Abstract

ABSTRACT Pettigrove advances a persuasive case against the proportionality principle. In my view, the moral respect that his modus operandi account of virtue affords to each person’s ‘characteristic way of being’ is also to be applauded. While various philosophers have come to believe in the proportionality principle, it is something that presupposes a monistic account of value. Moreover, it is readily arguable that the kind of abstraction that this involves provides nothing more than an illusion of understanding, and that any supposed insights associated with it have no genuine or practical application. While Pettigrove presents the modus operandi account of virtue as something that competes with consequentialist accounts of virtue, his discussion of consequentialist considerations is both minimal and equivocal. With this in mind, I seek to challenge Pettigrove’s apparent suggestion that the goodness of virtue is always ‘fundamental’.