Principled Virtue

In this dissertation, I defend a principled-based account of right action within an ethics of virtue. According to this view, an act is wrong if it conflicts with any virtue, and right if it conflicts with none. But this commits me to negative universal principles associated with the virtues, and it has been typical within virtue ethics to deny a role for moral principles. I argue that the tendency to reject principles turns a maximizing model of right action that has untenable consequence for an ethics of virtue.