Conclusion

Summary

This book represents ethics as concerned not just with what we should do or even with that conceived as done for the kinds of reasons that, morally, befit what we should do. Ethics concerns our overall conduct. The ethical theory presented here stresses the three major dimensions of conduct: its matter – its act-type – the agent’s motivation for acting, and the manner in which the agent does the thing in question. This theory has the important implication that moral obligation encompasses adverbial obligations, particularly those regarding the salient manners of what we do. The adverbial dimension of ethics deserves more explication than it has received, and this book is intended in part as a contribution to remedying that imbalance. The motivational dimension of moral conduct is also important, and it cannot be reduced to matters of obligation – by treating actions for reasons as act-types that are objects of obligation – nor can manners of action be fruitfully represented as act-types. Acting for a reason is not a manner of action but a compound phenomenon entailing both an action and an explanatory basis of it, and actions so conceived admit of indefinitely many manners of performance.