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Introduction I never forget to speak of humans as acting and suffering. —Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another Theoretical and Social Context Up until about twenty-five years ago, deontological and utilitarian moral theories dominated Anglo-American ethics. These theories took various forms, of course, and still greatly influence the contents of textbooks used in university ethics courses, the deliberations of hospital ethics committees, the writings of professionals in diverse fields of “applied” ethics and—in the case of Kant—the critical theory of Jürgen Habermas. But over the last two decades, several philosophers (and others) have raised critical questions about these two main theories of normative ethics, a questioning that has led them to seek an alternative in virtue ethics characteristic of ancient Greek philosophy.1 These thinkers have reconsidered ancient theories of the good life, eudaimonia, or “human flourishing.” The work proposed here attempts to extend and deepen that reconsideration.2 Anyone who wishes to think seriously about kindness today is in a rather curious position. On the one hand, praise of kindness is a staple of ordinary discourse , community interest news stories, fairy tales and other genres of children’s stories, poetry, and even bumper stickers. These references usually share Wordsworth’s opinion (in Tintern Abbey) of . . . that best portion of a good man’s life; His little, nameless, unremembered acts Of kindness and love. . . . However, most of these references are superficial in the extreme and often rest on demonstrably false presuppositions about their subject. As a result, to use Heideggerean language, they end by concealing the phenomenon rather than genuinely disclosing it. On the other hand, philosophers have only seldom shown any interest in pursuing a more reflective understanding of kindness, and so what Wordsworth xi thought the best part of the moral life has only rarely attracted the attention of ethicists. It is not likely that they are ignorant of this particular human quality, or that they value it less than do the rest of humankind. More probably, they have not thought kindness worth discussing.Why this has been so is in part fairly clear and in part a matter of speculation, but both are philosophically important. First, deontological and utilitarian ethical theories provide internal reasons for their neglect of kindness. On the one hand, Kantians and other deontologists might argue that kindness is (1) a function of character, and thus cannot be the object of the good will’s moral legislation; and/or (2) a result of physical actions, and so irrelevant to the state of the good will itself. Or they might construe kindness very differently by identifying it with benevolence or beneficence , or at least they might believe that all references to these phenomena logically include kindness as well. Kant himself takes this line in describing “kindness done from duty” as “practical, and not pathological, love” (1964a, 67; emphasis in original), and H. J. Paton adopts the same interpretation (1965, 152). They are not alone in these beliefs, since the synonymy is found in most dictionaries. On the other hand, utilitarians, and consequentialists in general, misled by the same identification of beneficence and kindness, focus solely on questions of social utility and restrict themselves to calculating the moral score of any given action, rule, social policy, law, and the like. Thus they tend to lose sight of—what is of only secondary interest for them anyway—the character of moral agents themselves. Individual feelings, closely bound up with the experience of kindness or doing acts of kindness, become suspect to the degree that they can interfere with the rational calculation of consequences. And, as we shall see, the lack of any sort of calculus of actual or possible results frequently characterizes certain types of acts of kindness. There are three exceptions, of varying degrees of importance, to the utilitarian disregard of kindness, and to the neglect of kindness in ethics generally. David Hume, in a minor sort of way, discusses kindness as a type of benevolence . He wants to explain “that merit, that is commonly ascrib’d to generosity, humanity, compassion, gratitude, friendship, fidelity, zeal, disinterestedness, liberality , and all those other qualities that form the character of good and benevolent ” (1967, 603; emphasis in original). Further, he approvingly cites Juvenal’s remark that the “principal advantage” of a “more extensive” benevolence is that it “gives us larger opportunities of spreading our kindly influence than what are indulged to the inferior creation” (Hume 1957, 10). Also, Henry Sidgwick (1913) discusses duties of kindness...

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