Abstract

A long standing internal objection to virtue ethics concerns the ability of virtue ethics to provide moral agents with guidance in the choice of actions in particular situations. Virtue ethics bases its evaluative focus in agents and states of agents. As a consequence it only takes stock of actions to the extent that they are underlain by character traits and motivational tendencies. Because such agentive factors only manifest themselves in sets of actions that take place across an extended period of time, virtue ethics seems to lack the conceptual resources to provide a moral evaluation of particular actions. ;First, I consider two possible roles for the virtuous agent in action guidance: moral exemplar or source of moral advice, but reject both on the grounds that they are motivationally implausible and make unwarranted presuppositions about self-knowledge. Next, I propose that it is not the virtuous agent that should be treated as a moral ideal, but the life of the virtuous agent. So, I propose an account of virtue as relative to the agent's stage of moral development: an action A is right for S in C iff a virtuous person with cultural and psychological traits like those of S would have performed A in C at a similar stage in her development as a moral agent. I also argue that moral motivations ought to be relativised to the agent's stage of moral development and degree of self-knowledge. I use this account to develop a particularist approach to action guidance. ;I conclude by arguing that the action guiding objection overlooks the real contribution that virtue ethics has to make to a discussion of right action. The question of action is not a special domain, isolated from the rest of the agent's life. Rather, the agent's life should be seen as a project in the course of which the agent acquires self-knowledge, and learns to take pleasure and pain in the right things