Towards Justice and Virtue A Constructive Account of Practical Reasoning [Paperback]

Constructs an account of the basic principles for moving towards just institutions and virtuous lives.Challenging the rivalry between those who advocate only abstract, universal principles of justice and those who commend only the particularities of virtuous lives, this work traces this impasse to defects in underlying conceptions of reasoning about action.Challenging the rivalry between those who advocate only abstract, universal principles of justice and those who commend only the particularities of virtuous lives, this work traces this impasse to defects in underlying conceptions of reasoning about action.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 an alternative, more modest, account of ethical reasoning, a reasoned way of answering the question who counts? , and constructs a linked account of the principles that are basic for moving toward 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. Towards Justice and Virtue should be admired (among other things) for its constructivist program for building principles from the ground up. The book has strong Kantian elements, but one of its merits is that it is independent of Kant's work. Her main arguments...are concise and fairly general, and one wants to press them at various points to see whether they can be carried through or on what (if any) further assumptions they depend. It is a stimulating book that merits further examination and discussion.lƒ'