Natural Badness: Suffering and Its Place in Contemporary Virtue Ethics

• Applicant: Dr. Eva-Maria Düringer
• Subject Area: Practical Philosophy
• Term: since 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 427387307

This project examines the nature of suffering and its role in virtue ethics. While there have been intense debates in recent years about the ontology and ethical relevance of pleasure and pain, the nature and role of suffering in ethics have been much neglected. Understanding suffering, which is a much more complex phenomenon than pain, is both desirable for its own sake and will bring fresh inputs to debates in normative ethics and applied ethics. None of the accounts of suffering that currently exist is able to reliably identify instances of suffering, and only instances of suffering, as such. My aim is to develop an account of suffering that fares better: I will argue that the essence of suffering, i.e. that in virtue of which the varied manifestations of suffering are instances of suffering, is a negative transformation of our will, typically caused by the frustration of a desire that is very important to us. In two further steps I want to bring this account of suffering to virtue ethics, more precisely to the debates surrounding neo-Aristotelian naturalism and practical wisdom. Firstly, I want to show that an attempt to describe suffering as the negative telos of all living creatures can dissolve a much debated dilemma that neo-Aristotelian naturalism supposedly suffers from: either we locate goodness in a description of nature that is already evaluatively laden (second nature), in which case our naturalism is much less attractive, or we locate goodness in a description of the nature we share with other animals, in which case the account of morally good and bad actions is very counterintuitive. Secondly, I want to demonstrate that understanding suffering in oneself and others is a crucial element of practical wisdom. Such a conception of practical wisdom helps to account for how it is that the practically wise person is able reliably to see the morally salient features of a situation.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants