ABSTRACT
Recent philosophical discussion of human excellence has been dominated by neo-Aristotelianism and in particular—notwithstanding the fact that the ‘moral’ virtues in the modern sense are not a distinctive category for Aristotle—by the familiar modern moral virtues. Beyond the academy, however, the late nineteenth century onwards has seen the growth of a wide range of alternative vocabularies of (putative) human excellence—accompanied, perhaps, by a simultaneous decline in the vocabulary of the virtues—and philosophy is beginning to catch up. Within these multifarious alternative vocabularies, this chapter attempts to identify certain characteristics which, though they may not be described as excellences in their home theories, nonetheless have some claim to be thought of as a class, namely what the chapter terms the ‘formal’ or ‘structural’ excellences. One of their common features is that they play the same theoretical role as health of the soul in Plato and Aristotle, that is, as an underlying state of an agent’s moral psychology (hence ‘structural’) which is said to explain his or her instantiation of various first-order excellences, both moral and non-moral. Finally, the chapter notes that while some thinkers whose theories feature ‘formal’ or ‘structural’ excellences have appealed to them to take an explicitly critical (e.g. Nietzsche) or vindicatory (e.g. Korsgaard) stance towards the modern moral virtues, many leave their relationship to the moral virtues hazy—a puzzle, given the centrality of some of these (putative) excellences to modern thought.
