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Abstract

Stocker focuses largely on issues related to my discussion of self-other asymmetry, though there is a brief coda on the question of what is attractive about virtue theory. He begins by noting an earlier article of his own that gives examples of self-other asymmetry, and in fact descriptions of such intuitive self-other asymmetry have been offered by many philosophers before Stocker, including Aristotle, Sidgwick, Ross, and Falk. What has been distinctive in my own use of this idea is the effort to illustrate and argue for the oddness and paradoxical character of the asymmetry, especially as combined with other features of the intuitive (or Kantian) moral landscape. (I allude to this on p. 21, fn. 22.) Stocker says that I prefer self-other-symmetric views because they are symmetrical, but that greatly oversimplifies my arguments from symmetry. More than once, I say that I regard symmetry has having some theoretical force, but that other factors, including factors of intuitive ethical fit and plausibility, can outweigh it. I argue that methodological considerations and the idea of ethical theory gain much of their force from the paradoxes and oddities that infect our ordinary intuitions about the moral. Were it not for the latter, we might do well to forget about theory and offer a rich and thoroughgoing account of morality and virtue that gave little weight to considerations of symmetry, self-other or otherwise. And I also argue that we should discard intuitions only to the extent needed to evade peculiarity (not particularity) and paradox. That way, the theory I end up with is supposed to be adequate, and considerable effort is expended to make it adequate, to the richness and complexity of many or most areas of the moral or ethical life, and that in particular means that, contrary to Stocker's opinion, the virtue ethics of From Morality doesn't do away with all ethical asymmetries. It doesn't, as Stocker