Towards Justice and Virtue: A Constructive Account of Practical Reasoning

Towards Justice and Virtue challenges the rivalry between those who advocate only abstract, universal principles of justice and those who commend only the particularities of virtuous lives. Onora O'Neill traces this impasse to defects in underlying conceptions of reasoning about action. She proposes and vindicates an alternative, more modest, account of ethical reasoning, a reasoned way of answering the question "who counts?", and constructs a linked account of the principles that are basic for moving toward just institutions and virtuous lives.