"In Morals from Motives, Michael Slote develops a virtue ethics inspired more by Hume and Hutcheson's moral sentimentalism than by the Aristotelianism that has recently been so influential. He defends a "pure" form of virtue theory based on the motive of "caring" and shows how a reconfigured morality of caring can go beyond its usual confines to offer a general account of right and wrong action. Rejecting the familiar idea of a fundamental opposition between caring and justice, he goes on to argue that social and legal justice can be explained in terms of caring and that both practical reason and human welfare can also be conceived in purely virtue-ethical terms." "Morals from Motives defends its approach against criticisms that naturally occur to those skeptical of basing the morality of right and wrong action in independently admirable motives. It also argues that ideally, good people will in general be concerned about helping people rather than about (conscientiously) doing their duty. But the book's largest positive aim is to show that virtue ethics isn't limited to ancient prototypes and can especially benefit from ideas deriving from eighteenth-century moral sentimentalism and from recent thinking about the "feminine" morality of caring."--Jacket.
Includes bibliographical references and index.