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Examines how facts about virtue and vice influence moral deliberation, clarifying their connections within normative theory.
What is the significance of facts about virtue and vice for deliberation? That is, how does the quality of an action’s disposition-grounds bear on how we should act? This question is more complicated than it seems: for facts about an action's virtue seem to be irrelevant within deliberation, while facts about vice seem to be non-instrumentally significant. In this paper, I offer an account of virtue and a partial account of vice that explains these facts’ relationship to deliberation by way of virtue and vice’s membership in a peculiar family of excellences and defects. An upshot of the account is a clarification of virtue and vice’s role in normative theory.
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Bob Bishop (2026) studied this question.
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