Abstract

In my dissertation, I present and defend a novel version of virtue ethics. Virtue ethics holds that an action is morally right if and only if it is an available act that an ideally virtuous person might characteristically do in the agent's circumstances. It also maintains that an action is morally worthy if and only if it is right and it is an act of a motive of an other-regarding virtue. ;Maximizing act consequentialism provides a problematic account of friendship. In support of that criticism, I show how maximizing act consequentialism mistakenly denies the rightness of some actions that are needed in order to maintain a friendship. ;If the Categorical Imperative supplies Kantian ethics with a theory of a right action, then it is the Formula of Universal Law. But, I argue, the most plausible interpretations of that formula wrongly deny the rightness of some beneficial lies. ;Kantian ethics holds that only actions performed from duty can have moral worth. I describe some helping actions performed solely out of sympathy that are morally worthy even though they are not performed from duty. And I reply to objections that are currently popular with Kantians. ;If maximizing act consequentialism is merely a theory of a right action, then virtue ethics is preferable because it is more complete. Moreover, even if maximizing act consequentialism also offers a theory of a morally worthy action, the most plausible interpretations of that theory are subject to the counter-examples to Kantian ethics. ;It follows that Kantian ethics and maximizing act consequentialism each overly restrict both the class of morally right actions and the class of morally worthy actions. But, I claim, the relevant counter-examples pose no problem for virtue ethics. And those examples aside, virtue ethics is at least as plausible as Kantian ethics and maximizing act consequentialism. So the former theory is preferable on the whole to the latter two theories