![]() Afghanistan ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women in 2003. The Ministry of Women’s Affairs was founded in 2001 with a mandate to “implement government’s social and political policy to secure legal rights of women in the country.” The ministry has often struggled with a lack of influence and resources, but its existence was an important acknowledgment by and reminder to the government of its obligation under international human rights law to ensure gender equality. On a chat group of people who have worked many years on Afghanistan, a journalist friend wrote, “Does anyone else fear these protests are going to end in a massacre?” This possibility seems all too real. ![]() The situation has a feeling of impending doom as a largely unchanged Taliban comes into direct conflict with a generation of young women who grew up hearing about the abuses that the Taliban inflicted on their mothers and older sisters and seizing the opportunities those older women were denied. To add insult to injury, the Taliban government handed over the women’s ministry building to be the new home of the vice and virtue ministry. The Ministry of Women’s Affairs had disappeared, and there were no women in the new cabinet. When the Taliban on September 7 announced their new interim government, the vice and virtue ministry featured on the list, with a cleric as its newly appointed minister. A faint trace of Stoic influence may be seen in the formal antithesis of praiseworthy and blameworthy actions at the beginning and the end of the treatise.There is no better symbol for the disappearance of women’s rights in Afghanistan than the end of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs and the return of the Ministry for Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. Zeller a points out that the recognition of an order of beings between gods and men, the daimones, in the passages dealing with piety and godliness (cc. The descriptive treatment of the virtues and vices (a method that had been first foreshadowed in the Nicomachean Ethics, in for instance the portrait of the Magnanimous Man) links the work with the Characters of Theophrastus, and seems to have been customary in the Peripatetic School from his time onward. ![]() three of the Vices are neatly subdivided into three species each) are more characteristic of the Peripatetic School than of the Academy the formal exposition of a subject already fully explored has replaced the tentative heuristic method which Plato in his dialogues inherited from Socrates. It is true that the rigorously systematic arrangement of the matter and the concise fullness of detail (in cc. viii.) there is an allusion to the comparison drawn by Plato in the Republic between the well-ordered Soul and the well-constituted State. He exhibited them as forms of moderation, lying midway between vicious extremes of excess and deficiency but here each virtue is merely contrasted with a single vice as its opposite. But the analysis of these virtues adopted is not Aristotle’s. Or generosity, and Magnanimity or greatness of spirit. ἠθικὴ ἀρετή or ‘moral goodness.’ The Greek mind saw the unity of human excellence behind its various forms. aThe word ‘virtue’ to the modern English ear denotes only one department of ἀρετή, viz.The list of Virtues or forms of Goodness a is Aristotelian, as in addition to the four cardinal virtues of Plato, Wisdom or prudence, Courage or manliness, Temperance or sobriety of mind, and Justice or righteousness, it includes Gentleness, Self-control, Liberality Then turning to conduct, it ranges the various actions and emotions under the virtues and vices which they exemplify. It starts from the ethical psychology of Plato, dividing the Soul or personality of man into three parts, the reason, the passions and the appetites. ![]() It classifies the various kinds of good and bad conduct under the virtues and vices of which they are manifestations. This essay is of interest as an example of the way in which Aristotle’s reduction to scientific form of the ethical system adumbrated by Plato was later systematized and stereotyped by smaller minds. ![]()
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