The Cambridge Companion to Virtue Ethics (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy) by Daniel C. Russell

Author:Daniel C. Russell
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2013-02-13T16:00:00+00:00

Acting virtuously requires that the agent knows what she is doing (rather than her acting accidentally or unintentionally), that she acts for a reason and, moreover, for the right reason (rather than from an ulterior motive), and that she has the appropriate feeling(s) or attitude(s) when she acts. Hursthouse notes an interesting difference between terms such as ‘acting morally’ (or ‘acting rightly’) and ‘acting well,’ namely that the former is not open to such qualifications as “quite,” “fairly,” “very,” or “perfectly,” whereas the latter is. We can act “fairly well,” “quite well,” or, if all the conditions for acting well are met, “perfectly” or “excellently.”25 This is one of the reasons why Hursthouse notes that virtue ethics is not happy with the term ‘right action,’ with its suggestion of uniqueness, and its implication of “if not right then wrong,” and instead prefers talking in terms of “good action” or “acting well.”26

In what follows I shall discuss an agent-based account of right action, which treats the rightness of an act as strictly dependent on virtuous motivation. Agent-based virtue ethics differs in an important respect from qualified-agent theories, in that it provides an explanatory account of right action, that is, it tells us that an action is right because it comes from a certain motive. By contrast, we have seen, qualified-agent theories provide a substantive account of right action, allowing us to fix the properties of right and wrong to their proper object, but without thereby telling us what makes an action right or wrong.

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