Virtue Ethics Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Virtue Ethics - Essay Example the light of the existence of the sub virtuous category of people, Johnson claims that Hursthouse’s assertion about right action is false, partly because it does not account for the right of those who are non virtuous to perform self controlling actions. Hursthouse’s argument is that an action can be deemed to be right under certain circumstances only if a completely virtuous agent would perform the said action under the same circumstances. The flaw in the argument is that a person who is completely virtuous would not be able to admit to performing unjust, non virtuous acts, or would not perform such actions in the first place. Hence, the same argument about right action cannot be extended to the case of non virtuous persons. To classify an action as right or wrong based entirely upon what a completely virtuous agent would do may itself be flawed, because it classes each kind of virtue into distinct categories of black and white areas with no scope for gray area in between. As opposed to this, a sub virtuous person who is neither fully virtuous or the complete anti-thesis of it, can admit to acts performed which may not be characteristic of the group to which he or she belongs. While an individual may be fairly good and virtuous on the whole, he or she may sometimes perform and can admit to an act that is not. Similarly, an individual that is not virtuous on the whole can sometimes admit to actions that are virtuous. Extending this argument further, a fully virtuous person would not therefore maintain a list of actions like the lies he or she has told in order to work towards becoming more honest, but this is precisely the kind of action that a sub virtuous person could and should do in order to improve. A sub virtuous person can perform actions which are self controlling, but applying Hursthouse’s argument about right actions, a non virtuous person cannot perform self controlling actions, because virtue ethics in such a person’s case is incomplete,

The historian's task is to understand the past; the human scientist, Essay

The historian's task is to understand the past; the human scientist, by contrast, is looking to change the future. To what extent is this true in these areas of knowledge - Essay Example This includes various rational, systematic and verification activities used by human scientists for validating the data obtained through objective specific and subjective phenomena. As human science not only remains confined towards the study of humanities and social sciences but also covers the areas of sociology, history, economics and anthropology, it often overlaps the dimensions of historians. Hence, the area of knowledge of human scientists cannot be firmly polarized from that of learning the past like in the case of historians. On the other hand, the Historian’s task can be quite delicate, which includes understanding the implications of various analytical categories for filling up the historical gaps and framing a proper picture of the past. This way, the area of knowledge relevant to historians tends to be polarized from that of the human scientists who learn the past in pursuit to make the future better. The role of historians, since decades, has been focused to provide conceptualized and factual descriptions about various events and circumstances that had occurred in the past and develop an understanding of the same in order to unveil the past origins of the human society. The area of knowledge relevant to historians can be considered significant to a large extent. They play an important role in reconstructing complex stories from scattered historical sources. Human curiosity about their origin and evolution has always strongly motivated the historians in their efforts of understanding past events that had transformed human civilization or embarks on a secretive paradigm of ancient human society. Historians examine the past in a very broad perspective and facilitate the readers in adding up the historical events as well as actions, triggering their thoughts, motives, and adventurous states of mind (Barton, 2009). They study and extract data from old artifacts, recorded writings, past stories and