David Bourget (Western Ontario)
David Chalmers (ANU, NYU)
Rafael De Clercq
Ezio Di Nucci
Jack Alan Reynolds
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Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 10 (1):53 - 68 (2007)
Ambition is a curiously neglected topic in ethics. It isn’t that philosophers have not discussed it. Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Harrington, Locke, Rousseau, Smith, Santayana and a number of others have discussed ambition. But it has seldom received more than a few paragraphs worth of analysis, in spite of the fact that ambition plays a central role in Western politics (one cannot be elected without it), and in spite of the fact that Machiavelli, Harrington, Locke and Rousseau each considered it to be among the greatest threats to political security. The aim of this paper is to provide a long overdue analysis of ambition. The first part of the paper explores what ambition is. The second seeks to answer the question, “Is ambition a virtue or a vice?”.
|Keywords||ambition virtue vice|
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References found in this work BETA
Aristotle (2012). Nicomachean Ethics. Courier Dover Publications.
Alasdair C. MacIntyre (2007). After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. University of Notre Dame Press.
Harry G. Frankfurt (2007). The Reasons of Love. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74 (2):463-475.
John Locke (2007). Second Treatise on Government. In Elizabeth Schmidt Radcliffe, Richard McCarty, Fritz Allhoff & Anand Vaidya (eds.), Late Modern Philosophy: Essential Readings with Commentary. Blackwell Pub. Ltd.
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