The term ‘cooperative virtues’ occupies a revealing fault-line in the depth-psychology corpus, appearing most prominently where scholars interrogate the tension between competitive, results-oriented excellence and the quieter moral qualities — justice, fairness, civic reciprocity — upon which social life depends. Arthur Adkins’ foundational study of Greek values furnishes the most sustained engagement: his argument is that cooperative excellences (dikaiosunē, aidos, and their cognates) historically occupied a subordinate position relative to the ‘competitive’ aretē of the warrior-aristocrat, and that the philosophical project of Plato and, later, Aristotle consisted largely in the effort to elevate these cooperative excellences to the rank of full virtues without abandoning the powerful vocabulary of success and honour that gave Greek moral discourse its force. Damasio and McGilchrist approach the same territory from a neurobiological and phenomenological direction respectively, each arguing that cooperative dispositions — empathy, restraint, mutual aid — are not cultural impositions upon a competitive nature but expressions of deep homeostatic and hemispheric imperatives. The Stoic and Platonic traditions, mediated through the Philokalia, add a further register: cooperative virtues as constitutive of a unified, divinely ordered soul-economy in which no single excellence operates independently. Across these traditions, the central tension is whether cooperative virtues are primary moral goods in their own right or derivative instruments of social utility.
The co-operative excellences have become aretai, and hence desirable, without the necessity of adopting the ‘logic’ of words commending success and decrying failure.
Adkins argues that fourth-century Greek philosophy successfully elevated cooperative virtues to the status of genuine excellences, yet this elevation remained incomplete because the dominant competitive vocabulary of aretē was never fully dislodged.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960thesis
co-operative uses of, 181 ff.; and unjust success, 183; dangers of extending use of, 186 ff.; weakness of, 188, 250
Adkins’ index entry signals his systematic tracing of cooperative virtue-language through Greek moral discourse, cataloguing its rhetorical weakness relative to competitive terms and its vulnerability when extended beyond its natural domain.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960thesis
Cooperative strategies have been a part of the homeostatically driven biological makeup of humans, which means that the germ of conflict resolution is present in hu
Damasio grounds cooperative virtues not in cultural invention but in the homeostatic architecture of human biology, treating them as evolutionarily prior dispositions toward conflict resolution.
, The strange order of things life, feeling, and the making, 2018thesis
political arete may be a skill turned to civic ends, even if the idea contains confusions which entail the whole problem of this chapter, for Protagoras is depicted as a well-meaning sophist
Adkins shows that even reformist thinkers like Protagoras reconceive cooperative virtue instrumentally — as a civic skill — rather than as an intrinsically binding moral obligation.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting
personal humility and compassion (and particularly compassion) – are indeed the most fundamental notions or feelings that underpin all moral codes, of everyone, whether they deem themselves to be ‘religious’ or not.
McGilchrist, via Tudge, argues that the cooperative virtues of humility and compassion form the irreducible foundation of all ethical systems, religious or secular, constituting a cross-cultural moral minimum.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
personal humility and compassion (and particularly compassion) – are indeed the most fundamental notions or feelings that underpin all moral codes, of everyone, whether they deem themselves to be ‘religious’ or not.
Parallel passage confirming McGilchrist’s claim that humility and compassion — paradigmatic cooperative virtues — underlie universal moral sensibility across traditions.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
they are not entirely useless to society, and they know city-benefiting justice. The exact implications of Simonides’ words are difficult to discover
Adkins examines Simonides’ archaic acknowledgment that ‘city-benefiting justice’ constitutes a minimal social virtue, showing the earliest contested space where cooperative excellence begins to claim moral recognition.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting
he sent Hermes to them, bearing reverence and justice to be the ordering principles of cities and the bonds of friendship and conciliation.
Plato’s Protagoras presents the mythological grounding of cooperative virtues — aidos and dikē — as divine gifts distributed universally so that political community becomes possible.
, Protagoras, -390supporting
dikaiosune in the general sense of displaying courage, self-control, quiet civic behaviour, &c., is ‘the whole of arete’
Adkins documents Aristotle’s momentary recognition that cooperative virtue (dikaiosunē) could be identified with the whole of excellence, while noting that his broader ethical system ultimately resists this identification.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting
powerful and cooperative collective behaviors. Fear, dread, and anger would be immediate results and compromise homeostasis, but cooperative group support would follow
Damasio presents cooperative collective behaviour as a homeostatic response to large-scale threat, suggesting that cooperative virtues emerge functionally from crisis conditions rather than purely from rational deliberation.
, The strange order of things life, feeling, and the making, 2018supporting
The Greek moral scene does not provide, and never has provided, even the raw material from which a categorical imperative could be fabricated.
Adkins identifies the structural reason why cooperative virtues remained weak in Greek ethics: the absence of any duty-based framework capable of mandating prosocial obligation independently of self-interest.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting
concentrate more on self-control and self-discipline. Recent work suggests this would be good for the individual and good for society
McGilchrist, citing Baumeister, redirects from the cult of self-esteem toward self-discipline and ethical behaviour as the proper basis for social flourishing, invoking virtues with a cooperative social dimension.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
concentrate more on self-control and self-discipline. Recent work suggests this would be good for the individual and good for society
Parallel passage in which McGilchrist endorses a shift from individualist self-esteem ideology toward virtues of restraint and ethical achievement that serve the social whole.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
The virtues are all equal and together reduce themselves to one, thus constituting a single principle and form of virtue.
The Philokalia articulates a unitary virtue-ontology in which cooperative and individual excellences are interdependent aspects of a single divine form, precluding any sharp separation between the two.
, The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995supporting
something is awarded to the man who will enter into cooperative relationship with the psychic feminine realm, which is mysterious to him.
Estés frames cooperation not as an ethical category but as a depth-psychological posture — an openness to the anima — suggesting that cooperative virtues in the inner life precede and enable their outer social expression.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017aside
Intergroup hostility was relieved only when a sense of allegiance to a single large group could be created… forced all the boys to work together in a single large group.
Yalom’s clinical reference to the Robbers Cave experiments illustrates empirically how superordinate cooperative goals can override inter-group hostility, grounding cooperative virtue in social-psychological conditions rather than individual character.
, The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy, Fifth Edition, 2008aside
No mental reflection was involved, no overt consideration of prior knowledge, no cunning, guile, kindness, fair play, or diplomatic conciliation.
Damasio uses the bacterial symbiosis model to argue that proto-cooperative outcomes can arise without any virtue-equivalent, raising the question of what distinguishes genuine cooperative virtue from mere adaptive strategy.
, The strange order of things life, feeling, and the making, 2018aside