The blurb on the back of Moral Cultivation hails the book as "a great contribution to the study of virtue ethics". Strictly speaking this is not true: the focus of the anthology is not virtue ethics but the notion of moral cultivation, and though all the essays touch upon questions and problems normally associated with virtue ethics none of the authors explicitly commit themselves to virtue ethical positions. It is not, however, difficult to understand why the essays in Moral Cultivation are categorized as belonging within the virtue ethical tradition. For most of the twentieth century the notion of moral cultivation was almost completely absent from mainstream Anglo-Saxon moral philosophy. It was not until the advent of virtue ethics as a distinct and influential approach to normative ethics that the question of how human beings acquire and develop the competences and capacities necessary for moral agency once again became an important and legitimate within moral philosophy. This unfortunately has led many people to conclude that moral cultivation must be the exclusive prerogative of virtue ethics.

One of the great strengths of this anthology is that it illustrates how fundamentally erroneous this conclusion is. Joel Kupperman (in "The Ethics of Style and Attitutde") and Philip Ivanhoe (in "Literature and Ethics in the Chinese Confucian Tradition") thus both turn to the ancient Confucian tradition within Chinese philosophy in order to illuminate the notion of moral cultivation. In "Self-cultivation and Relations with Others in Classical Rabbinic Thought" Jonathan Schofer employs ancient rabbinic texts to facilitate our understanding of the way in which different sorts of human relationships can further or hinder moral self-improvement. In "Moral Naturalism and the Possibility of Making Ourselves Better" Elizabeth Radcliffe uses Benjamin Franklin and David Hume to develop a naturalistic account of self-improvement, and then combines this account with Aristotle's moral philosophy in order to answer certain contemporary objections to the notion of moral character. And in "Self-Development as an Imperfect Duty" Robert Johnson provides a Kantian justification for the importance of moral cultivation, and explains what such cultivation looks like from a Kantian perspective. The only two essays which approach the notion of moral cultivation from what appears to be a recognizably virtue ethical position are William Prior's and Brad Wilburn's. In "Moral Philosophy and Moral Cultivation" Prior thus uses Aristotle's account of moral cultivation to critically examine the contemporary tendency to regard the teaching of ethics as primarily a theoretical enterprise. And in "Moral Self-Improvement" Wilburn develops an account of moral self-improvement which explicitly borrows from and employs insights found within Aristotle's moral philosophy.

All the essays are clearly written and accessible to persons with a basic grasp of moral philosophy. Persons well-versed in the contemporary discussion of moral cultivation will encounter both well-established viewpoints and novel ideas. The main virtue of the anthology however is neither its style nor its content but the fact that it establishes beyond any reasonable doubt that the question of moral cultivation is not the exclusive property of the virtue ethical tradition, but can and should be asked by any reasonably comprehensive ethical theory. As the essays in this anthology illustrates the question of how human beings acquire and develop the competences and capacities needed for being a moral agent has always been one of the most basic and important philosophical questions. It is about time it became so again.

© 2007 Carsten Fogh Nielsen

Carsten Fogh Nielsen, MA, post graduate student, University of Aarhus. Main interests: Kant, moral philosophy and the philosophy of popular culture

Categories: Ethics