Virtue Ethics without Right Action

The Journal of Value Inquiry

 This paper argues that Anscombe and Foot were correctly skeptical of the concept of moral rightness. Two senses of morally right action are distinguished, a strong notion that has deontic implications and a weaker notion that does not. It is argued that unless contemporary virtue ethicists are embracing a strong but dubious sense of moral rightness, their attempt to arrive at a criterion of right action is uninteresting. If they embrace a strong notion of right action, contemporary virtue ethicists come up against Anscombe's arguments against such a notion, advanced in "Modern Moral Philosophy."