Blackwell Reference Online

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In many contexts, the phrase ‘virtuous action’ is just virtue-ethics speak for ‘right action.’ In this use, it figures in debates within normative ethics about the relative merits of different virtue ethical accounts of right action and whether any of them is adequate. It is also used as a general phrase to apply to a smaller class than the phrase ‘right action’ – namely to actions which can be described using a virtue adjective: just actions, courageous actions, kind actions, honest actions. (When discretion is the better part of valor, the courageous (rather than foolhardy) agent may rightly run like mad, but his running isn't a courageous action.) In either of these uses, ‘virtuous action,’ like ‘right action,’ allows for the possibility that an agent can do such an action without possessing virtue. Call this ‘everyday virtuous action.’ But, in the most interesting use of the term, a virtuous action has to come from virtue. Call this ‘ideal virtuous action.’ And, in the context of this volume, the concept of ‘ideal virtuous action’ is interesting not so much as the concept of morally ideal action (though it is that) but as the concept of ideal rational action (or ‘acting for a reason’ or ‘from reason’) itself , in some special sense – the upshot of an ideal practical rationality. The concept is, of course, derived from Aristotle, though for some reason to do with Greek usage ... log in or subscribe to read full text