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Monkeying with Motives: Agent-Basing Virtue Ethics*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2009

Julia Driver
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Extract

Virtue ethics has generated a great deal of excitement among ethicists largely because it is seen as an alternative to the traditional theories – utilitarianism and Kantian ethics – which have come under considerable scrutiny and criticism in the past 30 years. Rather than give up the enterprise of doing moral theory altogether, as some have suggested, others have opted to develop an alternative that would hopefully avoid the shortcomings of both utilitarianism and Kantian ethics. Several writers, such as Jorge Garcia and Michael Slote, have tried to develop this alternative of virtue ethics, or at least sketch out ways such a theory could be developed.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , November 1995 , pp. 281 - 288
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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Footnotes

*

An earlier version of this paper was read as a comment on a paper presented by Michael Slote at the conference on Moral Obligation, held at UNC-Greensboro in April 1995.

References

1 See Garcia, Jorge, ‘The Primacy of the Virtues’, Philosophia, xx (1990)Google Scholar; Slote, Michael, From Morality to Virtue, Oxford, 1992Google Scholar, and more recently, ‘Agent-Basing Virtue Ethics’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, xx (1995)Google Scholar forthcoming. All references to this paper are made to the typescript version.

2 This is contrasted with pure evaluational externalism which holds that the moral quality of persons and actions is determined completely by factors external to the agent. Objective utilitarianism is an example of a pure evaluational externalist theory of moral evaluation.

3 ‘Agent-Basing Virtue Ethics’, 34.Google Scholar

4 Bentham, Jeremy, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ed. Burns, J. H. and Hart, H. L. A., London, 1970 (The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham), p. 100.Google Scholar

5 Nagel, Thomas, ‘Moral Luck’, in Mortal Questions, Cambridge, 1979.Google Scholar

6 ‘Agent-Basing Virtue Ethics’, 9.Google Scholar

7 Ibid., 9–10.

8 Ibid., 34.

9 See Blum, Lawrence, ‘Moral Perception and Particularity’, Ethics, ci (1991)Google Scholar; Amelie Rorty, ‘The Two Faces of Courage’ and ‘Virtues and Their Vicissitudes’, in Mind in Action, Boston, Mass., 1988.Google Scholar