A Brief History of Virtue from the Stoics to Levinas
1. Hume was an empiricist, and believed that knowledge could only arise from experience or the creation/analysis of connections between items of that experience. The implication of this is that moral knowledge must rely on the perception of real-world objects and relations, rather than an abstract ontological realm.
2. He posits that reason is unable to provide moral knowledge because it can only deal with ordering experience and activity so that the cognizer can get what it wants (reason is idle if bereft of prior motivation or desire). Moral principles must therefore derive from aspects of the emotional life of the cognizer.
3. For Hume, the virtue requisite to lead a moral life is that of sympathy for others.
4. Nietzsche's concept of the Will to Power can be understood as the doctrine that all organic beings possess the desire to overcome both the self and others. A well-lived life is one in which energy is spent in forcefully creating self-defined values and improving one's situation such that, for example, one would be willing to repeat one's decisions over and over (see his concept of "Eternal Recurrence").
5. The difference between "slave morality" and "master morality" is foundational to Nietzschean thought. The former refers to the ethic of world-denial, self-abnegation, hatred and refusal of personal growth and pride. The latter is the opposite: that of pride, dominance, control and power. Nietzsche claimed that the popular contemporaneous Christian slave morality was a contingent result of a particular moral genealogy.
6. There seem to be multiple ways of construing Nietzsche's main virtue: honesty, freedom, or, perhaps in keeping with the existential tradition he helped to found, "authenticity".
7. On Sartre's view, "hell is other people" is true because the presence of others forces each for-itself (self-conscious entity) to concede that (a) its world is not entirely controlled or constituted by its own being and (b) that it may be the object of another for-itself, which somewhat defines it as an in-itself.
8. Levinas' account regards the Nietzschean account as incomplete as it does not take into sufficient consideration the idea that the infinite existential inaccessibility of the Other always frustrates the self-conception of the for-itself as free and complete in-itself.
9. It is part of the existential constitution of the self that it is essentially (a) unable to subsume the Other, (b) liable to be affected by the presence of the Other. I don't think that van Hooft satisfactorily defends the idea that this means that the self is "primordially" social, as he even concedes that this can be perverted by bad upbringing. How fundamental is something that can be so perverted? As fundamental as it is, it is certainly not essentially or ontologically fundamental.
10. Levinas' argument for the primordiality of social constitution is based on (a) the ubiquitousness of (sometimes non-functional and non-pragmatic) dialogue and (b) the necessity to consider the Other as Other in order to successfully engage in dialogue.
11. That said, Levinas' foundational virtue seems to be responsiveness/responsibility (respecting as far as possible the etymological similarity of those words) or openness.
12. Whether or not this sort of thinking could work nowadays depends on how one conceives of the community. It is true that a vast range of relationships are purely pragmatic, and business and economic connections sometimes have to be severed ruthlessly for certain parties to succeed. If one is willing to be a radical critic of capitalism then Levinas' view is certainly conducive to it.
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