LIBERATING MORAL TRADITIONS 397 Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 1: 397–422, 1998. © 1998 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. KRISTJÁN KRISTJÁNSSON LIBERATING MORAL TRADITIONS: SAGA MORALITY AND ARISTOTLE’S MEGALOPSYCHIA ABSTRACT. It is a matter for both surprise and disappointment that so little has been written from a philosophical perspective about the moral tradition enshrined in Europe’s oldest living literature, the Icelandic sagas. The main purpose of the present essay is to start to ameliorate this shortcoming by analysing and assessing the moral code bequeathed to us by the saga literature. To do so, I draw attention to the striking similarities between saga morality and what tends to be called an ‘ancient moral outlook’ (with special reference to Aristotle’s much-maligned virtue of megalopsychia) and then try to defend the credentials of both outlooks in so far as they clash, or seem to clash, with certain aspects of a ‘modern moral outlook.’ KEY WORDS: Aristotle’s megalopsychia, humility, Icelandic sagas, moral luck, morality: ancient, modern, shame 1. During the last quarter of a century, an ethical theory variously described as ‘virtue ethics,’ ‘virtue-based ethics,’ or even ‘neo-Aristotelianism’ (since it is seen as being derived from Aristotle) has come into vogue among moral philosophers as a potential rival to deontological and utilitarian theories. According to virtue ethics, an action is morally right if and only if it is what a virtuous person would do in the given circumstances; a virtuous person being defined as one who acts virtuously, i.e., who possesses and displays the virtues. Furthermore, to avoid circularity, the virtues are considered to be those character traits a human being needs to achieve eudaimonia: to flourish or live well. 1 While this new trend is commonly spoken of as a revival of an Aristotelian or, more generally, an ancient moral outlook (hereafter, for convenience of exposition, labelled AMO 2 ), most 1 For a clear account of the formal and substantive framework of modern virtue theory and its relations to deontological and utilitarian theories, see Hursthouse, R., “Virtue Theory and Abortion,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 20 (1991), pp. 223–246. 2 It may be controversial to what extent Aristotelianism can be equated with ‘the an- cient moral outlook,’ for there are obviously ancient moral theories such as those of Plato and the Stoics which embody conceptions radically different from those of Aristotle (and arguably from those of most ordinary ancients), e.g., about the relationship between moral achievement and moral luck. For our present purposes, it can be left open to