David Riesbeck

Aristotle opens his much‐anticipated treatment of general justice with a focused discussion of whether general justice is the same as virtue. Competing answers to this question have been offered on Aristotle's behalf, and different parts of EN V.1–2 appear to support alternative views. This paper offers an account of the relationship between general justice and virtue—and an explanation of Aristotle's puzzling claim that justice and virtue are “the same but different in being”—by appealing to his distinction between general justice as a state (ἕξις) and general justice as an exercise (χρῆσις). General justice and virtue are the same state. However, justice as an exercise and virtue as an exercise stand in a part–whole relationship. This account resolves Broadie and Rowe's charge that Aristotle has no coherent conception of the relationship between particular justice and character virtue. It also has implications for understanding whether justice is always another's good, whether a just ruler is necessarily virtuous, and the cultivation of justice and virtue.

Moorean arguments are a popular and powerful way to engage highly revisionary philosophical views, such as nihilism about motion, time, truth, consciousness, causation, and various kinds of skepticism (e.g., external world, other minds, inductive, global). They take, as a premise, a highly plausible first-order claim (e.g., cars move, I ate breakfast before lunch, it’s true that some fish have gills) and conclude from it the falsity of the highly revisionary philosophical thesis. Moorean arguments can be used against nihilists in ethics (error theorists), too. Recently, error theorists have recognized Moorean arguments as a powerful challenge and have tried to meet it. They’ve argued that moral Moorean premises seem highly credible to us, but aren’t, by offering various debunking explanations. These explanations all appeal to higher-order evidence—evidence of error in our reasoning. I argue that drawing attention to higher-order evidence is a welcome contribution from error theorists, but that the higher-order evidence actually counts further against error theoretic arguments—including their debunking explanations—and further in favor of Moorean arguments and the commonsense views they support. Along the way I answer a few prominent objections to Moorean arguments: that they are objectionably question-begging, rely on categorizing some facts as “Moorean Facts”, and that reports of one’s credence in a proposition bears no interesting relation to that proposition’s credibility.