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 response to radically revisionary philosophical views such as nihilism about motion, time, truth, consciousness, causation, and various kinds of skepticism (e.g., global, external world, other minds, and inductive). They begin with a highly plausible first-order claim—cars move, I ate breakfast before lunch, it’s true that some fish have gills—and conclude that the revisionary thesis is false. The same strategy can be used against nihilism in ethics (error theory). Error theorists have recently recognized Moorean arguments as a serious challenge. Their response is to concede that moral Moorean premises seem highly credible to us while denying that they really are. They do this by offering various debunking explanations for our moral beliefs that appeal to higher-order evidence—evidence that our reasoning has gone wrong. I argue that error theorists are right to emphasize higher-order evidence but wrong about where it leads. Properly assessed, this evidence further undermines arguments for error theory, including its debunking arguments, while strengthening Moorean arguments and the commonsense moral views they support. Along the way, I answer several classic objections to Moorean arguments: that they're objectionably question-begging, depend on the dubious category of “Moorean fact,” and that a person’s credence in a proposition bears no interesting relation to its credibility.