Unprincipled virtue—synopsis (of sorts)

Abstract

The first thing I do in UNPRINCIPLED VIRTUE is to present some examples of agency of sorts that are largely absent in the agency theory literature, but are not particularly strange in real life. These cases involve good people with bad principles, people who deliberate in a cool hour but are very irrational, people who feel possessed by an alien emotion when to us they appear more themselves than ever, and some more ways in which an agent's mind or the nature of her action can be opaque to her in some way in the midst of performing morally significant actions. With such cases in mind, I set out to offer a theory of moral praiseworthiness and blameworthiness, to which I refer as "moral worth". I chose this term, with its Kantian overtones, because I rely a great deal on an intuition invoked by Kant in his story of the prudent grocer. The intuition is: an agent to is truly praiseworthy for a right action iff agent performs it from the reasons that make it right (thus, the prudent grocer is not praiseworthy for fair pricing because his reason for action is profit, and profitability is not what makes his action morally right). Perhaps unlike Kant, I hold that to perform an action for the reasons that make it right it is neither sufficient nor necessary to do it because one thinks it is right. If a person's idea of morality is something along the lines of "I must help people of my own ethnicity, and not the rest", that person can help someone because she thinks it is right, and yet at the same time, act for irrelevant reasons, because what makes it right to help the person is something like "because he is a person", but our nationalist acts from another reason "because we share an ethnicity". I also defend the view that it is possible to perform an action from the reasons that make it right while believing one's action to be wrong, and still, be praiseworthy, due to the fact that you act from the reasons that make your action right. The person who holds false views about morality is often regarded not as a bad person who accidentally does good things all the time, but as a good person who is bad at abstract thinking. I argue that it is wrong to reduce the virtue of such a person to something like Aristotelian "natural virtue" or Kantian "acting from mere inclination". I introduce cases of "Inverse