The concepts of virtue and right action are closely connected, in that we expect people with virtuous motives to at least often act rightly. Two well‐known views explain this connection by defining one of the concepts in terms of the other. Instrumentalists about virtue identify virtuous motives as those that lead to right acts; virtue‐ethicists identify right acts as those that are or would be done from virtuous motives. This essay outlines a rival explanation, based on the “higher‐level” account of virtue defended in the author's Virtue, Vice, and Value . On this account rightness and virtue go together because each is defined by a (different) relation to some other, more basic moral concept. Their frequent coincidence is therefore like a correlation between A and B based not on either's causing the other but on their being joint effects of a single common cause.
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Thomas Hurka (2010) studied this question.
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