Appraisal or Guidance of Actions? A Method for Discerning Right Acts From Virtuous Ones

Based on a revision of virtue ethics, an act is right if and only if performed by a virtuous agent under those circumstances. Of the semantic critiques placed on that view is the problem of “right but non-virtuous” since, on that basis, it is erroneous to define a right act depending on the action of a virtuous agent. This is because sometimes a non-virtuous agent is in a condition that is never experienced by a virtuous agent. The present article aimed to first grapple with this problem and show that the aforesaid problem is the result of mixing the realm of determining the duties and proffering the practical guidance with the scope of appraising the acts. As a consequence, in “guidance of actions” an act is right if and only if a virtuous agent decides in that condition whereas in “appraisal of actions” this decision might not be “admirable”. Correspondingly, there are cases that an agent “should” do an act, yet their act cannot be counted as “right” meaning “virtuous” and “admirable”. Finally, a number of pragmatic approaches were presented to solve this problem.