from Part II - Virtue and Eudaimonia
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 July 2025
This chapter asks where Kant stands on one of the most famous contentions of ancient ethics: the so-called Unity of the Virtues, the claim that a person who has one of the virtues must have all of them. The twentieth-century revival of virtue ethics was partly prompted by explorations of this proposal – its centrality to ancient theories and its presumed implausibility for philosophers today. Kant announces that he rejects three ancient premises about virtue, the first of which is “there is only one virtue and one vice”. The chapter argues that he thereby rejects the Unity of the Virtues, as the Stoics conceive of it. For Kant, virtue-singular is prior to virtues-plural, but it is not one. The virtues-plural are not parts of virtue; the latter is not a whole in the way the Stoics take it to be. Nevertheless, Kant shares more with the ancients than with twentieth-century philosophers writing on the topic. He endorses the premise that virtue-singular is prior to the virtues-plural.
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