Abstract

Both moral practice and moral theory need a sense of proportion. If it matters whether people have virtues or vices, we are justified in praising virtues and the actions that proceed from them, and justified in criticizing, blaming, and condemning vices and vicious actions. Moral judgment is connected with judgments about responsibility and blameworthiness, because the positive and negative sanctions that belong to morality are serious, and we do not want to apply them to people who do not deserve them. We suppose that acceptance of morality is something that we are entitled to demand (under the appropriate conditions) of other people. These features of moral requirements also encourage us to limit the scope of morality. We do not want to confuse moral judgments with judgments about how we would like people to behave, or what makes us comfortable or uncomfortable, or what we regard as good or bad manners.