Unprincipled Virtue

In Unprincipled Virtue, Nomy Arpaly argues that the conventional picture of rationality used by most philosophers and psychologists is fundamentally false and has little to do with how real human beings actually behave. Both common sense observations and psychology indicate that people act rationally without deliberation, and also act irrationally with deliberation. By questioning the notion that our own minds (and motivations) are comprehensible to us, and therefore much of the work currently being done by action theorists and ethicists, Arpaly attempts to develop a more realistic conception of moral agency. This provocative monograph will appeal to philosophers interested in ethics, rationality, action theory, and moral responsibility.