Public Lecture — “On Becoming Good: From Aristotle, through Hume and Sidgwick, 
and Back Again”
Professor Roger Crisp (Oxford)
Thursday 1 August 2024
The University of Notre Dame Australia, Sydney


The Institute for Ethics & Society at The University of Notre Dame Australia 
will host the 2024 Moral Philosophy & Ethics Education Annual Lecture. The 
public lecture will be delivered by Professor Roger Crisp.

The lecture will be held on The University of Notre Dame Australia’s Sydney 
campus (Moorgate Room, 10 Grafton Street, Chippendale). Refreshments will be 
served from 5:00pm, with the lecture commencing at 5:30pm.

All attendees are welcome, including undergraduates, HDR students, faculty, and 
members of the wider community. Registration essential.

To register, please email Tim Smartt 
(timothy.sma...@nd.edu.au<mailto:timothy.sma...@nd.edu.au>)

Abstract: I shall begin with the seminal account of moral education in the 
second book of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, discussing the roles of 
habituation, teaching, and pleasure and pain in the acquisition of virtue. 
After outlining the insights in Aristotle’s famous ‘doctrine of the mean’, I 
shall suggest that David Hume’s grounding of virtue in human well-being is 
preferable to that of Aristotle’s in ‘the noble’, and that Henry Sidgwick was 
right to recognize, as Aristotle did not, the possibility of genuine moral 
self-sacrifice. I shall end by suggesting that Aristotle’s account of practical 
wisdom, when attached to Sidgwick’s dualism, enables us to understand what it 
is to be, and to become, good.

About the speaker: Professor Roger Crisp is the Director of the Uehiro Centre 
for Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford. He is also Professor of Moral 
Philosophy in the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford, and Uehiro 
Fellow in Philosophy at St Anne’s College, Oxford. His main research interest 
is ethics, including the history of ethics, practical ethics, metaethics, and 
normative ethical theory. His translation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics has 
been published by Cambridge University Press. He has published monographs on 
John Stuart Mill (1997), Henry Sidgwick (2015), and the British moralists 
(2019), and is the editor of The Oxford Handbook of the History of Ethics 
(2013). He has been awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2003-5), 
the Findlay Visiting Professorship at Boston University (2010-11), and the 
Thank-Offering-to-Britain Fellowship by the British Academy (2015-16).


Tim Smartt
Lecturer and Research Fellow
Institute for Ethics & Society
University of Notre Dame Australia, Sydney

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