What does it take not just to do the right thing, but to do it virtuously—and what do achievement and anger reveal about the ethical costs of injustice?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Sukaina Hirji is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. Her philosophical research focuses primarily on ancient philosophy, Aristotelian ethics, and contemporary ethics.
2. Interview Summary
In this interview, Sukaina Hirji (Assistant Professor of Philosophy at University of Pennsylvania) reflects on why she finds philosophy valuable: it’s like an artform, involving creative puzzle-solving and the exercise of rational capacities, and its products can be both instrumentally useful and “beautiful” in their own right. The conversation then turns to her work on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, where she argues that we should distinguish between performing virtuous actions and acting virtuously: the same outward deed (like standing up to a bully) might count as a just action, yet fail to be “acting justly” if it’s done from the wrong motives (attention-seeking, mere conformity, etc.), whereas acting virtuously requires the right kind of understanding, desire, and affect toward the action.
From there, Hirji situates the distinction inside a broader Aristotelian picture of happiness: we should orient our lives toward the right conception of happiness, understood as the full realization of our ‘practical rationality’, which includes genuine responsiveness to ethical value—especially the well-being of others—rather than a narrow, single-minded focus on one’s own welfare. She also emphasizes why Aristotle needs the distinction in the first place: non-virtuous people can still perform virtuous actions (that’s part of how they become virtuous), but they can’t yet act virtuously, since that requires the right settled character and the right “way” of acting.
In the second half, the discussion shifts to Hirji’s contemporary ethical work. She critiques a perfectionist approach to the value of achievement (associated with Gwen Bradford and sometimes linked to Friedrich Nietzsche-style emphasis on willpower), arguing that difficulty can matter in more than one way—and that we shouldn’t accept the uncomfortable implication that deprivation automatically makes achievements more valuable. Using Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own thought experiment about William Shakespeare’s equally talented sister, she proposes an account on which achievement is valuable partly insofar as it expresses an agent’s capacities—and oppressive external conditions can rob someone of the opportunity to realize what they’re capable of. She then sketches a related project on anger in political injustice: drawing on Maria Lugones, she distinguishes ‘reform anger’ (aimed at accountability and reintegration within a shared moral community) from ‘outrage anger’ (a kind of “second-order” anger that can arise when serious harms are dismissed or rendered unintelligible, and that instead helps carve out solidarity and a separate moral space among those targeted by injustice).
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:48 - Virtuous actions and acting virtuously
07:52 - Aristotle as egoistic?
12:31 - Spelling out the difference
14:06 - Historical philosophical analysis
19:40 - Value of ancient philosophy
21:11 - Aristotelian ethics today
25:29 - Have the questions changed?
30:06 - Difficulty and achievement
37:31 - Criticism of Bradford’s account
38:21 - Hypothetical case
44:01 - Achieving vs. product of achievement
48:15 - Intrinsic value
51:08 - Achievement and desire
55:08 - Reasons to believe in intrinsic value
58:59 - Double binds
1:02:32 - Example
1:03:58 - Oppression
1:06:49 - Overfitting
1:10:53 - Oppressive and homeostatic structures
1:13:19 - Dealing with double binds
1:16:21 - Outrage
1:21:35 - Value of philosophy
1:24:37 - Conclusion
