Towards Justice and Virtue
A Constructive Account of Practical Reasoning

Constructs an account of the basic principles for moving towards just institutions and virtuous lives.

Onora O'Neill (Author)

9780521485593, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 28 August 1996

244 pages
22.8 x 15.1 x 2.3 cm, 0.34 kg

' … this book will take its place both as a mjaor statement of one version of a broadly Kantian approach to moral philosophy and as a standard work in its own right'. Jonathan Wolff, The Times Literary Supplement

Towards Justice and Virtue challenges the rivalry between those who advocate only abstract, universal principles of justice and those who commend only the particularities of virtuous lives. Onora O'Neill traces this impasse to defects in underlying conceptions of reasoning about action. She proposes and vindicates a modest account of ethical reasoning and a reasoned way of answering the question 'who counts?', then uses these to construct linked accounts of principles by which we can move towards just institutions and virtuous lives.

1. Overview: justice against virtue?
2. Practical reason: abstraction and construction
3. Focus: action, intelligibility and principles
4. Scope: agents and subjects: who counts? 5. Structure: obligations and rights
6. Content I: principles for all: towards justice
7. Content II: Principles for all: towards virtue.

Subject Areas: Ethics & moral philosophy [HPQ]