Précis of Knowing Better: Virtue, Deliberation, and Normative Ethics

Abstract

Ordinary virtuous agents reliably determine how to act despite lacking knowledge of fundamental ethical principles. This deliberative success is grounded in an account of practical reasons as facts that constitute evidence regarding what one ought to do. Under this framework, mundane, non-fundamental facts serve as genuine normative reasons that reliably guide agents who are ignorant of underlying ethical foundations. Moral virtues are therefore properly understood not as guarantees of right action, but as stable dispositions to respond appropriately to normative reasons, rendering practical virtue predominantly epistemic in nature. To avoid deducing normative conclusions purely from non-normative evidence, agents rely on a foundational body of mundane ethical knowledge distinct from theoretical principles. Combining this evidential view of reasons with the standard of knowledge for practical deliberation accounts for how pro tanto considerations function in deliberation and provides a coherent metaphysics relating fundamental ethical principles to everyday virtuous agency. – AI-generated abstract.