The Ockham Society

Abstract: Moral reasons have the wrong status in McDowell’s virtue ethics. For McDowell, defeated moral reasons are silenced: when a virtuous person makes a moral decision between competing moral reasons, the defeated moral reason no longer counts as a moral reason. The fittingness of regret without remorse undermines this view. This paper shows how Ross’s pluralist atomist status of moral reasons can account for the fittingness of regret without remorse, and then develops a Murdochian alternative moral psychology to McDowell’s, in which moral reasons are “dimmed” rather than “silenced”.

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Ockham Society Convenors: Max Festenstein, Leo Sonntag, Marta Szatkowska, and Joseph Karaganis | Ockham Society Webpage