Unprincipled Virtue: An Inquiry Into Moral Agency

Nomy Arpaly rejects the model of rationality used by most ethicists and action theorists. Both observation and psychology indicate that people act rationally without deliberation, and act irrationally with deliberation. By questioning the notion that our own minds are comprehensible to us--and therefore questioning much of the current work of action theorists and ethicists--Arpaly attempts to develop a more realistic conception of moral agency.

There are notoriously few decisive entries in philosophical debates, and this is one of them. Before reading it I had a very different view than Arpaly's, but by the end I was convinced that she is essentially right about what it means to be a good person. The book is clear, concise, and readable, and the subject could hardly be more important. This is about as good as philosophy gets.

I do not think the description of the book on this page does it justice though. The book is not primarily about rationality; as the title suggests, it is about virtue. The central thesis is that virtue is a matter of what we care about rather than a matter of what we believe, with the major corollary that this is the basis on which we should pass moral judgment.