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Our attitude towards cynicism is ambivalent: On the one hand we condemn it as a character failing and a trend that is undermining political and social life; on the other hand, we are often impressed by the apparent realism and honesty of the cynic. My aim in this paper is to offer an account of cynicism that can explain both our attraction and aversion. After defending a particular conception of cynicism, I argue that most of the work in explaining the fault of cynicism can be done by referring not to the cynic's beliefs about humanity, but to the attitude cultivated as a response to that belief. This attitude is hostile to the virtues of faith, hope and charity, upon which relationships and our sense of moral community depend. In conclusion, I suggest that holding the cynical belief is itself immoral, and that cynicism is disrespectful and destructive of morality.

Philosophy 78 2003 93 1 I am grateful to John Cottingham, Galen Strawson, Bart Streumer and Douglas Farland for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. 2 In what follows, I will use 'self' and 'identity' interchangeably to capture 'who we are'. up to the present but directing it into the future'. 3 There is therefore no innocent, brute experience or self-conception upon which a narrative is imposed. According to Charles Taylor, a 'basic condition of making sense of ourselves [is] that we grasp our lives in a narrative '. 4 Here then, narrative form is not just an essential condition of experiencing the world, but also of understanding our selves.Along with these factual claims, it is sometimes said that in order to live fully, to have a developed sense of self, or in order to be a person, we should think of ourselves in a narrative way; having a different self-conception from one that is narrative in form (assuming this is possible) is mistaken in a very significant way. Marya Schechtman, for example, writes that '[s]ome, but not all, individuals weave stories of their lives, and it is their doing so which makes them persons'. 5 My interest lies ultimately in this normative claim, although in exploring it, light will also be cast on the factual claim. If one finds the factual claim difficult to accept, it is tempting just to dig in one's heels and insist that here we have a fundamental confusion between life and art, or between a life and the attempt to understand that life. I think the issue does indeed come down to this, but it is usually less than helpful to dig in one's heels without any imaginative exploration of the other side. So, I will first explore the normative claims made by the narrative view: why should we think of ourselves and our experience in a narrative way if we do not already and what are the consequences of self-consciously, deliberately doing so? This question assumes what the factual claim would reject, that some of us do think in a non-narrative way. However, we can rephrase the question as follows: why should we think of ourselves and our experience in a narrative way if it seems to us that we do not, or if we do not self-consciously think in that way? Before we can answer this, we need to know what the narrative view comes down to and so how, exactly, we are to think of ourselves and our perception of the world beyond ourselves. IIIn order to be distinctive, the narrative view cannot be simply that the self and experience can only be properly described and Samantha Vice 94 3 Jerome Bruner, '

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It seems to be a phenomenon of contemporary life that we consider goodness embarrassing and rather dull. In contrast, the activities and inner lives of villains are deemed more complex and fascinating than those of good people. This paper attempts to understand the conception of goodness that underlies this phenomenon, and I suggest that informing it is the combination of two ideas, in tension with each other: firstly, a distorted understanding of the ancient conception of full virtue as the absence of all inner conflict; and secondly, the intuition that real goodness is only apparent and generated in inner conflict. In response, I offer an alternative picture of goodness as an ongoing, active and progressive relation to value, and conclude that in order to render goodness attractive again we need more adequate portraits of goodness from both philosophy and art.