Species Extinction and the Vice of Thoughtlessness: The Importance of Spiritual Exercises for Learning Virtue created by Jeremy Bendik-Keymer
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- volume
Item type | Current library | Call number | Vol info | Copy number | Status | Notes | Date due | Barcode | |
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Main Library - Special Collections | BJ52.5 JOU (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | Vol 23. No 1-2 pages 61-83 | SP3460 | Not for loan | For Inhouse use only |
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In this paper, I present a sample spiritual exercise—a contemporary form of the written practice that ancient philosophers used to shape their characters. The exercise, which develops the ancient practice of the examination of conscience, is on the sixth mass extinction and seeks to understand why the extinction appears as a moral wrong. It concludes by finding a vice in the moral character of the author and the author’s society. From a methodological standpoint, the purpose of spiritual exercises is to create a habit of thoughtfulness in the writer, and by way of teaching, to suggest one to the reader. Such a habit is important, at least, because virtue is a habit. In other words, there can be no learning of virtue itself without habituation into it. Accordingly, I frame the sample spiritual exercise with a deliberately controversial objection to contemporary academic virtue ethics and with a justification for why the spiritual exercise is important for taking virtue ethically. And I end the paper with some further remarks explaining the form of the exercise and its relevance to doing philosophy. In this way, the paper makes and illustrates a methodological point about virtue ethics based on a meta-ethical assumption about virtue as a habit, and it does this by focusing on a pressing environmental problem in the twenty-first century.
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