Abstract

This thesis aims at suggesting a possible way for virtue ethics to explain moral motivation. If this attempt is successful, it will turn out that in this respect virtue ethics, or a certain version of it, is better than other types of ethical theories. ;After showing that various theories about moral motivation, or the rationality of morality, are far from satisfactory, I proceed, by discussing and defending virtue ethics, to sketch a new framework of understanding and solving the problem of moral motivation. ;Virtue ethics was popular in ancient Greece and China, but until quite recently it had been ignored mainly because it was, and still is, perceived to be conceptually obscure and metaphysically incongruous with contemporary science. Against this perception I argue that virtue ethics can be naturalized via the ideal observer theory , and that virtues can be best understood as character traits that ideal observers would admire or desire. ;One consequence of this is the disappearance of the "unscientific" metaphysical underpinnings that make many people balk at taking virtue ethics seriously. A more important consequence is that in the naturalized virtue ethics being virtuous is part of one's well-being, whatever theory of individual welfare we adopt, and so Sidgwick's "profoundest question" in ethics is no longer difficult to answer from the viewpoint of virtue ethics