Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life

by Clare Mac Cumhaill

‘It is surely clear’, she would write, ‘that moral virtues must be connected with human good and harm, and that it is quite impossible to call anything you like good or harm.’ [153] With this insight, she found a way to put value back in the world, and to reconnect moral language to human life. The connection to virtue or vice is not a disguised appeal to a higher-order principle: ‘Do not be ostentatious’ or ‘Always display humility’. Philippa did not think (as many contemporary ‘virtue ethicists’ do) that bringing an action under a virtue description implies that it ought to be done. Rather, the virtue term gives a ‘way of looking at something’, a way of seeing the facts in the light of ideas about the human good.