Wesley J. Park (St Anne's College, Oxford University): 'What Would Virtuous Agents Do?'
Abstract: Virtue ethicists spend a great deal of time thinking about the question, 'What would virtuous agents do?' In this essay, my aim is to say more about the neo-Aristotelian link between the concepts of right action and the virtuous agent. I shall endorse the thesis that right actions are those characteristic of a virtuous agent (i.e., they are what a possessor of the virtues would characteristically do). Firstly, I argue that neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics can be improved by a novel conceptual analysis of virtuous action. Secondly, I use a novel criterion of wrong action to argue that cases of morally trivial options are excluded by the virtue ethics criterion. Thirdly, I argue that the action of the partially virtuous agent is either hypothetically reasonable for agents who have the wrong character traits or actually right if (roughly) it is characteristic of a virtuous agent.
