An Agent-Centered Account of Rightness: The Importance of a Good Attitude

This paper provides a sketch of an agent-centered way of understanding and answering the question, "What's wrong with that?" On this view, what lies at the bottom of judgments of wrongness is a bad attitude; when someone does something wrong, she does something that expresses a bad, o...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Foreman, Elizabeth (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Springer Science + Business Media B. V [2014]
In: Ethical theory and moral practice
Year: 2014, Volume: 17, Issue: 5, Pages: 941-954
Further subjects:B Agent-centered ethics
B Slote
B Attitudes
B Kant
B Normative ethics
Online Access: Volltext (Resolving-System)
Description
Summary:This paper provides a sketch of an agent-centered way of understanding and answering the question, "What's wrong with that?" On this view, what lies at the bottom of judgments of wrongness is a bad attitude; when someone does something wrong, she does something that expresses a bad, or inappropriate, attitude (where inappropriateness is understood, tentatively, as a failure to recognize the separateness of others). In order to motivate this account, a general Kantian agent-centered ethics is discussed, as well as Michael Slote's agent-based ethics, in light of analysis of the grounding role of attitudes in the evaluation of two core cases. In light of these discussions, it is argued that there are advantages to preserving the grounding of the appropriateness of attitudes in facts about their objects (as opposed to Slote's sentimentalism), while cutting such an agent-centered ethics away from a Kantian grounding.
ISSN:1572-8447
Contains:Enthalten in: Ethical theory and moral practice
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1007/s10677-014-9491-2