This chapter introduces the book's basic account of virtue and vice. This account combines two elements: (1) a recursive characterization of goodness and evil, which makes morally appropriate attitudes to other goods and evils intrinsically good and morally inappropriate attitudes evil, and (2) a definition of virtue and vice that equates them with these good and evil attitudes. The chapter discusses how this recursive account allows consequentialist moral views to treat virtue as an intrinsic good; it also traces the account's history of philosophers such as Aristotle, Sidgwick, Brentano,...

This chapter introduces the book's basic account of virtue and vice. This account combines two elements: (1) a recursive characterization of goodness and evil, which makes morally appropriate attitudes to other goods and evils intrinsically good and morally inappropriate attitudes evil, and (2) a definition of virtue and vice that equates them with these good and evil attitudes. The chapter discusses how this recursive account allows consequentialist moral views to treat virtue as an intrinsic good; it also traces the account's history of philosophers such as Aristotle, Sidgwick, Brentano, Rashdall, Moore, Ross, Chisholm, and Nozick.