Papers below may be linked. Any papers under blind review have been removed.

Agent-Based Virtue Ethics and the Evaluation of Right Action (Revising; Available Later)
  • Abstract: According to agent-based virtue ethics, the moral quality of an act is determined by the moral quality of the motive of the agent in performing the act. Critics allege that agent-based virtue ethics destroys the commonsense distinction between doing a right act and doing it for the right reason, with the consequence that agent-basers will have trouble providing badly motivated agents with reasons for performing an intuitively right act. In several recent publications, Liezl van Zyl argues that such agents can have obligations to do intuitively right acts even on an agent-based account. In this paper, I critically evaluate van Zyl’s proposal. The upshot of my criticism is showing why the commonsense distinction is important and why agent-based virtue ethics should be rejected.