Peter Railton

Traditional virtue-oriented approaches to ethics suppose that acquiring relatively stable character traits, such as courage and compassion, is crucial in addressing the question of how to be. However, recent psychological studies cast doubt on the idea that people develop such traits. In light of this pessimism, the paper raises the question: what is left of virtue theory? It argues that much remains once one shifts from a traditional understanding of virtues to one of cognitive/affective “if…then” dispositions that form a person’s character. The central proposal is to understand such dispositions as “habitudes” – habitual ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that are acquired by example and repetition, and that enable one to competently react to varying situations one confronts. The resulting model of ethical comportment represents a psychologically realistic understanding of virtue. Furthermore, this account fits well with what we learn from the field of positive psychology about subjective well-being, thus helping to vindicate eudaimonism.

It has been the dominant view that probabilistic explanations of particular facts must be inductive in character. I argue here that this view is mistaken, and that the aim of probabilistic explanation is not to demonstrate that the explanandum fact was nomically expectable, but to give an account of the chance mechanism(s) responsible for it. To this end, a deductive-nomological model of probabilistic explanation is developed and defended. Such a model has application only when the probabilities occurring in covering laws can be interpreted as measures of objective chance, expressing the strength of physical propensities. Unlike inductive models of probabilistic explanation, this deductive model stands in no need of troublesome requirements of maximal specificity or epistemic relativization

Statements about a person's good slip into and out of our ordinary discourse about the world with nary a ripple. Such statements are objects of belief and assertion, they obey the rules of logic, and they are often defended by evidence and argument. They even participate in common-sense explanations, as when we say of some person that he has been less subject to wild swings of enthusiasm and disappointment now that, with experience, he has gained a clearer idea of what is good for him. Statements about a person's good present themselves as being about something with respect to which our beliefs can be true or false, warranted or unwarranted. Let us speak of these features as the descriptive side of discourse about a person's good

Although the standard theory and actual practice of cost-benefit analysis are seriously defective, the general idea of making social policy in accord with an aggregative, maximizing, consequentialist criterion is a sensible one. Therefore it is argued, against Bantz, that interpersonal utility comparisons can be meaningful, and, against both Bantz and MacLean, that quantitative overall assessments of expected value provide a presumptively rational basis for social choice. However, it does not follow that introducing cost-benefit tests into the political or legal process would always be optimal: recognizing some quite stringent legal rights against involuntary exposure to pollution or risk may actually promote cost-beneficial results more reliably than cost-benefit tests employed in very imperfect circumstances