ABSTRACT
Ambition is a familiar and recognizable character trait, but we rapidly fall into confusion and conflicting claims when we ask whether it is a virtue. In this chapter, I follow Rosalind Hursthouse’s lead in asking what it would be for ambition to be a virtue of an Aristotelian kind, rather than a less robust sort. Although Aristotle’s own account of the virtue related to pursuit of honors gives us insights about ambition, we get less help from him than usual, and need a starting-point of our own. I suggest that this is aspiration, and that we need to consider that there are two forms of it. One is the simpler form, in which we aspire in pursuing a specific aim in a way that is markedly intense, tenacious and dedicated. The other is a more complex form in which virtue requires us to pursue the overall aim of becoming virtuous in a way which is similarly intense, tenacious and dedicated, but differs in requiring us to have the appropriate practical reasoning to integrate our specific aims into our overall goal of living in a virtuous way, rather than a way unbalanced by over-intense focus on a specific goal.
