Moral worth and rationality as acting on good reasons

Abstract

Unprincipled Virtue probably shouldn't be called that. Its main subject is moral praiseworthiness and blameworthiness, not virtue.1 And "unprincipled" makes it sound as if the book is a salvo in the generalist-particularist wars in moral theory, which it certainly is not. Rather, Arpaly's main aim in the book in addition to pressing a methodological agenda, on which I will shortly comment is to defend a unified theory of rationality and moral worth according to which our actions are rational, or morally praiseworthy, when we act for good reasons that is, for what are in fact good reasons, regardless of what we take to be good reasons. (In the moral domain, "good reasons" must be understood as specifically moral reasons.) Rather than making the agent's conception of what she is doing criterial for either rationality or moral praiseworthiness, Arpaly proposes in both cases a more "external" criterion which focuses on the match (or lack thereof) between what are in fact the agent's reasons (whether she realizes it or not) and what are in fact good reasons (whether the agent believes this or not). I shall raise some worries about this strategy in both domains: first that of moral praiseworthiness and blameworthiness, and then that of rationality (where an "external" view strikes me as especially dubious). First, though, a word about Arpaly's methodological aim.