Annette Baier Quotes on Virtue
Annette Baier’s Postures of the Mind (1985), Moral Prejudices (1994), and the late Reflections on How We Live (2010) gave late twentieth-century moral philosophy one of its most influential feminist Humean accounts of virtue. The central project — recovering Hume’s sentimentalism and analysis of the artificial virtues against the dominant Kantian and consequentialist frameworks — develops trust as a central moral phenomenon that the standard contractarian and impartial-spectator analyses had systematically overlooked, with the corresponding treatment of the virtues as character traits formed within particular relationships of dependence and care. The framework, drawing on the Humean tradition and feminist ethics through Carol Gilligan and Sara Ruddick, shaped the contemporary ethics of trust, care, and the moral significance of asymmetric relationships.
Quotes
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Attributed to Annette Baier:
“Trust is more like the air we breathe than a thing we choose.”
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Attributed to Annette Baier:
“The ethics of trust is more fundamental than the ethics of justice.”
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Attributed to Annette Baier:
“Hume is the moral philosopher of women's experience.”
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Attributed to Annette Baier:
“We can only learn what trust is by being entrusted, and by trusting in turn.”
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Attributed to Annette Baier:
“Moral life is mostly carried on in the second person.”
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“One ground for suspicion of apparently sincere moral convictions is their link with some special interest of those who hold them. The questions cui bono and cui malo are appropriate questions to raise when we are searching for possible contaminants of conscience. Entrenched privilege , and fear of losing it, distorts one's moral sense.”
p. 63 -
“I think there is at least one moral theory of respectable lineage and good independent credentials that can accommodate such fairly minimal intuitions about us and animals. This is the theory Hume offers us. I do not consider Hume a forerunner of utilitarianism , and therefore what I shall go on to say in defense of Hume is not intended as a defense of any version of utilitarianism. I see Hume to be much closer to Aristotle than to Mill , to be offering us a theory about human virtues, not a theory about utility maximization and the duties that might involve.”
p. 68