Abstract
This paper is about the rationality of moral action, and so about a problem that is as old as Plato but which still haunts moral philosophy today. It is about the rationality of following morality; of refraining from murder or robbery for instance, and being faithful in keeping contracts and promises, even where this seems to be against our interest and contrary to what we most desire. The problem of the rationality of morality arises most obviously over such actions and therefore has to do particularly with the virtue of justice, because it is here that self-interest and morality often seem to clash. Then reason may represent itself as on the side of self-interest and the fulfilment of present desire; so unless it can be shown that acting justly is a necessary part of practical rationality, cynics like Thrasymachus will always say that there is no good reason to pass up an advantage for the sake of acting justly, and plenty of reason not to pass it up.
The ideas in this paper owe much to the work of Warren Quinn, Gavin Lawrence and Michael Thompson. I have benefitted, too, from criticisms, by Rosalind Hursthouse and from participants at the Vienna Circle Institute’s Conference “Norms, Values, and Society” in September/October 1993.
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Notes
Plato: Republic, 348c2-d3.
P.T. Geach: “Good and Evil”, in: Analysis, 17, 1956, pp.33-42.
See Philippa Foot: “Goodness and Choice”, in: Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume XXXV, 1961, pp.45-60.
I mean by this to exclude, e.g. comfort to a rider in the evaluation of the way a horse moves.
Whether it actually does so depends, of course, partly on external circumstances and on other things about itself.
He is contrasting this with the “relative need” which would be implied if someone said that he needed money for an expensive suit. David Wiggins: “Claims of Need”, in: Needs, Values, Truth, Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1987, pp.1-57.
Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica, Part II, I, Question I, article 2.
G.E.M. Anscombe: “On Promising and its Justice”, in: Anscombe: Collected Philosophical Papers, vol. III, Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1981, p.18.
Philippa Foot: “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives”, in: Philosophical Review, 3, 81, 1972, pp.305-316.
For a powerful criticism of this Humean idea, see Warren Quinn: “Rationality and the human good”, in Quinn: Morality and Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993, pp.210227.
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© 1994 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Foot, P. (1994). Rationality and Virtue. In: Pauer-Studer, H. (eds) Norms, Values, and Society. Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2454-8_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2454-8_16
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