Contemporary Debates: Agent-Based versus Target-Based Virtue Ethics

Contemporary virtue ethics divides into several rival structural positions on the question of how, exactly, virtue is supposed to determine or explain right action. Michael Slote, in the essay "Agent-Based Virtue Ethics" (Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 20, 1995) and in the books From Morality to Virtue (1992) and Morals from Motives (2001), defends a purely "agent-based" position, on which the moral status of an action is derived directly and exclusively from facts about the inner motives or traits of the agent performing it — an act is right, on this view, roughly because it exhibits or expresses a virtuous motive such as benevolence or compassion, with no independent, prior specification of virtue in terms of an external standard such as human flourishing doing any explanatory work.