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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
The problem I am going to discuss here concerns practical rationality, rationality not in thought but in action. More particularly, I am going to discuss the rationality, or absence of rationality (even, as one might put it, the contra-rationality or irrationality) of moral action. And ‘moral action’ shall mean here something done by someone who (let us suppose rightly) believes that to act otherwise would be contrary to, say, justice or charity; or again not done because it is thought that it would be unjust or uncharitable to do it. The question is whether in so acting, or refusing to act, this person will be acting rationally, even in cases where he or she believes that not only desire but self-interest would argue in favour of the wrongdoing.
1 I am thinking here of the undoubtedly interesting work of philosophers such as Rosalind Hursthouse, Christine Swanton, and Michael Slote who insist that dispositions, motives, and other ‘internal’ elements are the primary subjects and determinants of moral goodness and badness. I myself have never been a ‘virtue ethicist’ in this sense. For me it is what is done that stands in this position.
2 Gollwitzer, H., Kuhn, K., and Schneider, R. (eds.) Dying We Live (London: The Harvill Press), 1956 11Google Scholar. See Foot, Philippa, Natural Goodness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001) 94–6, 102CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Dying We Live, 11.
4 The Philosophical Review, volume 81, Number 3 (3 07, 1972)Google Scholar.
5 Quinn, W., Morality and Action (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.
6 Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness, especially chs. 1–3.
7 It is Michael Thompson who has developed the concept of a life form on which I relied heavily in Natural Goodness. See Thompson, M. ‘The Representation of Life’ in R., Hursthouse, G., Lawrence and W., Quinn (eds.) Virtues and Reasons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995)Google Scholar and his contribution ‘Human Nature and Practical Reason’ in the present volume.
