Abstract
Does any child ever first acquire virtue in an Aristotelian manner? A subtle interpersonal play is the more typical locus of initial ethical formation. Moreover, many modern experiments, such as a picture of a pair of eyes being glued to an “honesty box” (Bateson et al. 2006), reveal how even a lifeless representation that evokes a sense of “second-person relatedness” (SPR) subtly encourages virtuous actions by adults. Classical virtue ethics does not easily accommodate these phenomena, but I have argued previously (Pinsent 2012) that the “infused” dispositions described by St Thomas Aquinas can be understood in terms of SPR. In this chapter, I propose that these insights, with some corroboration from contemporary social neuroscience, highlight the need for a “Copernican Revolution” of virtue ethics. I also review briefly some implications and propose ways in which the role of infused or second-person dispositions might be tested.
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Pinsent, A. (2017). “Till We Have Faces”: Second-Person Relatedness as the Object, End and Crucial Circumstance of Perfect or “Infused” Virtues. In: Carr, D., Arthur, J., Kristjánsson, K. (eds) Varieties of Virtue Ethics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59177-7_16
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