¹ I should place consequentialism and deontology on the map I am using. Consequentialism is the view that whether an act is morally right or wrong is determined solely by how good or bad its consequences are. Deontology is the view that whether an act is morally right or wrong can at least sometimes be determined not by its consequences but by the kind of act it is.

² E.g., Hare, R. M., Moral Thinking (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 153, 193–94, 196–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³ E.g., Ross, W. D., The Right and the Good (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), pp. 134–35.Google Scholar See also Kant's distinction between, and integration of, the doctrine of right (Rechtslehre) and the doctrine of virtue (Tugendlehre) in his Metaphysics of Morals; O'Neill, Onora, “Kant's Virtues,” in How Should One Live? Essays on the Virtues, ed. Crisp, Roger (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 77–97Google Scholar; and Herman, Barbara, “On the Value of Acting from the Motive of Duty,” Philosophical Review, vol. 90, no. 3 (1981), pp. 359–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴ See, e.g., Hursthouse, Rosalind, Beginning Lives (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), p. 245Google Scholar, and “Applying Virtue Ethics,” in Hursthouse, Rosalind, Lawrence, Gavin, and Quinn, Warren, eds., Virtues and Reasons: Philippa Foot and Moral Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 62Google Scholar; Schneewind, J. B., “The Misfortunes of Virtue,” Ethics, vol. 101, no. 1 (1990), p. 43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Slote, Michael, From Morality to Virtue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 89Google Scholar; and Garcia, Jorge, “Virtue Ethics,” in The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, ed. Audi, Robert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 840.Google Scholar

⁵ See, e.g., Hursthouse, , Beginning Lives, p. 220Google Scholar; Trianosky, Gregory, “What Is Virtue Ethics All About?” American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 4 (1990), p. 336Google Scholar; and Slote, Michael, “Virtue Ethics, Utilitarianism, and Symmetry,”Google Scholar in Crisp, , ed., How Should One Live? Essays on the Virtues, p. 106.Google Scholar

⁶ See, e.g., Garcia, Jorge, “The Primacy of the Virtuous,” Philosophia, vol. 20, nos. 1–2 (1990), p. 69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schneewind, , “The Misfortunes of Virtue,” p. 43Google Scholar; and Annas, Julia, The Morality of Happiness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 91.Google Scholar

⁷ See, e.g., Solomon, David, “Internal Objections to Virtue Ethics,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 13 (1988), p. 429CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Crisp, Roger, “Modern Moral Philosophy and the Virtues,”Google Scholar in Crisp, , ed., How Should One Live? Essays on the Virtues, p. 7.Google Scholar

⁸ See, e.g., Baier, Kurt, “Radical Virtue Ethics,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 13 (1988), p. 127CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Annas, , The Morality of Happiness, p. 110Google Scholar (but Annas plausibly suggests that the virtues cannot be determined independently of judgments about right and wrong either; see ibid., p. 114).

⁹ Crisp, , “Modern Moral Philosophy and the Virtues,” p. 7.Google Scholar

¹⁰ See Dent, N. J. H., The Moral Psychology of the Virtues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), ch. 1, section 4.Google Scholar

¹¹ See, e.g., Annas, , The Morality of Happiness, pp. 8–9, 111–13.Google Scholar

¹² This seems to be Annas's view in ibid., pp. 111–14.

¹³ My remarks will be very summary; I say more in Value Judgement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), chs. 2, 5, 6, and 8.Google Scholar

¹⁴ For fuller discussion, see ibid., ch. 6, sections 2 and 4; ch. 7, section 5.

¹⁵ Again, for a less summary account, see ibid., ch. 7, section 6.

¹⁶ There are honorable exceptions: e.g., Hare, Moral Thinking; see the index entries in Hare's book under the subject “Education.”

¹⁷ This is not to say that supporters of virtue ethics have denied this; see, e.g., Annas, , The Morality of Happiness, pp. 113–14.Google Scholar There are also thoughtful applications of the virtues to actual cases: see, e.g., Foot, Philippa, “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect,” and “Euthanasia,” in her Virtues and Vices (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978)Google Scholar; Hursthouse, , Beginning Lives (supra note 4)Google Scholar, passim, and “Virtue Theory and Abortion,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 20, no. 3 (1991).Google Scholar But these pieces do leave us uncertain about how the virtues cited become endowed with the determinate form they display there.

¹⁸ These cases have been discussed, e.g., in Foot, , “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect”; and in Thomson, Judith Jarvis, The Realm of Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), esp. chs. 5–7.Google Scholar I develop my line of argument here more fully in my Value Judgement, ch. 7.

¹⁹ Martha Nussbaum speaks of “the priority of perceptions,” where perception means “the ability to discern … the salient features of one's particular situation.” This ability, she suggests, “is at the core of what practical wisdom is.… It is very clear, in both Aristotle and James, that one point of the emphasis on perception is to show the ethical crudeness of moralities based exclusively on general rules, and to demand for ethics a much finer responsiveness to the concrete.…” See Nussbaum, , Love's Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 37.Google Scholar What she says seems to me right, but distortion enters if one does not also acknowledge the limits to this “finer responsiveness.”

²⁰ The precise formulation of the doctrine of double effect is contentious, but the doctrine states, roughly, that when a certain action has both good and bad effects, it is permissible only if it is not wrong in itself and if it does not require that one directly intend the evil result. (For a good brief discussion, see Solomon, David, “Double Effect,” in Becker, L. C. and Becker, C. B., Encyclopedia of Ethics [Chicago: St. James Press, 1992]Google Scholar; I have followed his definition here.) The principle of respect for persons, for all of its influence, suffers from great vagueness. It is associated primarily with Kant, especially with his second formulation of the categorical imperative: “Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end” (Kant, , Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, 429, standard Academy pagination).Google Scholar

²¹ See, e.g., Nussbaum, Martha, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 290Google Scholar; and Annas, , The Morality of Happiness, pp. 110, 113–14.Google Scholar

²² See Annas, , The Morality of Happiness, pp. 83, 91.Google Scholar

²³ I discuss the question of unattainable ideals in my Value Judgement, ch. 6, section 2.

²⁴ See references in note 21.

²⁵ See my Value Judgement, ch. 7, sections 8 and 9.