The word ‘environment’ has a history. Before the mid-nineteenth century, the idea of a singular, abstract entity—the organism—interacting with another singular, abstract entity—the environment—was virtually unknown. In this paper I trace how the idea of a plurality of external conditions or circumstances was replaced by the idea of a singular environment. The central figure behind this shift, at least in Anglo-American intellectual life, was the philosopher Herbert Spencer. I examine Spencer’s work from 1840 to 1855, demonstrating that he was exposed (...) to a variety of discussions of the ‘force of circumstances’ in this period, and was decisively influenced by the ideas of Auguste Comte in the years preceding the publication of Principles of psychology (1855). It is this latter work that popularized the word ‘environment’ and the corresponding idea of organism–environment interaction—an idea with important metaphysical and methodological implications. Spencer introduced into the English-speaking world one of our most enduring dichotomies: organism and environment. (shrink)

Some key political challenges today, e.g. climate change, are future oriented. The intergenerational setting differs in some notable ways from the intragenerational one, creating obstacles to theorizing about intergenerational justice. One concern is that as the circumstances of justice do not pertain intergenerationally, intergenerational justice is not meaningful. In this paper, I scrutinize this worry by analysing the presentations of the doctrine of the circumstances of justice by David Hume and John Rawls. I argue that we should accept the upshot (...) of their idea, that justice is context sensitive, even if this at first sight seems to invalidate intergenerational justice. On the basis of moral constructivism, I subsequently provide a fresh reading of the doctrine according to which it conveys the idea that justice is the solution to a practical problem. However, as the problem background is evolving, we need to properly characterize the relevant practical problem in order to make ethical theorizing relevant. Contrary to what has been claimed, the circumstances of justice do not then clash with intergenerational justice, but are the necessary presuppositions for its advancement. (shrink)

Individualism dominates Western ontologies: atoms and molecules; substances, minds, and agents. Each is said to embody conditions sufficient to establish its nature and existence. Ontologies spawned by Descartes's cogito and Kantian world‐making are, nevertheless, false to all we know of reality and ourselves. This paper suggests an alternative: entities and events are generated by the material circumstances in which they emerge and evolve; nothing at any scale is exempt from the discovery that its existence and character derive from and are (...) sustained by circumstances additional to those it embodies. All are embedded in the context that has been their source. (shrink)

In this article, I analyze the circumstances of justice, that is, the background conditions that are necessary and sufficient for justice to exist between individual parties in society. Contemporary political philosophers almost unanimously accept an account of these circumstances attributed to David Hume. I argue that the conditions of this standard account are neither sufficient nor necessary conditions for justice. In particular, I contend that both a Hobbesian state of nature and a prisoner’s dilemma are cases in which the conditions (...) of the standard account obtain and yet no justice exists between parties. I propose an alternative set of generic circumstances of justice motivated by examples from game theory. Parties are in these generic circumstances with respect to each other when: (1) they are engaged in a conflictual coordination game with multiple strict Nash equilibrium points where, at any of these equilibria, some parties do not receive their greatest payoffs, and (2) they have common knowledge that each party is rational and follows her end of a strict equilibrium where no party receives her greatest payoff. These two conditions reflect the idea that justice requires all parties to make some sacrifices so that others can have more of the goods they need and want. I argue that these generic circumstances are necessary and sufficient conditions for parties to follow generic norms of justice, that is, mutually beneficial practices that require some sacrifices. Key Words: common knowledge • conflictual coordination • correlated equilibrium • moderate selfishness • moderate variable scarcity • rough equality. (shrink)

This article is a reply to Venkatapuram's critique in his article Health, Vital Goals, Capabilities, this volume. I take issue mainly with three critical points put forward by Venkatapuram with regard to my theory of health. (1) I deny that the contents of my vital goals are relative to each community or context, as Venkatapuram claims. There is no conceptual connection at all between standard circumstances and vital goals, as I understand these concepts. (2) Venkatapuram notes that I stop short (...) of filling the framework of vital goals with any content and thereby make my concept of health less concrete. I reply that some vital goals are indeed universal, viz. the ones which are necessary conditions for survival. Many other vital goals are individual and cannot therefore be included in a universal list. (3) Venkatapuram claims that my definition of vital goals is too broad, since it entails that some persons without any disease can be regarded as ill. However, in my understanding health is a relational concept from a state of complete health to a state of maximal illness. In this framework, a minor reduction of a state of complete health does not entail illness. This article also contains a comparison between my theory of health and Martha Nussbaum's theory of capabilities for dignity. (shrink)

Abstract:Should the responsibilities of business managers be understood independently of the social circumstances and “market forces” that surround them, or (in accord with empiricism and the social sciences) are agents and their choices shaped by their circumstances, free only insofar as they act in accordance with antecedently established dispositions, their “character”? Virtue ethics, of which I consider myself a proponent, shares with empiricism this emphasis on character as well as an affinity with the social sciences. But recent criticisms of both (...) empiricist and virtue ethical accounts of character deny even this apparent compromise between agency and environment. Here is an account of character that emphasizes dynamic interaction both in the formation and in the interplay between personal agency and responsibility on the one hand and social pressures and the environment on the other. (shrink)

In 2004, I explained the absurdity of Moore-paradoxical belief via the syllogism (Williams 2004): (1) All circumstances that justify me in believing that p are circumstances that tend to make me believe that p. (2) All circumstances that tend to make me believe that p are circumstances that justify me in believing that I believe that p. (3) All circumstances that justify me in believing that p are circumstances that justify me in believing that I believe that p. I then (...) took (3) to mean (EP) Whatever justifies me in believing that p justifies me in believing that I believe that p.1 Now suppose that I am justified in believing anything of the omissive Mooreparadoxical form: (Om) p and I do not believe that p. Then I am justified in believing the first conjunct. So by (EP) I am justified in believing that I believe that p. But since I am also justified in believing the second conjunct, I am justified in believing that I do not believe that p. I claimed that this is impossible, because anything that justifies me in believing that something is the case renders me unjustified in believing that it is not the case. This syllogism is plausible from an externalist view of justification, according to which circumstances such as seeming to see rain under normal perceptual conditions, justify me in believing that it is raining. In support of (1), if my apparent perceptions of rain are reliably connected with rain, so as to justify me in thinking that it is raining, they also tend to make me believe that it is raining. In support of (2), my apparent perceptions of rain are also reliably connected with my coming to believe that it is raining. However, Anthony Brueckner (2006) argues that (1) and (EP) are both false once justification is thought of evidentially. Against (EP), he claims that my evidence that p is not evidence that I believe that p unless I possess the evidence, in the sense that I believe it and were I to believe that p on its basis. (shrink)

Alvin Goldman’s paper “What Is Justified Belief" and his book Epistemology and Cognition pioneered reliabilist theories of epistemic justifiedness. In light of counterexamples to necessity and counterexamples to sufficiency, Goldman has offered a number of refinements and modifications. This paper focuses on those refinements that relativize the justification conferring force of a belief-forming process to its reliably producing a high ratio of true beliefs over falsehoods in special circumstances: reliability in the actual world, in normal worlds, and in nonmanipulated environments. (...) This paper argues that Goldman’s refinements fall short and suggests instead the relativization to reliability in normal circumstances. Normal circumstances are those where the belief-forming process acquired the etiological function of reliably inducing true beliefs. This theory invites the Swampman objection. Two lines of response are pursued. (shrink)

Both context relativists and circumstance-of-evaluation relativists agree that the traditional semantic interpretation of some sentence-types fails to deliver the adequate truth-conditions for the corresponding tokens. But while the context relativists argue that the truth-conditions of each token depend on its context of utterance—each token being thus associated with a distinct intension—circumstance-of-evaluation relativists preserve a unique intension for all the tokens by placing circumstances of evaluations under the influence of a certain ‘point of view’. The main difference between the (...) two approaches is that only the former can operate locally. It is shown that, for this reason, circumstance-of-evaluation relativism makes erroneous semantic predictions about (relative) gradable adjectives. (shrink)

This paper discusses two distinct strategies that have been adopted to provide fine-grained propositions; that is, propositions individuated more finely than sets of possible worlds. One strategy takes propositions to have internal structure, while the other looks beyond possible worlds, and takes propositions to be sets of circumstances, where possible worlds do not exhaust the circumstances. The usual arguments for these positions turn on fineness-of-grain issues: just how finely should propositions be individuated? Here, I compare the two strategies with an (...) eye to the fineness-of-grain question, arguing that when a wide enough range of data is considered, we can see that a circumstance-based approach, properly spelled out, outperforms a structure-based approach in answering the question. (Part of this argument involves spelling out what I take to be a reasonable circumstance-based approach.) An argument to the contrary, due to Soames, is also considered. (shrink)

_Elite Schools in Globalizing Circumstances_ foregrounds the richly theoretical and empirically-based work of an international cast of scholars seeking to break out of the confines of the methodological nationalism that now governs so much of contemporary scholarship on schooling. Based on a 5-year extended global ethnography of elite schools in nine different countries—countries defined by colonial pasts linked to England—the contributors make a powerful case for the rethinking of elite schools and elite class formation theory in light of contemporary processes (...) of globalization and transnational change. Prestigious, high-status schools have long been seen as critical institutional vehicles directly contributing to the societal processes of elite selection and reproduction. This book asserts that much has changed and that these schools can no longer rest on their past laurels and accomplishments. Instead they must re-cast their heritages and tradition in order to navigate the new globally competitive educational field enabling them to succeed in a world in which the globalization of educational markets, the global ambitions and imaginations of school youth, and the emergence of new powerful players peddling entrepreneurial models of curriculum and education, have placed contemporary schooling under tremendous pressure. This insightful and though-provoking volume provides a well-researched perspective on the nature of contemporary schooling in the globalizing era. This book was originally published as a special issue of _Globalisation, Societies and Education. _. (shrink)

A number of authors have suggested that a conditional analysis of dispositions must take roughly the following form: Thing X is disposed to produce response R to stimulus S just in case, if X were exposed to S and surrounding circumstances were auspicious, then X would produce R. The great challenge is cashing out the relevant notion of ‘auspicious circumstances’. I give a general argument which entails that all existing conditional analyses fail, and that there is no satisfactory way to (...) define ‘auspicious circumstances’ just in terms of S, R, and X. Instead, I argue that the auspicious circumstances C for the manifestation of a disposition constitute a third irreducible element of that disposition, and that to pick out (or to ‘individuate’) that disposition one must specify C along with S and R. This enables a new conditional analysis of dispositions that gives intuitively satisfying answers in cases that pose problems for other approaches. (shrink)

Two recent reports of mice homozygously deleted for cyclin D1 provide unequivocal evidence that the critical G1 cyclin, cyclin D1, is by itself rate‐limiting for growth in some mammalian tissues(1,2). Cyclin D1 knockout mice are small and exhibit behavioral abnormalities. Specific hypoplasias of retinal and mammary tissues suggest an unusual dependence on cyclin D1 function for tissue growth in those organs. The odd coincidences that cyclin D1 functions as the retinoblastoma gene kinase, together with associations between increased cyclin D1 expression (...) and breast cancer, suggest, but do not prove, a special function of cyclin D1 in those tissues. (shrink)

Can Rawlsian theory provide us with an adequate response to the practical question of how we should proceed in the face of widespread and intractable disagreement over matters of justice? Recent criticism of ideal theorizing might make us wonder whether this question highlights another way in which ideal theory can be too far removed from our non-ideal circumstances to provide any practical guidance. Further reflection on it does not show that ideal theory is redundant, but it does indicate that there (...) is a need for a non-ideal theory that does not consist simply in an account of how to apply the principles which are yielded by ideal theory to non-ideal circumstances in the light of what is feasible and an assessment of the costs of implementation. Indeed any non-ideal theory that can adequately address this question will have to be partially autonomous, drawing on a notion of legitimacy that is rather different to the one which lies at the heart of Rawlsian ideal theory. (shrink)

En 2017, des spécialistes de différentes disciplines (santé, éducation et travail social) issus de cinq pays européens (France, Géorgie, Italie, Norvège et Suisse) ont créé un réseau afin de poursuivre leurs recherches sur le handicap et la migration. Le présent article expose les principaux résultats d’un premier workshop qu’ils ont réalisé et les pistes qui en découlent pour de futures recherches. D’une part, les enfants migrants en situation de handicap restent invisibles sur le plan statistique dans plusieurs pays. Leurs besoins (...) en tant que migrants et personnes en situation de handicap sont pris en compte par des politiques et des dispositifs distincts. D’autre part, dans les cinq pays, un écart important entre les normes légales et la situation des familles migrantes ayant un enfant en situation de handicap est constaté. Il en est de même en ce qui concerne la collaboration entre les différents services publics, ou entre ces services et les associations soutenant les personnes en situation de handicap, les personnes migrantes et/ou les minorités. Les futures recherches seront centrées sur les moyens d’augmenter la participation sociale des enfants migrants en situation de handicap et de leurs familles dans des contextes d’interventions interculturelles et interdisciplinaires. (shrink)

Many recent political philosophers have attempted to demonstrate that choice and responsibility can be incorporated into the framework of an egalitarian theory of distributive justice. This article argues, however, that the project of developing a responsibility-based conception of egalitarian justice is misconceived. The project represents an attempt to defuse conservative criticism of the welfare state and of egalitarian liberalism more generally. But by mimicking the conservative’s emphasis on choice and responsibility, advocates of responsibility-based egalitarianism unwittingly inherit the conservative’s unsustainable justificatory (...) ambitions, unattractive moralism, and questionable metaphysical commitments. More importantly, they misrepresent the nature of our concern with equality as a value. (shrink)

What circumstances create the need for an institution that conforms to civil recourse theory? I consider polities that vary in the extent to which they instantiate justice and argue that only a moderately non-ideal polity has a need for such an institution. When a polity gets close to the ideal, the polity needs institutions of corrective justice. When the polity gets very far from the ideal, tort law is at best instrumentally justified. Somewhere in between those two extremes, a civil (...) recourse conception has significant justificatory advantages over both corrective justice and instrumental accounts. Even under these conditions, however, it remains difficult to explain within the confines of civil recourse theory why enforcement of tort law’s primary norms should remain in the hands of the victim. I suggest a possible explanation, but it requires us to jettison the claim that the wrongs of tort law are genuine wrongs. (shrink)

"Evidentialism" is the view that a person's epistemic justification for a doxastic attitude is determined entirely by his or her evidence for the content of that attitude. This paper has two goals. The first is to argue that values and circumstances properly influence epistemic justification, and that evidentialism is therefore untenable, even as an epistemic ideal. The second is to outline a nonevidentialist theory of epistemic justification that avoids the common objection that nonevidentialist theories fail to preserve important distinctions between (...) epistemic justification, on the one hand, and moral and prudential justification, on the other hand. (shrink)

No semantic theory satisfying certain natural constraints can identify the semantic contents of sentences (the propositions they express), with sets of circumstances in which the sentences are true–no matter how fine-grained the circumstances are taken to be. An objection to the proof is shown to fail by virtue of conflating model-theoretic consequence between sentences with truth-conditional consequence between the semantic contents of sentences. The error underlines the impotence of distinguishing semantics, in the sense of a truth-based theory of logical consequence, (...) and semantics, in the sense of a theory of meaning. (shrink)

A sentence is never not in a context. We are never not in a situation. A statute is never not read in the light on some purpose. A set of interpretative assumptions is always in force. A sentence that seems to need no interpretation is already the product of one...No sentence is ever apprehended independently of some or other illocutionary force. Illocutionary force is the key term in speech-act theory. It refers to the way an utterance is taken—as an order, (...) a warning, a promise, a proposal, a request, etc.—and the theory's strongest assertion is that no utterance is ever taken purely, that is, without already having been understood as the performance of some illocutionary act. Consider, as an example, the sentence "I will go." Depending on the context in which it is uttered, "I will go" can be understood as a promise, a threat, a warning, a report, a prediction, etc., but it will always be understood as one of these, and it will never be an unsituated kernel of pure semantic value. In other words, "I will go" does not have a basic or primary meaning which is then put to various illocutionary uses; rather, "I will go" is known only in its illocutionary lives, and in each of them its meaning will be different. Moreover, if the meaning of a sentence is a function of its illocutionary force , and if illocutionary force varies with the circumstances, then illocutionary force is not a property of sentences, but of situations. That is, while a sentence will always have an illocutionary force , the illocutionary force it has will not always be the same. Stanley E. Fish is the author of, among many other works, Is There a Text in This Class? Interpretative Authority in the Classroom and in Literary Criticism, and The Living Temple: George Herbert and Catechizing. His contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Facts and Fictions: A Reply to Ralph Rader" , "Interpreting the Variorum" , "Interpreting 'Interpreting the Variorum'" , "A Reply to John Reichert; or, How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Interpretation" , and "One More Time". (shrink)

This article reviews the development of social quality indicators and the challenges ahead. First, through a review of recent Asian and Australian work carried out on social quality indicators, and the World Bank related work on “social development indicators,” the article argues that social quality indicators research should move beyond the empirical level of particular policy areas. Therefore, it should be guided by a clear methodological perspective regarding the role of indicators as part of a social quality theory (SQT) and (...) their relation to the social quality approach (SQA). Second, the article opens a debate about the rationale behind distinguishing between three different functions of social quality indicators. Indicators should address the change in the conditional factors in daily life, as manifested in its economic, socio-political, socio-cultural and environmental dimensions, in order to examine the consequences of general trends and contradictions in (1) societal circumstances, (2) the development (or lack of development) toward sustainability, and (3) the related issue of sustainable urban development. Before 2010 social quality scholars mainly concentrated on the first issue. Recently, however, they are approaching all three issues. It is essential to delve deeper into SQT and the SQA for understanding these three issues separately and integrally. This has implications for the nature of social quality indicators and their comparison to those of other mainstream approaches; the article introduces this agenda of work. (shrink)

This paper identifies a distinctive kind of moral luck, deep circumstantial luck and then explores its effects on moral responsibility. A key feature of the phenomenon is that it is recurrent rather than one-off. It also affects agents across a wide range of situations making it difficult to detect. Deeply unlucky agents are subject to unfavourable moral assessments through no fault of their own both in specific cases and when they try to respond to such initial assessments. In this respect, (...) deep circumstantial luck takes the form of a normative burden that grows over time. A process-oriented conception of moral responsibility as answerability is proposed to explain this phenomenon and highlight its implications for rethinking vicarious responsibility. (shrink)

Four lectures delivered by the author at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study in 2008.

What is the link between patients' rights to NHS treatment and PCTs' duties to live within their budgets? This was the issue in Rogers v Swindon PCT [2006], in which a patient had been denied trastuzamab (Herceptin®) for early-stage breast cancer. In principle, rationing is lawful and PCTs have to make hard choices about spending priorities, but they may not ignore the interests of needy patients in doing so. Rather, they must balance the 'corporate' interests of the PCT with the (...) 'clinical' interests of individuals. One way of doing so is to adopt an Ethical Framework at the macro-level to guide NHS resource allocation, but to also recognize 'exceptional cases' at the micro-level, even if the treatment is generally considered to be a low priority. This article is primarily concerned with these micro-level cases. Patients and clinicians should know how the balance is struck. Such a system operates in Berkshire, but there is plenty of room for debate about how it should develop. (shrink)

What are the worst conditions under which someone can be virtuous and happy? In this paper, I argue that a minimum threshold of favorable circumstances is necessary for moral virtue and human flourishing or happiness. Stoic and Aristotelian traditions make different and important claims about the role of external circumstances in our moral lives. Retrieving the ancient dispute benefits contemporary ethics. For one, the relevance of external circumstances is an important question for the development of present-day virtue ethics. For another, (...) identifying the minimal ingredients for virtue and happiness is helpful for wider ethical concerns such as discussions of our moral obligations to future generations. After explaining the ancient dispute, I describe categories of circumstances that seem intuitively relevant to virtue and happiness. Then, I investigate which are necessary and examine commonsense examples. I conclude that a minimum threshold of favorable circumstances from the following categories is necessary: the necessities for biological life, cognitive ability, and moral education. (shrink)

In this paper, I will examine how the role of hope can inform our interpretation of the classical principles of medical ethics. Defining hope as a future-oriented expectation for the good, I will look at how it can shape our understanding of justice, beneficence, respect for autonomy and non-maleficence. I will suggest that ethically engaging with these principles in medical practice requires placing value on the patient–practitioner relation as a mode of hope. Engaging the writings of Emmanuel Lévinas and Søren (...) Kierkegaard, I will show how hope reveals itself through responsible and expectant relationship, even in the midst of suffering. (shrink)

“Iatrophilosophy” is defined as the translational discipline between medicine and philosophy that has a double objective, theoretical and practical. It is presented a model of practical iatrophilosophy applied to chronic pain associated with depression and stress—depresalgia—, that expands Phenomenologic, Hermeneutic, Dynamic Psychotherapy (PHD) to the general medical field. It starts from the general model of the medical triad - disease, illness, and sickness- and, in the horizon of Ortega's anthropology, five nuclear metaphors are proposed: greed of the body, anguish of (...) circumstance, personal tear, personal knots, and personal expropriation. These are related to the neurobiological mechanisms of central sensitization, allostasis, and alteration of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. A personal recovery process based on therapeutic concord is proposed. The analysis of chronic pain and other complex health problems can benefit from philosophical methodologies such as clinical hermeneutics. (shrink)

A striking feature of the songs of Sappho and Alcaeus is their constant use of ‘deictic’ signals to establish a setting in a specific location in time and space. This article examines the created worlds of Sappho and Alcaeus, drawing on cognitive methodologies, in particular Text World Theory. It argues for the importance of a methodological distinction between the circumstances of performance of the songs, and the cognitive world they create. The locations established by the songs are designed to assimilate (...) to, or mirror, the plausible/potential circumstances of actual performance, but are distinct from them, and are just as constructed as the artful lyric locations of Horace or Thomas Gray. Close readings of the songs show how Sappho and Alcaeus use ‘location’ as a tool in their poetics, exploiting the interaction between the world created by the songs and the circumstances of their performance. (shrink)

Ted Honderich; V*—Causes and Causal Circumstances as Necessitating, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 78, Issue 1, 1 June 1978, Pages 63–86, https.

David Hume famously states, in his A Treatise of Human Nature, “that ’tis only from the selfishness and confin’d generosity of men, along with the scanty provision nature has made for his wants, that justice derives its origin”.1 This is Hume’s summary of the conditions under which the very idea of rules of justice makes practical sense, and he effectively repeats it in the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals.2 To put it briefly at the outset, Hume’s point is simply (...) this: if there was either a superabundance or drastic scarcity of resources, or if everyone were either completely and unfailingly virtuous or completely and unfailingly wicked, we would not need rules. (shrink)

The authors of this article use systemic, comparative and historical methods to review the most representative legal systems – rench, English and German – and analyse how these legal systems deal with the effects of change in circumstances on the performance of a contract. The authors also discuss solutions adopted by scholar groups working on supranational contract law (soft law) instruments, namely, UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts and Principles of European Contract Law, stressing that these sets of principles have (...) significantly affected Lithuanian contract law provisions on changed circumstances. The authors concisely evaluate the case law of the Supreme Court of Lithuania on the application of the provisions on change in circumstances and their effect on the performance of a contract. (shrink)

Liberal political theory sees justice as the "first virtue" of a good society, the virtue that guides individuals' conceptions of their own good, and protects the equal liberty of all to pursue their ends, so long as these ends and pursuits are just. But ever since Marx's declaration that "liberty as a right of man is not founded upon the relations between man and man, but rather upon the separation of man from man...,"i liberal society has been frequently criticized for (...) falling seriously short of the conditions of a good society.ii A prominent recent criticism of this sort has been voiced by "communitarians," who charge that the primacy of rights in liberalism reveals a failure to appreciate the value of friendship and community, and tends to undermine their possibility.iii My aim in this paper is to defend liberal political theory, understood as the theory that justifies a polity of individual rights and justice, against this charge.iv My main argument will be directed at the assumption that there is an inherent tension between rights and justice on the one hand, and familial love and friendship on the other. According to the communitarian, two or more individuals constitute a community when they share a common conception of the good, and see this good as partly constitutive of their identities or selves.v Such "constitutive community," in Michael Sandel's words, may be a close friendship or family relationship, or an intermediate association such as a neighborhood organization, or a comprehensive political community. The communitarian charges that in making justice the first virtue of social institutions, liberalism undermines community at all levels, and this for two reasons. First, liberalism demands that we revise or surrender our conceptions of the good - including our attachments and commitments to family and friends - if they should turn out to be unjust. But this demand, the communitarian claims, requires attitudes 2 that are inconsistent with these attachments and commitments.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Virtue and Circumstances:On the City-State Concept of AreteMargalit FinkelbergIn his discussion of virtue (arete) in books 1 and 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle makes the famous claim that "it is impossible, or not easy, to do noble acts without the proper equipment ()" (Eth. Nic. 1.8 1099a32-33). This is why arete would need what he calls "the external goods" () in order to be actualized:The liberal man will (...) need money for the doing of his liberal deeds, and the just man too will need it for the returning of services (for wishes are hard to discern, and even people who are not just pretend to wish to act justly); and the brave man will need power if he is to accomplish any of the acts that correspond to his arete, and the temperate man will need opportunity; for how else is either he or any of the others to be recognized? It is debated, too, whether the will or the deed is more essential to arete, which is assumed to involve both; it is surely clear that its perfection involves both; but for deeds many things are needed, and more, the greater and nobler the deeds are.1Since arete is essential for achieving the state of happiness (eudaimonia), in the last analysis happiness too would depend on the circumstances of one's life.Aristotle's conditioning of arete on external circumstances had been sharply criticized already in antiquity, mainly by the Stoics. Not a few present-day historians of philosophy also tend to see his approach as unsatisfactory, in that it relies on commonsense intuitions that would not withstand a proper philosophical examination. Compare, for example, Julia Annas's criticism of Aristotle's conception of happiness (eudaimonia), which is intimately connected with his conception of arete:Unreflectively, we associate happiness with success and with actual possession of affluence, worldly goods and success. But the account of happiness [End Page 35] which an ethical theory has to produce must satisfy people who have reflected on virtue and what its significance is in our lives. And to those who do this, it seems clear that worldly success is not the point at all, that what matters is being virtuous, being a moral person as we nowadays say, and that if this is what matters, one has all one needs for happiness even if one loses all the worldly goods."2Accordingly, the Stoic attitude to virtue would contrast favorably with that of Aristotle.According to the alternative view, as represented by Martha Nussbaum and Bernard Williams, Aristotle in his conditioning of both virtue and happiness on external circumstances does not avoid facing harsh realities of life—the same realities, it must be added, that later attitudes to virtue tended to ignore. Thus, according to Nussbaum, "every Aristotelian philosophical inquiry is conducted within the world of human experience and belief, limited by the limits of that world" (Nussbaum 1986, 318). Likewise, in commenting on the substantial honesty of the attitude to slavery displayed by Aristotle and the Greeks in general, as compared to the view of Seneca and "its various Christian relatives," Williams writes: "Seneca and his various associates can let the social world be unjust, because they can, in accordance with one or another of their fantasies, suppose that one can get out of it. Aristotle knew that one could never get out of it" (Williams 1993, 116).It should not be forgotten, however, that, whatever the universal applications of Aristotle's discussion of virtue may be, this discussion originally addressed Greek society of the fourth century B.C. In what follows, I argue that to understand Aristotle's reasons for treating arete as conditioned on external circumstances, we have to consider his conception against the concrete historical background of this society.Arete in and Out of UseThe usual rendering of the Greek arete as "virtue" would be misleading here, in that it would irreparably distort the sense of the original. This was the opinion of H. D. F. Kitto, for example, who wrote on this "typically Greek word," as he called it, as follows: "When we meet it in Plato we translate it... (shrink)