Towards Justice and Virtue: A Constructive Account of Practical Reasoning

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 a modest account of ethical reasoning and a reasoned way of answering the question ‘who counts?’, then uses these to construct linked accounts of principles by which we can move towards just institutions and virtuous lives.

• Distinguished author • Will appeal to readers in political theory as well as philosophy • Subject-matter also of interest to law departments and centres for human rights

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.

‘ … this book will take its place both as a mjaor statement of one version of a broadly Kantian approach to moral philosophy and as a standard work in its own right’.

– Jonathan Wolff, Times Literary Supplement