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Despite the differences between Michael Slote and Iris Murdoch—and between them and the book's Neo-Confucian sources—Slote and Murdoch make excellent conversation partners on the subject of harmony, offering important insights and clarifications, while at the same time they are rewarded with ideas from the Confucian tradition that complement or improve their own views. The key points of dialogue include the following: (1) Drawing on Slote, Confucians can distinguish between particularist and aggregative caring, which solves a long-standing problem about caring for strangers. (2) Drawing on the Confucians, Slote can better-ground his idea of “balanced caring” by recognizing the reverence we should have for what the Neo-Confucians call universal coherence. (3) After a few qualifications, Murdoch can help us (and Slote) to see how reverence for universal coherence can indeed play needed justificatory and motivational roles, but (4) Murdoch's appeal to a transcendent notion of Good needs either serious modification or rejection. Finally, (5) both Slote and Murdoch can learn from the Neo-Confucians about the proper ways in which we should value ourselves.

In his recent book Morals from Motives, Michael Slote defends what he calls “agent-based virtue ethics”. This view consists of two theses: one about the nature of rightness and one about the nature of virtuousness. The thesis about rightness is that a right action is right solely on account of the virtuous motivations that produced it. The thesis about virtuousness is that, on the one hand, actions become virtuous only on account of the virtuousness expressed by the agent in doing the action, and on the other that the virtuousness of an agent and an agent's motives is a “fundamental” notion and not grounded in anything else. Although most critiques of Slote's view have focused on his thesis about rightness, this chapter focuses instead on Slote's thesis about virtuousness. In particular, it rejects Slote's view that deliberation and phronesis are redundant if one really is virtuous, and argues instead that virtuous persons need to deliberate so as to find virtuous actions. The chapter also argues that making the virtuousness of agents fundamental in Slote's sense raises several perilous problems for agent-based virtue ethics. Phronesis is necessary for virtue on the grounds that virtuous persons are so on account of their appropriate responsiveness to reasons to act virtuously.

The deontic relevance of motives in virtue ethics is examined. Various types of virtue ethics are distinguished. Only some of them endorse the usage of the deontic concepts of obligation, wrongness, and permissibility. Hursthouse's neo‐Aristotelian theory is a type of virtue ethics that utilizes deontic concepts, but it yields a completely objective conception of deontic status. That is, motives never make a difference to the deontic status of an action. This is problematic. Michael Slote's non‐Aristotelian theory is examined next. In his theory a motive like malice is strongly wrong‐making: any action from malice is wrong. An example of a prosecutor acting from malice is considered. Slote's position that such a person necessarily acts wrongly is refuted. Further objections to his position are presented. Slote's recent position aligns him with Hursthouse. Virtue ethics oscillates between asserting that motives are never relevant deontically and asserting that some motives are strongly wrong‐making.

Although Slote and Hursthouse differ, as virtue theorists, in that the former is not a consequentialist while the latter is, they are both grand theorists. Jackson introduces religious commitments into the discussion. The three together make it clearer than before that theories in ethics are surprisingly varied.

In this chapter various philosophers are cited (e.g., Alan Gewirth, Alan Donagan, Richard Boyd, Michael Slote) to help make the case that there is not much agreement in ethics concerning the correct procedures to be used for dealing with whatever issues one faces. Some of the same philosophers are cited to make out a similar case for how a theory is to be justified. Derek Parfit’s thesis that there is more agreement than is argued for in this work is also discussed