Unprincipled Virtue

An Inquiry Into Moral Agency

Bibliographic Data

ID23398175
AuthorsNomy Arpaly (Rice University, corresponding author)
Year2002
Pages203
Publication date2002-12-19
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueUnprincipled virtue (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherOxford University PressNew York (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/0195152042.001.0001
OpenAlexW4240610838
Open LibraryOL15554673M
ISBN9780195152043
LanguageEN
Citations received78
References cited54

This book presents a positive theory of moral worth. Chapter 1 examines the complexities of moral life that appear to differ from the paradigmatic cases of moral psychology. Chapter 2 argues against the common assumption that akrasia is always irrational, or at least, always less rational than the corresponding self-controlled action. The theory is presented in Chapter 3 — that people are praiseworthy for acts of good will and blameworthy for acts of ill will or absence of good will, and the amount of praise or blame they deserve varies with the depth of their motivation or extent of their indifference. Chapter 4 and 5 defend this theory against potential objections to the effect that there is something wrong with its failure to invoke autonomy, and clarifies the theory’s implications about some issues in moral responsibility often associated with autonomy (i.e., responsibility of kleptomaniacs, drug addicts, makers of Freudian slips, and persons driven to murder by hypnotists).

Action (physics) · Autonomy · Blame · Epistemology · Irrational number · Moral responsibility · Political science · Praise · Virtue · Free Will and Agency · Law · Mathematics · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Philosophy · Psychology · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment · Social Psychology · Ethics · Psychology and philosophy

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