ABSTRACT
One important difference, however, was that Kant did not acknowledge how much judgment (how much in the way of intellectual resources) might be involved in reconciling conflicting demands. Moreover, Kant, in repudiating Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean (Section 8.1), did not see that it might well be appropriate to view the problem of the co-ordination of wide duties in the light of the schema of a continuum of responses, where ‘too much’ and ‘too little’ indicate responses to avoid. One has wide duties to one’s family, to one’s neighbors, to one’s career, to develop one’s talents. How much is enough to discharge one duty depends on how much is enough to discharge another. It is clearly possible to do too much if less is enough and another duty is neglected as a result. If, however, one thinks of duties in isolation from one another, as Kantians are prone to do, then whether one has discharged a duty looks as if it
admits of only a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer-no question of ‘too little’ or ‘too much.’ And when one thinks in terms of fulfilling wide duties in relation to one another, there appears to be an important role for a concept of living well or flourishing, which informs all virtuous choices in Aristotle’s framework, but which Kant and his followers overlook.
