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.This is a satisfactorily unimpressive thought.Yet the connection betweensimple rationality of this kind and goodness tends to be obscured by conventionalaltruistic expectations.Rosalind Hursthouse s chosen example of acting wellinvolves giving someone a present (1999: 68 9).That is what gets the tick ofapproval as she puts it.It is however completely misleading in any virtue ethicsworthy of the name to cling to such virtuous examples.We should be givingthe tick of approval to the opening of a can of beans.And if we must continueto talk of moral reasons , then in order to make one s supper must be allowed tocount.wThe fact that ordinary human actions so often count as good actions simplyqua successful is quite striking when we think that an action, even a successfulaction, can be bad in many different ways.It can of course be penny wise andpound foolish.But more than that, it can be an action of a bad kind, or somecircumstance can make it bad, or it can be done for a bad motive, or it canv That temperance requires us not irrationally to miss out is appreciated by Michael Slote,discussing the doctrine of the mean (Slote 1997:184).Aristotle seems not to realize the extentto which people can be unreasonably buttoned-up, perhaps because he thinks that not enjoyingbodily pleasures sufficiently must be a consequence of insensitivity, a rare condition, rather thanof profitless ascetic teaching which might be quite common: NE 1119a.Chastity is a virtue alliedto temperance.And once again, it need not be thought of as exclusively nay-saying. An act ofintercourse occurring as part of married life is an exercise of the virtue of chastity unless somethingprevents it from being so, writes Elizabeth Anscombe (1981: 89).w The notion of supererogation can be misleading here.For it suggests that an action good-to-do-but-not-bad-to-omit cannot be something merely sensible, but must instead be a virtuousaction in the degenerate everyday sense, like giving a present.But perhaps this notion is more athome in what Anscombe called a law conception of ethics , with its distinction between counselsand commands. 26 Christopher Miles Coopebe thought bad by the agent.If anything like this is correct, one might beginto wonder how one could possibly act well save in the rarest circumstance.Butthen, so many people and indeed organisms generally are pretty healthy dayto day, and yet one only counts as healthy if one simultaneously satisfies severalcriteria.xIt might be thought that merely picking up an umbrella when it looks like rainwould not have any moral worth save perhaps in quite peculiar circumstances,where one has to overcome one s umbrellophobia.Michael Slote for exampleremarks that although it may be smarter or wiser or more prudent to provideoneself with a better lunch or take pills to relieve one s headache,. morallybetter is not a phrase that naturally comes to mind in connection with suchactions (1997: 185).But perhaps all this shows that we should jettison the ideaof a peculiarly moral sort of worth or indeed of something called a moralpoint of view.yLet us return to the question of the force of ought and must, the force let ussay of agreeing, after deliberating what to do, that one ought to or must do suchand such.It has always been an indispensable and salutary part of good-senseethics to find justice a problematic virtue in this regard, and here, of course, it isthe Republic rather than the Nicomachean Ethics which has been a central text.Justice often stands in the way of the projects we would naturally wish to pursue,and would therefore seem to be a self-defeating quality of character, like timidityor a burdensome obsession, rather than something we need.This problem is oneof the glories of good-sense ethics.It might seem odd to pick out a problem andcall it a glory, but some problems just are fruitful.It is the irritating grain ofsand that creates the pearl.Of course, with the mesmeric ought at our disposalthis intellectual difficulty about justice would not have arisen: or rather, what isimportant about it would have been covered over.One might of course believe that it is important never to act unjustly, withoutbeing able to say why it is important.Presumably Glaucon and Adeimantus werein this position
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