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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 December 2015
Susan Wolf famously argued that a saintly life – one totally dedicated to moral concerns – would be ‘a life strangely barren’. It would mean neglecting many activities that make human life worthwhile. But her argument assumes that our moral duties are simply duties to others, that a perfectly moral person would always act selflessly. It may be, however, that we also have duties to ourselves, which include the cultivation of so-called ‘non-moral’ virtues. On this view, morality is pervasive, relating to all features of a human life, and has architectonic status, being capable of shaping all that we do.
1 Aldous Huxley, ‘Pascal’, in Do What You Will: Essays; The Thinker's Library (London: Watts & Co., 1936), 240.
2 Ibid., 228.
3 Wolf, Susan, ‘Moral Saints’, The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 79, no. 8 (1982), 421CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, translated by Mary Gregor; Texts in German Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 239.
5 Martha Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 76–78.
6 Louden, Robert B., ‘Can We Be Too Moral?’, Ethics, vol. 98, no. 1 (1988), 369CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Ibid., 374.
8 Adams, Robert Merrihew, ‘Saints’, The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 81, no. 7 (1984), 395CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Ibid., 398.
10 Bernard Williams, ‘Persons, Character, and Morality’, in Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973–80 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 18.