Abstract
In this paper I argue that the disagreement between modern moral philosophers and (some) virtue ethicists about whether motive affects rightness is a result of conceptual disagreement, and that when they develop a theory of ‘right action,’ the two parties respond to two very different questions. Whereas virtue ethicists tend to use ‘right’ as interchangeable with ‘good’ or ‘virtuous’ and as implying moral praise, modern moral philosophers use it as roughly equivalent to ‘in accordance with moral obligation.’ One implication of this is that the possibility of an act being right by accident does not pose a problem for consequentialism or deontology. A further implication is that it reveals a shortcoming in virtue ethics, namely that it does not—yet needs to—present an account of moral obligation.
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Notes
There is at least one version of virtue ethics that does not fully support this intuition, namely Swanton’s (2001) target-centred account. For the sake of simplicity I will focus on the accounts provided by Slote and Hursthouse, but it is an interesting question how Swanton would respond to the problem of accidental rightness.
Consequentialists could make much the same response, but for the sake of simplicity I will in the remainder of this paper focus on the way deontologists, mainly Kant and Ross, deal with the distinction.
However, Ross does go on to note a slight difference between the meaning of ‘right’ and the meaning of ‘the act that is morally obligatory’. In some cases the agent ought to do either of two acts, and in such a case either act is right, but neither is obligatory. ‘Right’ therefore has a somewhat wider application than ‘obligatory’ (Ross 1930, pp. 2–3). In what follows I will use ‘right act’ as interchangeable with ‘an act that accords with our obligations’.
Van Zyl, L. (Forthcoming) “Rightness and Goodness in Agent-based Virtue Ethics.”
In the case of the person who helps another out of sympathy rather than a sense of duty Kant writes: ‘[I]n such a case an action of this kind, however right and however amiable it may be, still has no genuinely moral worth.’ Such an agent acts ‘in accordance with duty,’ but not ‘for the sake of duty,’ so that the rightness of an act, conceived as what one has a duty to do, is independent of the motive one might have for performing that act (Kant 1984, para. 4:398).
The importance of virtuous action and the question of what a person’s actions reveal of his character is brilliantly illustrated in Leo Tolstoy’s novel, Anna Karenina. Soon after meeting Anna for the first time, Count Vronsky makes a substantial monetary gift to a woman whose husband—a watchman and the sole provider for a huge family—has just been killed in a train accident. The act is clearly right—perhaps because it has good consequences, or because it is in accordance with duty—but this question is of no significance in the novel. Instead, the central question—upon which, to a large degree, Anna Karenina’s fate depends—is whether it is a good deed, revealing Vronsky to be a truly magnanimous man, or instead, whether it is motivated by a desire to impress others and to enhance his reputation.
See, for example Railton (1988), O’Neill (1988, 1993) and Driver (1988). Some have argued that there is much more agreement between Aristotle and Kant on the issue of moral motivation than is usually supposed, in that both believe that what is involved in acting morally is acting from a reason rather than acting from feeling or inclination. See, for example, Louden (1986) and Korsgaard (1996).
However, I agree with Coope (2006) that “she was merely inveighing against those who invested notions of ‘Ought’ and ‘Must’ and ‘Duty’ … with a purely mesmeric force” (p. 22).
Miller (2006) goes some way towards developing such a theory.
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van Zyl, L. Accidental Rightness. Philosophia 37, 91–104 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-008-9136-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-008-9136-6