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Appraisals of Virtue and Value*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Ishtiyaque Haji
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota, Morris

Extract

Thomas Hurka's brilliant study on the nature and value of virtue and vice opens with a puzzle. Hurka tells us that as consequentialism defines “all other moral properties in terms of goodness and evil” (p. 8), a fully consequentialist characterization of virtue and vice should define these things by appeal to goodness and evil as well. However, it has traditionally been thought that the most promising analysis of virtue, in terms of what is intrinsically good or evil, embarks from the fundamental claim that virtue is a disposition to promote good and prevent evil (p. 8). But then this been concluded, the bedrock truth that virtue is intrinsically good cannot be captured successfully by any consequentialist approach.

Type
Critical Notices/Études critiques
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 2002

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References

Notes

1 For arguments in support of this view, see, for example, Zimmerman, Michael J., “A Plea for Accuses,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 34, 2 (April 1997): 229–43;Google Scholar my own Moral Appraisability: Puzzles, Proposals, and Perplexities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), esp. chap. 8;Google Scholar and my Deontic Morality and Control (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002 [forthcoming]), esp. chap. 10.Google Scholar

2 See my Moral Appraisability, chap. 9. Also see Zimmerman, Michael J., An Essay on Moral Responsibility (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1989).Google Scholar

3 See my “An Epistemic Dimension of Blameworthiness,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 57, 3 (September 1997): 523–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar