of thought for action
theorists is to distinguish between what people do and what merely happens to them. What
people do is called an “action,” which comes with a rich psychological structure or an intention
usually ascribed to an agent. That intention may form from an agent’s disposition to behave in a
certain way. This would suggest that a virtue an agent may have cultivated over a lifetime may
figure into the formation of an intention. Moreover, action theorists have been for many years
concerned with explaining an intentional action in terms of an agent’s reasons for action. Some
have found a causal explanation of action in an agent’s desires, intentions, and means-end beliefs
(cf. Goldman 1970), while others have stood firm against the causal view by suggesting a “non-
causal bringing about” (Taylor 1964). More recently, George Wilson (1989) and Carl Ginet (1990)
have proposed reason explanations as grounded in an agent’s intention, which resembles
Anscombe’s view (1957/2000), while Michael Thompson (2008) has presented a case for
jettisoning anything resembling a causal or non-causal approach to the explanation of action.
Since the explanation of action is so interwoven with an agent’s intention and the formation of
one’s character, this debate may play an informative role in thinking about virtues and its
partnership with character. Injecting the study of virtue and character into action theory or
thinking of ways in which issues in action theory may inform our appreciation of how one may
lead a virtuous life, we believe, may yield new veins of research for us to mine.

Second, at the same time, but independent of the developments in virtue ethics, there has been
a growing interest among philosophers of mind and action, in the role of narrative in selfhood,
identity, and agency. Broadly speaking, narrativity is the view that our lives have narrative shape,
and that this is of central importance to our sense of self and our view of what it means to live
well (See, e.g., Dennett 1991, 1992, Flanagan 1996, Goldie 2012). Part of living well should
involve the cultivation of good character and the virtues. So, we should expect that theorising
about narrative will involve virtue. Likewise, the study of narrative may inform debates in the
study of individual virtues. Since virtues are a characteriological disposition to behave in certain

4
ways, and since the formation and maintenance of our character may involve our own reflection
upon the events that comprise our life, we should expect that we have a story to tell of our
virtues. This new research suggests that it could inform our theorising about virtue, and vice
versa.

Third, virtue as character is informed by the way we identify our selves. How we identify our
selves is sometimes through the self being understood as having a narrative arc or a story to tell
about our self. How we live our lives depends upon the character traits (virtues and vices) we
have cultivated. So, there is a fluid connection between virtue as character and the narrative
view of the self. Human beings have been endowed with the capacity to respond to reasons for
action, and virtue ethicists of various stripes have been interested in the nature and role of
practical wisdom as a disposition to reason well about what one is to do. For example, a truly
courageous person acts from reasons consistent with the virtue of courage, such as “It is worth
risking my safety to prevent many people from suffering great harm”. As acquired dispositions
to act, feel, reason, and respond, the virtues (and vices) form a crucial part of the individual’s
identity or sense of self. Further, in a way that Julia Annas has pointed out, given the differences
in the circumstances of people’s lives, both the prominence and expression of particular virtues
will be different. Hence, for example, a nurse’s courage will differ significantly from the courage
of a firefighter (see Annas 2011, chapter 6). Although virtue theorists have increasingly turned
their attention to the philosophy of education and moral psychology in their attempt to
understand the nature of virtue and the process by which it is cultivated, the role of narrative –
the story we tell of ourselves – in the development of character is only beginning to be explored.

Finally, we should recognise a complex interplay in how a virtuous (or vicious) self figures as the
author of a narrative. The author functions differently in different literary discourses. The author
of novels engages readers differently than the short story author, and both engage the reader
differently than the science textbook author. In any text, the author has their own perspective,
and that perspective may be at least partly informed by their own virtuous or vicious character,
as well as the virtuous or vicious characters of people who surround the author. Such a view has
as its source the work of Michel Foucault:

We can conclude that, unlike a proper name, which moves from the interior of a discourse
to the real person outside who produced it, the name of the author remains at the contours
of texts—separating one from the other, defining their form, and characterizing their mode
of existence. It points to the existence of certain groups of discourse and refers to the status
of this discourse within a society and culture. The author's name is not a function of a man's
civil status, nor is it fictional; it is situated in the breach, among the discontinuities, which
gives rise to new groups of discourse and their singular mode of existence. (1969/1984,
113)

Rich texts, such as novels, short stories, and essays, serve as a window into the author’s virtuous
(or vicious) character. For example, witness Helen and Scott Nearing’s description of self-
sufficient living in rural Vermont:

5
 We were in good health. We were solvent in that we had no debts. We were fairly hopeful
of the future, but inexperienced in the ways of subsistence living and somewhat uncertain
as to how we should proceed. After due consideration and in the spirit of the times, we
drew up a ten year plan. (Nearing and Nearing 1954/1982, 29)

It does not seem far-fetched to say that the Nearings exercised the virtues of humility,
perseverance, and open-mindedness during their adventure in rural Vermont. Even the most
sterile text, say that of a science textbook, may be riddled with the author’s virtuous (or vicious)
character. For example, the author of a science textbook on evolutionary theory may lash out at
Christianity in an otherwise hygienic scientific text for giving a literal translation of the Bible.

Narratives enable us to learn something about the authors themselves or the alter-ego that the
author wants us to find in them. When we are confronted by a self-narrative, we have to decide
whether the text is giving us an accurate picture of who the author is or it is giving us a picture of
who the author wants us to think she is. This scepticism has led some to argue that the text and
its author should be sharply distinguished. For example, Roland Barthes writes:

[O]utside of literature itself (actually, these distinctions are being superseded), linguistics
has just furnished the destruction of the Author with a precious analytic instrument by
showing that utterance in its entirety is a void process, which functions perfectly without
requiring to be filled by the person of the interlocutors: linguistically, the author is never
anything more than the man who writes, just as I is no more than the man who says I:
language knows a “subject,” not a “person,” end this subject, void outside of the very
utterance which defines it, suffices to make language “work,” that is, to exhaust it. (Barthes
1977, 144)

Unlike Foucault, Barthes wanted us to appreciate that the author is distinct from the person who
wrote the text. Barthes felt that “To give a text an author is to impose a limit on that text, to
furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing” (Barthes 1977, 147). Barthes’
recommendation is for us not to read texts to uncover anything about the character of the
author. Textual meaning is loosened, despite the authorial control we might otherwise think
occurs in the writing process. We do not read texts to understand the author but to appreciate
the text itself.3 Such instability in an author’s connection with her own writing has been amplified
by Jacques Derrida (2001) and Louis Althusser (1971).4

We imagine that none of the arguments we have just presented should be surprising to those
who have worked in virtue ethics or virtue epistemology, but it may come as a surprise to those
who work exclusively in topics of analytic metaphysics. Orthodox approaches to problems of
analytic metaphysics only rarely consider anything beyond logic and philosophy of language.
However, we foresee that discussions of virtue will expand further beyond the confines of the
areas we have mentioned so far. For example, given some of the recent work in the history and
philosophy of science, we believe that virtue theory will begin to make headway in discussions of
scientific methods and their reliability, relevance, and effectiveness (cf. Pennock 2019). Let us

6
now turn to an overview of each of the contributions to the volume and share how they fit the
themes of this anthology.

4. Overview of the Contributions to this Volume

Christine Swanton, in “Virtue Ethics and Narrative Virtue,” kicks off the volume by arguing that
virtue ethics should move beyond basic virtue and develop an account of “narrative virtues,” that
is, role differentiated forms of basic virtue, such as the kindness of a lawyer qua lawyer, or the
generosity of a doctor qua doctor. As Anscombe pointed out, one of the advantages of virtue
ethics is that it replaces the “thin” deontic concepts (“right” and “wrong,” “permissible,”
“obligatory,” etc.) and the abstract moral principles favoured by modern moral philosophers with
“thick” aretaic concepts and attention to the complexity of moral life. By evaluating an action as
generous, for example, we do not merely approve of the action but also identify the features of
the action that warrant approval (in this case, that it involves giving of one’s time or resources
without demanding anything in return). Virtue theorists have given detailed analyses of specific
virtues and vices, but for the most part they have focused on the nature of what Swanton refers
to as “basic virtue,” that is, “virtue understood at a high level of generality (e.g. kindness qua
human being) or abstraction (kindness simpliciter).” She thinks we cannot settle debates about
the requirements of specific virtues without considering the settings in which we act, such as
cultural and historical location, role occupancy, and the narrative shape of our lives. Her focus in
this chapter is on the narrative character of our ethical lives. Swanton draws on the work of
Velleman, who defines “narrativism” as the view that “the meaning of a benefit depends on …
the specific narrative relation between the goods and evils involved” (Velleman 1991/2000, 63).
She develops an Integrationist view about the link between basic virtue and narrative virtue,
namely that the demands of ordinary morality and the complexities of social norms of narrative
meaning and role demands are mutually constraining.

Garrett Cullity further weaves together narrativity and virtues with second-order reasons, the
content of which involves one’s having responded to first-order reasons, in “Narrative Virtues
and Second-Order Reasons.” One approach to thinking about virtues conceives of them as
dispositions to respond well to the reasons we have. This “reasons-responsiveness” approach
helps to illuminate what is distinctive about such virtues as loyalty and the kind of integrity that
amounts to constancy in sustaining one’s allegiances to important goods. These virtues are ways
of responding well to facts about the narrative shape that one’s relationships and allegiances
have given to one’s life. Of particular interest are the forms that these narrative virtues take when
they are responses to the way one’s life has been shaped by one’s previous reasons-responsive
decisions. Narrative virtues with this feature are responses to second-order reasons.
Appreciating this helps us to distinguish different forms of loyalty and integrity from each other;
to see the relationship between these virtues and the choices we face between the plurality of
life-shaping goods, not all of which can be accommodated in a single life; to see how a virtuous
sensitivity to the life-allegiances one has formed in resolving those choices need not be unduly
self-regarding; and to appreciate what there is for someone who faces such choices to think
about.

7
Ramon Das, in his “Narrative Virtue Ethics?”, is more sceptical than Swanton and Cullity when it
comes to the appreciation of narratives and whether they may be a source of normativity at all.
More specifically, Das considers whether they are a serviceable substitute for dispositions as a
normative basis for virtue ethics. The idea of a narrative has served a variety of philosophical
purposes in the recent literature. It has been argued that narratives are an aid to understanding
(de Bres 2018), constitute a distinct form of explanation (Velleman 2003), and are a source of
meaning in life (Rosati 2013, Kauppinen 2015, de Bres 2018). Das uses as a foil a recent paper by
Lisa Grover (2013), in which she argues that the “situationist critique” of virtue ethics can be
avoided entirely by appealing to narratives, rather than dispositions as a basis for character traits.
Even if narratives have the causative influence that Glover thinks that they have, they cannot
provide the normative basis for right action that virtue ethics requires. In this respect, narratives
do not serve as an improvement over dispositions because they cannot supply the requisite
normative foundation for virtue ethics. While dispositions and narratives aim to provide a sound
basis for character traits, character is ultimately unsatisfactory as a basis for right action. Das
argues that right action must be sufficiently independent of character to allow for the possibility
to act rightly (or wrongly) by acting out of character. Sometimes, persons with bad character
nevertheless do the right thing and persons with good character nevertheless do the wrong thing.
Insofar as the virtue-ethical appeal to narratives is in the end an attempt to provide a sound basis
for character traits, Das argues, it cannot enable virtue ethics to meet this fundamental objection.

While they appreciate Das’ claim that the nature of the virtues and their role in human action are
controversial, in “How Virtues and Self-Narratives Cause Actions,” David Lumsden and Joseph
Ulatowski wish to explore the thesis that virtues and self-narratives play a causal role in the
production of action. One fruitful, though controversial, approach to understanding the nature
of the self is through the notion of a narrative and in particular a person’s self narrative or
narratives. Lumsden and Ulatowski consider how virtues and self-narratives interrelate and, in
particular, how they play a comparable role in the production of action. The basic ideas in the
literature concerning reasons as causes of action provide us with a useful starting point even
though the focus on reasons has tended to sideline potential causal roles for both virtues and
self-narratives. Without attempting to develop a new theory of causation, Lumsden and
Ulatowski draw a picture of how virtues and self-narratives, in relation to each other, can be
regarded as causally effective in producing an action.

Not only ought we consider whether narratives play a causal role in the production of action but
we should take up the question whether the narrative structure of an agent’s life influences the
rightness of their actions. Jason Kawall, in “Virtue Ethics, Narrative, and Revisionary Accounts of
Rightness,” does exactly this. Some virtue ethicists, most notably Rosalind Hursthouse and Daniel
Russell, have proposed a revisionary account of right action, where “right action” is a matter of
action assessment, and indicates that a given action is morally excellent and praiseworthy. The
account emphasizes both (i) an agent’s past and how she came to be in certain circumstances --
is it a result of her own vice or wrong actions? and (ii) the agent’s own future happiness and well-
being -- will an action be so terrible that her life is marred and ruined? The narrative structure of
an agent’s life thus plays a significant role in determining whether an action is right. Kawall thinks
the revisionary account faces significant obstacles. In particular, he argues that non-virtuous

8
agents can perform actions that are far more praiseworthy and excellent than many of those
characteristics of virtuous agents, even in circumstances that no virtuous agent would find herself
in. Kawall also considers cases where virtuous agents face terrible circumstances through no
fault of their own, and must act in ways that will inevitably mar or ruin their lives. Hursthouse
and Russell have argued that such circumstances make it impossible to perform a right, excellent
action, given that it is a cause for sorrow and robs the agent of their ongoing peace of mind.
Kawall thinks the revisionary account implausibly limits the scope for right action under difficult
or oppressive conditions, and concludes by arguing that it risks being excessively and implausibly
egoistic by focusing on the peace of mind and flourishing of the agent herself in assessing the
impacts of her actions.

As we have seen, to be virtuous is to be constituted as a kind of rational agent, namely one who
is exceptionally responsive to moral reasons. The virtuous person does not, however, learn to be
responsive to moral reasons in a peculiarly moral way but rather she acquires a range of
competencies associated with being a member of a community, such as the ability to recognise
norms and conventions and to participate in conversation. In “Virtuous Perception: A Gibsonian
Approach,” Richard Paul Hamilton argues that virtue represents a refined form of social
competence. It proceeds from an unobjectionable assumption: the virtuous are exemplary
because they are better able to reliably grasp the moral demands of a situation and act
accordingly. We should follow these moral exemplars and recommend that others, particularly
the young, emulate them. Hamilton begins by setting out Gibson’s original theory and introduces
some objections and refinements to it. He then explores how the theory can be expanded to
encompass social perception, as Gibson himself suggested (Gibson 1975/2015, 120). Broadly
speaking, in Gibsonian terms, social perception involves detecting “affordances” presented by
social settings, that is, seeing other’s actions as calling for us to act or refrain from acting in
particular ways. Following on from this, Hamilton concludes that moral perception can be
considered as a refined form of social perception. A Gibsonian view of perception makes this
claim intelligible, protecting it against some common objections to direct moral perception. He
links this Gibsonian analysis with Aristotle’s thoughts on training and habituation and Alfred
Schutz’s insights regarding the habituated nature of mundane social knowledge. This is where
he locates the idea of virtuous perception. He suggests, however, that times of moral crisis
require more than merely habitual responses. The virtuous person has acquired the requisite
skills to move beyond mere habit and is able to see more clearly than the non-virtuous how to
resolve the situation satisfactorily. Hamilton concludes with a discussion of how the proposed
approach addresses some common objections to naturalistic virtue ethics.

We pivot now to three contributions whose main thrust is to better appreciate the application of
virtue to the self and one’s self-narrative and how they make up the good life. Justin Oakley’s
“Virtue Ethics, Blameworthiness, and Role Failure” focuses on the application of virtue ethics to
problems in medical ethics, specifically the requirements of medical beneficence as a role-
specific or narrative virtue. When doctors in nineteenth-century America instilled hope – false
or otherwise – in dying patients, these doctors were acting in accordance with the advice of the
American Medical Association code of ethics that prevailed at the time. The AMA no longer
advises doctors to administer hope to dying patients, and contemporary doctors commonly

9
regard the provision of false hope as unjustifiably paternalistic and judge practitioners as
blameworthy for such behaviour. Virtue ethical approaches to medical practice typically evaluate
such conduct as wrong because it is contrary to the role virtue of medical beneficence, and to
the proper goals of medicine that this virtue aims to serve. Nevertheless, a nineteenth-century
American doctor instilling false hope in their dying patient might seem to be less blameworthy
than a contemporary doctor acting in such ways, given that this sort of conduct was being
prescribed to nineteenth-century American doctors by their professional association at the time.
This raises a more general question, which Oakley addresses in his chapter, namely whether
virtue ethics is capable of accommodating judgments of diminished blameworthiness being made
of role occupants who fail to act in accordance with the relevant role virtues, in circumstances
where the professional, institutional, and regulatory environments they act in are not conducive
to acting virtuously on those occasions?

In “Virtue, Living Well, and the Shape of a Life” Nicholas Ryan Smith argues in favour of a virtue-
ethical account of what makes someone’s life good for them. First, he engages with the literature
on the shape of a life and, following Velleman (2003) and Kauppinen (2015), argues that changes
in the (dis)value of events and acts that are targeted by this literature are due to changes in
narrative meaning rather than temporal location or order. Second, Smith outlines three
constraints for a fully satisfactory account of well-being: adequacy in respect to narrative value,
emotional fittingness, and practical reason. Finally, he argues that virtue ethics is superior to
hedonism, desire-satisfaction theory, and standard objective list theory in respect to meeting
these constraints. Emphasis is placed on how virtue ethics is better equipped to capture narrative
value and disvalue than Kauppinen’s narrative calculus.

The chapter by Damian Cox, “On the Value of Moral Failure,” further explores the role of
narrativity in our conception of the good life. Cox puts forward the following thesis: moral
success is sometimes born out of moral failure, and it is possible that a moral success that arises
in this way can be of such great significance that it exceeds moral successes available to the agent
without the failure. For example, if Oscar Schindler had not joined the National Socialists and
had not made valuable contacts within it, it is highly improbable that he would have been able
to save so many lives. One should, in retrospect, be thankful for failures of this kind while also
recognising them as failures worthy of remorse. Cox brings to light various ways in which moral
failure is especially valuable using the Dardenne Brothers’ film Le Fils (2004) as a principal case-
study. He then uses his account of valuable moral failure to examine two contrasting forms that
the moral assessment of a life may take. On the forensic model moral assessment of one’s life
arises from a summative judgement of a person’s moral credits and debits, and on the narrative
model moral assessment arises from the merit, success, and virtuous pursuit of significant moral
projects. Cox argues that certain important kinds of valuable moral failure are best understood
through a narrative model. This adds to the case for preferring the narrative model over forensic
approaches to moral assessment.

What Cox has shown is how an agent’s success may proceed from failure. The study of agency
can involve many things including the ability to act intentionally, which itself leads to issues of
moral responsibility but it requires postulating an agent, which could be identified with the self.

10
Thus, a study of the self has the potential to illuminate some issues connected with agency while
neglecting others. This broadly conventional approach tends to accept an agent as unified when
agents act as they do within certain constraints (cf. Frankfurt 1988, Korsgaard 2008, Velleman
2000, and Williams 1981). For example, Michael Bratman explains agency on the basis of actions
flowing from plans and policies that remain steadfast over time. For Bratman, figuring out what
to do consists of designing, selecting, and deploying plans (Bratman 1987, 1999, 2001, 2007,
2009, 2014). Thus, one requirement of the conventional approach is the unity of the agent’s so-
called “psychic spine,” something relatively stable, well structured, and action guiding.

In his contribution, Elijah Millgram finds motivation in Nietzsche’s writings to rethink orthodox
views of the unified agent. “Who Wrote Nietzsche’s Autobiography?” represents the
continuation of a theme in Millgram’s recent work (e.g., Millgram 2014, 2015, 2019). He offers
a Nietzschean anthropic argument for his version of the unity of agency. Agency is something
akin to a spectral notion. An agent’s dominant priority usually falls somewhere between two
extremes: the will to power, which is best described as a guide to action or choice, and amor fati,
which is to accept things as they are. To not have will to power as a dominant priority is called
‘decadence’ and the decadent cannot effectively control her own conative states. The decadent,
therefore, is someone who has no priorities because the control structures that priorities
presuppose are no longer in place. The will to power agent and decadent represent two
unoccupied extremes of the spectrum. The Nietzschean anthropic argument shows us how
someone who has his act together will not find the question of how we ought to live particularly
urgent, but if one is a decadent, then that question is urgent given that the decadent is falling
apart.

In “The Abnegated Self,” Nellie Wieland tells us about someone who has lost contact with her
agency, either against or without her will, and who may be called a “self-abnegating person.”
The loss of contact with her own agency does not mean that she cannot provide reasons for or a
narrative about her actions. Quite the contrary, it’s just that those reasons and that narrative
are someone else’s. People abnegate part of their agency regularly; for example, this is done
within hierarchical institutions. This may be compared with what Millgram (this volume) has
outlined as control and patterns of control in the priorities of the will to power agent. In other
times, the self-abnegation is all-encompassing; for example, this happens to victims of
brainwashing. An agent in such a position can completely fail to understand herself or be
understood as having a self. This can arise from internal and external forces. After describing
the features of self-abnegation, Wieland concludes with a consideration of whether the self-
abnegated person is owed respect.

Finally, last but not least, we return to question whether the messy lives we lead through the
roles that we play need be absent of integrity and virtue in Tim Dare’s “Integrity and Messy Lives.”
He notes that we should be surprised that Aristotle and Harry Frankfurt’s views of integration,
integrity, and the self have been as influential as they have, since few of us obtain, or perhaps
even aspire to, the peaceful coherence — or psychic harmony — of Aristotle’s virtuous person or
to Frankfurt’s well-ordered self. Many, perhaps most, of us lead much messier lives than these
views comfortably accommodate, and not because we are wicked or wanton. The messiness of

11
our lives is explained at least in part by the inevitability that we will be forced to make choices,
not merely within, but between, lives, and because we occupy social roles, the norms of which
are likely to conflict with one another and with broader moral norms we endorse. However, what
matters to integrity is not the successful integration of our desires and volitions, or the
attainment of psychic harmony, but instead commitment to a certain kind of critical reflection
and a willingness to embrace the recommendations of that reflection. So understood, integrity
need not be denied to the many of us who live messy lives.

5. Conclusion
Virtue theory will no doubt continue to expand into domains of philosophy beyond what we have
described here and what the volume’s contributors exemplify. “The Virtue Turn” prompted by
Anscombe in moral philosophy and Sosa in epistemology will not stop with philosophy of mind
or philosophy of action. We envision that discussion of virtue may even enter debates in more
formal areas of the philosophical enterprise, like logic and formal epistemology. We have
defended expansion of virtue-theoretic talk into discussions of narrative and the self, and vice
versa, in this introduction. All of our arguments have attempted to make broad connections
between virtue, narratives, and the self, and the contributions--in one way or another--fill out
each of these broad connections.

12
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Notes

1
There are far too many replies to Gettier’s work than we may summarise in this introduction. Suffice it to say that
one could easily spend a career studying Gettier’s counterexample and responses to it. For more information on
Gettier and responses to the infamous 1963 article, see Ichikawa and Steup (2017).
2
Heather Battaly has expanded work in virtue epistemology to include work on epistemic vices (2010; 2014; cf.
Cassam 2019).
3
One may think that such interpretations of authorial intent only afflict continental philosophy. This would be a
patently untrue claim. For example, resolute readings of Ludwig Wittgenstein recommend that we read the
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus not to come to understand what nonsense is but to understand who he is. On a
proper reading of Wittgenstein, so they claim, we are to read Wittgenstein to understand him and the kind of activity
in which he engages. To read Wittgenstein is to evoke an inner change in the reader. The importance of Wittgenstein
is therapeutic, and the point of understanding is inner change (cf. Conant 1990; Ulatowski forthcoming).
4
Space does not permit for us to enter discussion with Derridean deconstruction or the poststructuralism of
Althusser. Suffice it to say that we acknowledge the relevance of such material for endeavours such as we have
embarked upon in this text, but we have decided to forgo giving a careful analysis of our own or having one of our
contributors weigh in on the debate.

19