Many Faces of Virtue

Nomy Arpaly and Timothy Schroeder defend an alternative to what they see, I think rightly, as the excessive intellectualism of much recent work on moral psychology and moral worth, an alternative centred on what they call “plain desire.” They first give a desire-based account of acting “for a reason” on which this involves behaviour that is not only caused by a belief and desire that rationalize it but caused by or in virtue of the fact that they rationalize it. They then present the account of desire Schroeder defended in Three Faces of Desire. It denies that a desire is identical to a disposition either to act or to feel pleasure, though in normal humans it usually has those effects. It’s instead a state of the brain’s reward system, so to desire P is to have that system strengthen neural connections that produce P. Finally, they give desire-based accounts of the related concepts of virtue and praiseworthy action, on which each involves desires for the right objects thought of in the right way, which is a “plain” rather than an intellectualist way. I’ll leave their book’s moral-psychological claims to those who know that subject better and concentrate on the normative claims in its third part, which I’ll discuss from a broadly sympathetic point of view. Though connected to the earlier claims, they’re to some extent independent of them. They go best with some desire-based account of acting for a reason and some view that distinguishes desire from just any impulse to act, but these needn’t be the precise ones Arpaly and Schroeder give. For them the core of both virtue and praiseworthy action is “good will,” or intrinsically desiring the right or the good, correctly conceptualized or under the right concepts. What are these concepts? Any right act has some property that makes it right, and different normative theories give competing