Feeling Our Way: Virtue, Insight and Emotion

Michael Lacewing
University of Reading

This paper is about a particular philosophical picture of the moral agent according to which, ethical insight, the ability to find out what one should feel and do, is conceived of as wholly intellectual and unemotional. I believe this view, which I term 'intellectualism', is mistaken, but I shall not try to demonstrate this here. My aim, instead, is to do a good amount of ground clearing on clarifying the issues, seeing what intellectualism is committed to, and what would require us to give it up.

Although there are many versions of intellectualism, there is some evidence that Aristotle held a weak version of it, and I shall discuss the issues in relation to Aristotle's framework of ethical thought. In =DF I and II, I present Aristotle's views on virtue and on phronesis, respectively, and how they relate to intellectualism; in =DF III, I clarify what insight is; in =DF IV, I probe the plausibility of intellectualism and make some comparisons with certain forms of Kantian and utilitarian theories.