This book offers a comprehensive virtue ethics that breaks from the tradition of eudaimonistic virtue ethics. In developing a pluralistic view, it shows how different ’modes of moral response’ such as love, respect, appreciation, and creativity are all central to the virtuous response and thereby to ethics. It offers virtue ethical accounts of the good life, objectivity, rightness, demandingness, and moral epistemology.

James D. Wallace treats moral considerations as beliefs about the right and wrong ways of doing things - beliefs whose source and authority are the same as any ...

There is an obvious affinity between virtue ethics and particularism. Both stress the complexify of the moral life, the inadequacy of rule-following as a guide to moral deliberation, and the importance of judgement in discerning the morally relevant features of particular situations. Yet it remains an open question how deep the affinity goes. I argue that the radical form of particularism defended by Jonathan Dancy has surprisingly strong implications for virtue ethics. Adopting such a view would require the virtue theorist (...) either to adopt an unattractive model of moral motivation or to embrace a fairly strong version of the unity of the virtues. (shrink)

Morals from Motives develops a virtue ethics inspired more by Hume and Hutcheson's moral sentimentalism than by recently-influential Aristotelianism. It argues that a reconfigured and expanded "morality of caring" can offer a general account of right and wrong action as well as social justice. Expanding the frontiers of ethics, it goes on to show how a motive-based "pure" virtue theory can also help us to understand the nature of human well-being and practical reason.

Appeals to utility permeate Hume's account of morality. He maintains, for which have this tendency to the public advantage and loss" (T. 578-79).

In this paper, I begin by outlining some basic features of the version of virtue ethics I espouse, and then turn to exploring what light may be shed on our understanding and interpretation of Hume when he is viewed from that perspective.

In the world according to Hume, people are complicated creatures, with convoluted, often contradictory characters. Consider, for example, Hume's controversial assessment of Charles I: "The character of this prince, as that of most men, if not of all men, was mixed .... To consider him in the most favourable light, it may be affirmed, that his dignity was free from pride, his humanity from weakness, his bravery from rashness, his temperance from austerity, his frugality from avarice .... To speak the (...) most harshly of him, we may affirm, that many of his good qualities were attended with some latent frailty, which, though seemingly inconsiderable, was able, when seconded by the extreme malevolence of his fortune, to disappoint them of all their influence: His beneficent disposition was clouded by a manner not very gracious; his virtue was tinctured with superstition; his good sense was disfigured by a deference to persons of a capacity inferior to his own; and his moderate temper exempted him not from hasty and precipitate resolutions." This sketch shows Charles in all his complexities, with his virtues, near virtues, and contradicting virtues. I have quoted it at length because it is hard to summarize without losing the subtleties that lie within it. Hume's moral theory is based fundamentally on judgments of character, 2 so those subtleties are important to his view. The character sketches that pervade the.. (shrink)

In this much-anticipated book, Jonathan Dancy offers the only available full-scale treatment of particularism in ethics, a view with which he has been associated for twenty years. Dancy now presents particularism as the view that the possibility of moral thought and judgement does not in any way depend on an adequate supply of principles. He grounds this claim on a form of reasons-holism, holding that what is a reason in one case need not be any reason in another, and maintaining (...) that moral reasons are no different in this respect from others. Ethics Without Principles offers detailed treatment and criticism of opposing positions of all sorts, with useful summaries. It also contains three chapters on the nature of what Dancy calls 'contributory' reasons, which, though the topic of much interest at the moment, are not often discussed in anything like the detail given here. And it offers a distinctive form of value-holism to go with the holism of reasons. As Dancy's definitive statement on particularism, the book will be required reading for all those working on moral philosophy and ethical theory. (shrink)

" By the end, we can see the cause to which Hume has been true throughout the work.

Among contemporary ethicists, Hume is perhaps best known for his views about morality’s practical import and his spectator-centered account of moral evaluation. Yet according to the so-called “spectator complaint”, these two aspects of Hume’s moral theory cannot be reconciled with one another. I argue that the answer to the spectator complaint lies in Hume’s account of “goodness” and “greatness of mind”. Through a discussion of these two virtues, Hume makes clear the connection between his views about moral motivation and his (...) understanding of moral evaluation by providing us with two portraits of the Humean moral agent. (shrink)

To be truly reflective, moral thinking and moral philosophy must become aware of the contexts that bind our thinking about how to live. These essays show how to do this, and why it makes a difference.

The idea of perfection.--On God and Good.--The sovereignty of good over other concepts.