¹ As such, I likewise leave aside perceptual questions of hearing, of the relation between hearing and listening, and of the structure and imagery of the ear. My account is not specific to the auditory mode, because the social task of listening to someone is as much at issue in written conversational exchanges as it is in audible communication.

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⁴ I am not convinced that the variety of listening-related tasks required of the virtuous person makes listening a poor candidate for inclusion in an arsenal of virtues. On the contrary, it seems that one particularly useful strength of virtue ethics is its ability to cope with virtues whose manifestations can take a wide variety of forms. To be courageous can take the form of all kinds of unrelated activities, from charging into battle, to initiating a conversation, to undergoing surgery to donate a kidney. More on this strategy of categorisation in Section 2.

⁵ Beatty, Joseph, “Good Listening,” Educational Theory 49, no. 3 (September 1, 1999): 281–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ In describing listening as a meta-virtue, Beatty writes that it is ‘a “virtue of virtue” in that it is a fundamental avenue of understanding one's own and the other's character and occasioning its transformation’ (Beatty, 281).

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¹² see Book V in NE, Aristotle, 2004. Op. cit. note 11, Book V.

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¹⁴ Op. cit. note 13, 335.

¹⁵ Op. cit. note 13, 340.

¹⁶ Compare, for example, what Lovibond writes about the concept or Bildung of a virtue providing “a stable point of view with which we can identify for the purpose of talking about the ‘demands’ of, say, courage, and of the courageous person as ‘responding’ to these; and when we do talk in this ethically loaded way (as opposed to saying simply that A faced the danger while B ran away), we demonstrate our investment in the forces that direct Bildung and that designate certain behaviour-patterns as the ones flowing from a ‘clear perception’ of the ethical” (Lovibond, Sabina, Essays on Ethics and Feminism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 79–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.). To describe something as ‘courageous’ rather than describing bare actions just is to take a stance on the ethical quality of certain actions; likewise, to describe someone as listening well rather than employing any other of a litany of more barely descriptive verbs (like hearing, paying attention, understanding, believing…) is to take a stance on the ethical rightness of the way in which those other verbal activities were deployed.

¹⁷ Op. cit. note 10, 137.

¹⁸ Op. cit. note 11, Book IV.

¹⁹ Aristotle does mention listening briefly in his description of the virtue of ready wit, saying “there is such a thing as saying – and again listening to – what one should and as one should” (Op. cit. note 11, 102–03.). He was right to note that there is such a thing as rightness in what one listens to and how, but his mere bracketed mention suggests that there is rather little to be said about listening rightly, compared to the important matter of speaking rightly. Needless to say, I disagree.

²⁰ I am not referring to the volume of the literal voice of a person, as in the sound produced by the larynx. Rather, I am using ‘voice’ in the same way we talk about having a voice in a conversation, which we often use to refer to spoken participation in person, or to representation of a person or set of people's views in a broader social discourse. For present purposes, in referring to a person's ‘voice’ I am referring to their capacity to communicate their concerns and their power to persuade. As such, the power of my ‘voice’ is relevant to my listening activity, even when my interlocutor is the one speaking. To clarify, think of the listener's voice as pointing to what the listener would say about the matter if she were speaking, and the power of her voice as pointing to the strength of her beliefs about the matter.

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²³ Op. cit. note 21, 246–66.

²⁴ Op. cit. note 21, 226.

²⁵ Op. cit. note 22, 326.

²⁶ Op. cit. note 21, 231.

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²⁸ I am sidestepping the considerable literature about epistemology of testimony, since the issue of whether a person listens to someone arises right where normal responsiveness to testimony ends. For one fairly recent overview, see the collection of essays edited by Lackey and Sosa (Lackey, Jennifer and Sosa, Ernest, The Epistemology of Testimony (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁹ Op. cit. note 5, 285–290.

³⁰ Acknowledgements: Thanks are due to my supervisors, Benedict Smith and Sara Uckelman, for their feedback on countless drafts; to Allison Lee and to Matthew Patterson, for their support throughout the writing process and the impact of their insights on the formation of my ideas; and to Mary Notess, for help with preparing the final version of the manuscript.