On the Relationship between the Aretaic and the Deontic

Jarek Gryz
York University
4700 Keele St
Toronto M3J1P3
Canada

Abstract

There are two fundamental classes of terms traditionally distinguished within moral vocabulary: the deontic and the
aretaic. The terms from the first set serve in the prescriptive function of a moral code. The second class contains terms
used for a moral evaluation of an action. The problem of the relationship between the aretaic and the deontic has not
been discussed often by philosophers. It is, however, a very important and interesting issue: any normative ethical
theory which takes as basic one set of these concepts should justify such choice and establish, at least implicitly, the
logical relation with the other set. This paper is organized around the criticism of Stocker's ‘sameness thesis’ (Stocker,
1973)1: the claim that 'good' or 'right' mean the same thing. It is first presented in Stocker's own formulation and
criticized as implausible in that form. Some friendly modifications to his idea are suggested and then further discussed
with the skeptical conclusion: no matter how close we bring deontic and aretaic notions, the gap between them will
remain and any attempt to define or even explain one set of terms in another will leave something behind.

Keywords: ethics, virtue ethics, moral theory

I Introduction

There are two fundamental classes of terms traditionally distinguished within moral vocabulary: the deontic and the
aretaic. The terms from the first set serve in the prescriptive function of a moral code. This function consists in
providing answers to questions like: What am I (morally) required to do? Answers to such questions usually have the
grammatical form of an imperative and are called “prescriptions”, “moral norms”, “rules”, “precepts”, or “commands”.
They are expressed by means of such terms as: 'right', 'obligation', 'duty', etc. The second class contains terms used for a
moral evaluation of an action (or an actor). Such moral evaluation is not primarily intended to direct actions, although it
seems capable of performing this function as well. Terms used for evaluations include: 'good', 'bad', 'blameworthy',
'praiseworthy', 'virtuous', etc. The 'right' is the key notion of the normative part of a moral theory; the 'good' is used to
express moral judgments.

The problem of the relationship between the aretaic and the deontic has not been discussed often by philosophers and
when it has, it led to very different conclusions. Von Wright, for example, warns not to confuse or mix value-terms with
normative terms and suggests: “It may be argued, on the contrary, that moral goodness is ‘over and above’ obligation
and that no man is or does good merely on the ground that he does not neglect his moral duties”. 2 Hare, on the other
hand, describes a model in which ‘right’ and ‘good’ are inter-definable: sentences with one term can be equivalently
replaced with sentences containing another term3. The problem of the relationship between the aretaic and the deontic is
a very important issue: any normative ethical theory which takes as basic one set of these concepts should justify such
choice and establish, at least implicitly, the logical relation with another set. The choice of either 'good' or 'right' as a
fundamental ethical concept indicates, according to Sidgwick 4, two very different ways of understanding the nature of
ethics: attractive or imperative one. The first one makes an agent and his motives the focus of moral considerations, the
second one ties moral value with obligations (or their satisfaction) ignoring agent's motives and desires.

1
Stocker 1973.
2
Von Wright 1963, p.155.
3
Hare 1952, ch.12.
4 Sidgwick 1907, ch. 1.9.
Faced with these two fundamental approaches to the construction of an ethical system, one would like to know what
their relationship with common-sense morality is; in particular, how well they account for our intuitions about
conceptual links within moral vocabulary. Is the relation between rightness and goodness properly captured by moral
theories? Can the aretaic and the deontic description of a given act be ever equivalent? More often than not, the
connections between the two sets are simply a result of the way the key concepts in each set are defined, rather than a
conscious decision on the part of a designer of an ethical theory. One of the intuitions we seem to have about the
relationship between the aretaic and the deontic is that “right” and “good” refer to different things and so have different
meanings. It may be surprising then, that Michael Stocker5 rejects this commonsense belief and proposes, what he calls,
the 'sameness thesis'.

The rest of this paper is organized around the criticism of Stocker's thesis. It is first presented in Stocker's own
formulation and criticized as implausible in that form. Some friendly modifications to his idea are suggested and then
further discussed. In particular, we propose that ‘good’ be interpreted through its aretaic connotations. This is a tradition
defended, for example, by Hare: “when we are speaking of a good act we are speaking of the act as indicative of the
goodness of the man”.6 We admit readily that Stocker’s paper is something of a strawman; it allows us to spell out
arguments for and against the ‘sameness thesis’ understood under our somewhat liberal interpretation. We conclude the
discussion with a skeptical conclusion: no matter how close we bring deontic and aretaic notions, the gap between them
will remain and any attempt to define or even explain one set of terms in another will leave something behind.

II Stocker's Sameness Thesis

Most of Stocker's paper contains a review of axiology, that is, the claim that 'rightness depends solely on goodness', a
criticism of that claim offered by W. D. Ross, and a possible defense of the axiological position. The conclusion
Stocker derives from that discussion is that arguments of both sides 7 are not and cannot be conclusive. Indeed, he
rejects all traditional axiological and anti-axiological theories because both sides, according to him, make the same
mistaken assumption, that rightness and goodness are two different things.

Before we get into a description of Stocker's position, a few technical remarks are necessary. First, by concentrating our
discussion on the relationship between the deontic pair right/wrong and the aretaic pair good/bad, we do not abandon
the initial idea of trying to clarify the connection between the two sets of moral concepts: the deontic and the aretaic. To
complete this task one would have to explain, respectively, aretaic concepts in terms of 'good' and 'bad' and all deontic
ones in terms of 'right' and 'wrong'. This will not be attempted here, however, because it does not seem to be directly
related to our main topic 8. For simplicity, we will assume the intra-relations within each set as given. This is equivalent
to the claim that once a relation between just one deontic-aretaic pair of terms is established, all relations between all
deontic-aretaic pairs can be easily derived from that. This assumption will make the discussion easier by allowing us to
switch freely from talking about good/right relation to, say, admirable/right relation.

Second, we will adopt in the later discussion the standard philosophical interpretation of 'right' in which it means
'permissible' or 'acceptable'. It is not, however, the sense that Stocker has in mind when he is talking about rightness
and goodness being the same thing. His discussion of Ross clearly suggests that he understands rightness as
obligatoriness.9 This deviation from the standard use should not, however, cause any confusion: all arguments for and
against the identification of rightness (in Stocker's sense) and goodness can be re-written as arguments for and against
the identification of rightness (in standard sense) and not-badness. For simplicity, we will adopt, for now, Stocker's
understanding of 'right'.

Third, it is commonly assumed that rightness and goodness refer to different ontological categories: the former to acts,
the latter to situations or states of affairs. This is not to say that they cannot cross these boundaries; there is nothing
incorrect in saying "it is wrong that there is so much hatred" or "causing someone pain is bad". The point is that the
primary or original use of these terms implies different domains in which they operate. Since this difference is widely

5 Stocker 1973.
6
Hare 1952, p. 186.
7 The exact opposite of the axiological theory would be, for example, Ewing's position that goodness depends on rightness.
8 This will be seen from the following discussion. Also, establishing relations within each set seems to an easier thing to do so between the terms from the two sets.
9 Ross 1967, p.7: "The right act is the one that which if I were omniscient I should see to be my duty".
accepted even among the foes of deontic/aretaic distinction, we will adopt it initially and later point out problems it
raises for Stocker's thesis.

The sameness thesis (which we will abbreviate as ST) can be stated in at least two different forms. The first one,
explicitly defended by Stocker, is a stronger one. It says:

(I): “all and only those considerations relevant and decisive for determining whether an act is right are relevant for
determining whether it is associated with goodness, and that these considerations are no more in the camp of goodness
than of rightness. (... ) so far as moral considerations are concerned they [the rightness and the goodness] are the
same”.10

Thus, Stocker claims not only that the rightness and the goodness cannot be separated in moral evaluations, but also
that we assess the act (its rightness) and the resulting situation (its goodness) in exactly the same way. The weaker
thesis says:

(II): The goodness and the rightness are tied together, that is, the state of affairs is good iff the act that brought it about
is right.

The connection between the goodness and the rightness in (II) are clearly of the conceptual type. They are not
necessarily epistemic (a stockerian 11 need not hold that if we believe something to be right, our reason must be
that we believe it to be associated in various ways with goodness and vice versa) or even less so nomological (it is not
clear if one can talk about any laws in the domain of morality in the first place).

The first interpretative problem with ST has to do with the entities to which the terms 'good' and 'right': 'good' is
typically applied to situations, whereas 'right' to actions (or acts). Several statements by Stocker suggest that he adheres
to that use, for example: "Any difference between them [rightness and goodness] reflects or is based upon a difference
in the ontological nature of what is assessed: for rightness, an act; for goodness, a state of affairs or situation, or a part
thereof, but not an act." Hence, the sameness thesis can be read as meaning that there is a conceptual link between an
act and a situation, that is, an act is right iff the appropriate situation is good. The question is: what is the ‘appropriate
situation’? At some points Stocker gives a clear answer to that question, but by doing this renders his position
untenable. At some other points, he avoids the immediate criticism by suggesting a different, rather obscure answer.

The clear answer is the following: a good situation is related to a right act as its consequence 12. Consider an act of
hurting a baby. The sameness thesis in this version would say that all and only those considerations relevant and
decisive for determining that the act of hurting a baby is wrong are relevant and decisive for determining that its
consequence, the situation of the baby being in pain, is bad. The theory applied to this example works fine, but it will
obviously break down on dozens of others. For example, killing an innocent person to save five other lives is wrong,
even though the consequence may well be considered good. The problem, of course, is the conseqentialist assumption
that an act inherits moral evaluation from its consequence 13. Thus Stocker's idea becomes a subject to all traditional
arguments against consequentialism.

This interpretation of ST is so implausible that one is inclined to think that it could not be what Stocker really had in
mind. Indeed, there are a few passing remarks that suggest a different reading of the thesis 14; the problem is, that they
are very obscure. It is clear, that to avoid the anti-consequentialist type of criticism we need to redraw the
10
Stocker p.93
11
We call a stockerian someone who denies that there is a fundamental distinction between deontic and aretaic terms.
12
For example: “(…) good things can properly be regarded simply as right to bring about.” (Stocker, p. 93), “The
difference between rightness and goodness here clearly depends solely on the standpoint from which the general
welfare is regarded: from the standpoint of bringing it about, it is right; from that of an existent or part of a situation, it
is good” (ibid.) [undln mine -J .G.]
13
Of course, the sameness thesis is stronger than that: not only is the act right when the associated situation is good, but
vice versa too.
14
"The sameness thesis maintains only that insofar as there is a difference in rightness between such acts or any other
acts, there is the 'same difference' of goodness between situations involving these acts, and conversely" (Stocker, p. 94)
" (…) an act involving situation is a situation at least partially constituted by an act." (Stocker, p.93)
designation of the 'aretaically' evaluated situation associated with a given act. It is not enough to say, however, that
the situation in question is 'at least partially constituted by an act' (p. 93). If what is meant here is not an outright
identification of an act and a situation, then one might wonder what else, besides an act, counts as part of an associated
situation. There are several candidates to be considered here: the agent's intentions, motives or character; consequences
of the act; the pattern the act forms with other acts, or any combination of the above. Then, one needs to know what
weight each of those components should be assigned, that is, how much attention we are supposed to pay to, say, the
agent's character when we assess morally the situation. Any decision about that would be theory dependent, thus
depriving Stocker's thesis of an aura of generality and theoretical neutrality.

The crucial point, however, is that inclusion of anything beyond an act in the situation is either redundant, or makes the
ST false. Let us take, for example, the situation to consist of an act and its consequences. And let us assume further that
we have a case of a presumably right act with disastrous consequences (for example, by keeping a promise we enable –
unknowingly - a madman to kill dozens of people). It seems that ST is false in this case: when we evaluate the act we
do not necessarily have to take into account its consequences (unless we are utilitarians) and so can hold that the act
was right. We are bound, however, to consider the consequences of the act when we assess the situation, simply,
because they are part of it. Hence, the considerations relevant for determining whether the act is right are different from
those relevant for determining whether its associated situation is good. The same sort of argument can be built for any
particular design of a situation referred to in ST.

One can insist, of course, that when assessing both the act and the situation, we do, in fact, take into account the same
factors. In the above example that would amount to making the act wrong. But this approach is not only
counterintuitive from the common sense point of view; it also undermines the very idea of extending the scope of a
situation beyond an act itself. If in the final analysis we do take into account all considerations when assessing an act,
then there is no intuitive reason to refuse to do the same when assessing a situation. Hence making those considerations
a part of the situation seems plainly redundant.

The conclusion of this discussion is a conjecture rather than a solution: for ST to be an interesting and plausible idea, it
should state that an act and a situation evaluated respectively as right and good (or wrong and bad) are one and the
same thing. By saying this, we can claim either that we reject the standard assumption that only acts can be described
as right or wrong, whereas situations or states of affairs are described as good or bad, or that it is much more difficult -
perhaps even impossible - to make a clear distinction between states of affairs and actions in moral vocabulary 15. It
would require an extensive argument to convincingly defend this claim; to show that it is plausible a few intuitive
remarks - in support of the first interpretation of the thesis should suffice.

In his review of differences between states of affairs and events (of which actions are presumably a species) Parsons 16
stresses the two most important ones. First, events culminate and so take time, whereas states of affairs hold, hence last
through time. The test to distinguish between them would be to see which of the two questions it would make sense to
ask about a given eventuality17: 'How long did it take [the subject] to ... ' (about an event) or 'How long did [or was] ... '
(about a state). Secondly, events are done (completed); states are not done. Thus, only sentences about events can
contain constructions called 'pseudo-clefts', for example, “What John did was win the race”.

Now, none of these criteria seem to work well for morally evaluated eventualities. There are actions, morally assessed
as wrong or right, which last through time without necessarily culminating at one point (an example would be an act of
continuously causing someone pain over a long period of time). On the other hand, when the action does culminate, the
result seems to be an important part of what is evaluated as right or wrong. Ross's theory is an example of an extreme
approach here: success or failure is the only and sufficient test of the performance of duty (and so of the action being
right or wrong). For example, if we promised to return a book to a friend and the train which carried the book derailed,
we did not fulfill our duty. 18 Ross notwithstanding, we can probably safely claim that what we consider to be right or
wrong is an act as having certain consequences. On the other hand, we never (morally) evaluate a situation as good or

15
The latter implies that the entities described as good\bad and right\wrong are paradigm cases of states of affairs and
actions, and that there are no independent grounds for distinguishing between those entities. This is probably far
fetched.
16
Parsons 1990, pp. 34-39.
17
I follow Parsons in referring to processes, states, and events as 'eventualities'.
18
Ross 1967, pp.43-45
bad in isolation. The way the situation was brought about, that is an act, is a part of the thing we refer to. That is why
Stocker suggests at a certain point that what is good or bad is an act involving a situation not just a situation itself.

Now, the natural question arises: is an act involving a situation a different entity than an act as having certain
consequences? There seems to be no reason to answer this question in the negative. It looks as if we are dealing here
with some sort of hybrid entities, something between an event and a state of affairs. And this is probably why we do not
perceive it as a mistake when we say that acts are good or bad (‘causing someone pain is bad’), or about states of affairs
that they are right (‘it is wrong that there is so much hatred’).

Let us review the argument that led us to this conclusion. We started with the Stocker's original ST where a situation
was related to an act as its consequence. We rejected this version of ST as subject to anti-consequentialism arguments.
But then we noticed that any other design of the situation referred to in ST, after it is clearly spelled out (which has not
been done by Stocker), would face similar problems: it will always seem arbitrary. As a way out of this dilemma, we
suggested an ontological solution: we are ready to grant to a stockerian - and find it to be quite a plausible idea that
'good' and 'right’ operate in the same domain of hybrid entities. The next section is a discussion of this new version of
ST19.

As stated above, our motivation for the new ontological commitments was for the most part negative: we simply
wanted to clear the way for the most plausible statement of ST. Hopefully, this modification would be welcome by
stockerians. From now on we will assume that the relation between entities to which 'right' and 'good' refer does not
pose any problem for the theory and so will 'carelessly' talk about right situations and good acts. ST can then be taken
as saying that there may be no significant fundamental distinction between aretaic and deontic notions since aretaic and
deontic judgments are equivalent in force. To give substance to this claim one needs to establish more precise relation
between pairs of notions from the two sets. Slote suggests the following solution20.

First, since right and wrong seem contradictories whereas good and bad contraries, any straightforward connection
between them is impossible. Secondly, 'good' and 'bad' with their application extending far beyond morality are not the
best candidates as basic aretaic equivalents of deontic terms. It seems very intuitive, however, to take deplorability (or
some appropriate degree of) criticizability as the aretaic analogue of (moral) wrongness. Rightness, conceived as
negation of wrongness, that is, as permissibility, may be understood as the aretaic equivalent of non deplorability. With
these identifications in place we can now say that each deontic-aretaic pair plays the same role in moral vocabulary; in
particular, aretaic judgments entail prescriptions with force equal to full-fledged imperatives.

One can think of two arguments against ST. The first one would deny the coextensionality of appropriate terms (which
is a consequence of their equal force) by presenting cases of moral evaluations violating it. The second argument would
attempt to show that the respective notions do differ substantially in meaning, without necessarily failing to apply to the
same cases.

The rest of this paper will roughly follow those lines: first, three examples of acts in which ST is violated will be
presented (good but neither right nor wrong; right but deplorable; wrong but not bad\deplorable), and then a short
diagnosis of these cases will follow.

III Criticism and Diagnosis

(1) There are situations which can be assessed morally as good (or bad) but are neither right nor wrong. For example,
the famous claim by G.E. Moore that a beautiful world is morally better than an ugly one, even if there were no human
beings living in it. One can think of dozens of other cases where a certain state of affairs can be evaluated as good or
bad, but there is no reason for assessing it as right or wrong (since there is no human action involved in bringing it
about). Of course, this argument can be accommodated by a stockerian simply by adding an extra condition, namely
that ST talks only about act-situations with human involvement. He can also say that ST is true in such cases, but
simply takes a counterfactual form, that is, a state of affairs is bad if and only if it would have been wrong to bring it
about.

19
From now on we will understand 'right' as 'permissible'.
20
Slote 92.
(2) For some time now, philosophers have been pointing to the inadequacy of a three-fold classification of moral facts
into obligatory, forbidden and indifferent as a basis of assigning moral value. Urmson 21 drew attention to two of the
types of action that most conspicuously lie outside such a classification: saintly and heroic acts. Both of them fall into
the category of supererogation, something which is good, but not obligatory, to do. Inspired by this fact Chisholm 22
suggested a new classification of moral facts in which actions are evaluated not only with respect to their performance,
but also with respect to their non-performance. Since we have three basic terms for assessing each action: good, bad, or
neutral (indifferent), we end up with nine possible combinations (gg, gn, gb, ng, nn, nb, bg, nb, bb). It is an open
question whether each of these theoretical cases has got practical analogues, that is, whether we can find examples of
real life moral phenomena that would fall into each slot of the classification and cover together its entire spectrum.
What is important for our purposes is the fact that Chisholm's classification suggests a possibility of a counterexample
to ST. Thus, there are acts, which Chisholm calls offenses, that are morally deplorable, yet not forbidden; they are
related to forbidden in the same way in which supererogation is related to the obligatory. Here is Chisholm's original
example:

“(…) suppose A knows concerning B, whom A dislikes, that the loss of B's employment would result in great
tragedy for B and his family; that there is another man, C, who could do B's work but no more satisfactorily than
B does it; and that B's employer, even if he knew the foregoing, would replace B by C if he thought that C were
available. One might plausibly argue that, if A were deliberately to bring the availability of C to the attention of
B's employer, his act would be permissible but at the same time heinous and inhuman.”

An even more extreme case of discrepancy between aretaic and deontic style evaluation is given by Ross 23: someone
can fulfill his duty (that is what 'right' means for Ross) and still end up doing something bad. Of course, this case falls
outside of Chisholm's categories.

(3) The existence of moral dilemmas provides us with another possible counterexample to ST. There are situations of
moral conflict in which one is faced with two (or more) incompatible obligations. At least some of these conflicts are
genuine24, that is, they involve duties that cannot be overridden (so called duties proper or perfect) so there is no
reasonable and proper way out. Now, in these cases we do not have a choice but must say that every available action is
morally wrong. But if someone found himself in such a situation through no fault of his own, are we ready to say that
whatever he does is morally deplorable? Deplorability strongly implies agent-directed criticism; accusation of guilt,
fault, mistake, or carelessness. Yet nothing of this sort is present here.

One can, of course, argue that an action by itself (not necessarily the agent) is deplorable. For example, if the dilemma
involves a choice between lying and breaking a promise, then we would not hesitate to say that both of them are, as
such, deplorable. The point we will try to argue later, however, is that one of the main differences in application of
aretaic versus deontic notions is that only the latter pick out isolated actions for their evaluation. Thus, if the question
concerning our hypothetical agent in the situation of moral dilemma is: 'Was it wrong what he did?', the answer would
be: 'Yes', whereas if the question is: 'Was it deplorable what he did?', the answer is probably: 'No'.

The first main and perhaps trivial difference between rightness and goodness or the aretaic and the deontic that the
above examples seem to indicate is the difference in their justification. Rightness and wrongness are conceptually very
strongly connected with duties, prohibitions, norms in general. If we accept the norm "You ought not to lie" and know
that in given circumstances there is no conflict with other accepted norms, we have sufficient reasons to assess an
action as wrong if the norm in question is violated. The act is right or wrong independently of agent's motives,
knowledge or circumstances he found himself in. When we evaluate the same situation in terms of goodness, however,
we take into account not only the fact whether appropriate norms were fulfilled or violated, but also agent's motives, his
knowledge and reasoning skills, various outside circumstances that could influence his behavior, etc. Of course,
violation or compliance with moral norms remains the most important factor in the assessment of an action. It can be
outweighed, however, by other considerations to the point where deplorability does not coincide with wrongness (as in
(2) and (3)) or even shift the evaluation to the other extreme (a duty-fulfilling, yet bad action, as in Ross's example in
(2) above).

21
J.O.Urmson, "Saints and Heroes", in: Feinberg 1969, pp. 60-73.
22
Chisholm 1963.
23
Ross 1968, p. 309.
24
Some philosophers deny this, e.g. Chisholm 1964, Ladd 1958.
The way we use words 'good/bad' and 'right/wrong' seems to support the above claims. Goodness and badness come
in degrees, hence we have words like 'better' and 'worse'; we lack similar terms for deontically evaluated
actions. The availability of degree terms in the former case seems to indicate the presence of many criteria used in
evaluation; an all-or-nothing choice, implied by the use of 'right' or 'wrong', suggests focusing on only one quantum
quality25. But fine-grainedness is not only a property of particular aretaic terms, the entire aretaic vocabulary is
infinitely richer and allows us to draw much finer distinctions in act-evaluations than the deontic vocabulary. For
example, by saying that something is praiseworthy we imply that it deserves approval or favor: we assess it higher
when we say that it is admirable, since then it should be also respected and honored. The meaning of the word
‘praiseworthy’ can be quite well conveyed by saying, that it is something that ought to be done, or that it is the right (in
Ross's understanding of ‘right’) thing to do: yet expressing the word ‘admiarable’ in deontic vocabulary seems just
impossible.

From what has been said so far one can derive an encouraging conclusion for the advocates of attractive ethics. Sheer
richness and fine-grainedness of aretaic vocabulary seems to be a good reason for believing that all that can be
said in deontic terms can be equally well expressed in aretaic terms. This is not to say, however, that we can
produce a translation manual which would provide us with a general method of expressing deontic notions in
terms of aretaic ones for all possible cases. In particular, it does not seem possible, as we hope to have shown, to
substitute ‘good’ for ‘right’ or ‘deplorable’ for ‘wrong’. The relation between the aretaic and the deontic seems to be
somewhat similar to the relation between the physical and the mental in the mind-body problem. We can claim
that deontic is supervenient on the aretaic without committing ourselves to the idea of complete definitional
reduction. In other words, we may allow for token identity (each particular action can have an aretaic description that
perfectly matches the deontic one) and deny the possibility of type identity (that there is aretaic sentence true of all and
only the actions having some deontic property).

If this analogy is correct then the idea of definitional reduction of the deontic to the aretaic, and in particular, Stocker's
identification of rightness and goodness, is doomed. But we can still pursue a more modest goal. If our task is just to
substitute every particular deontic evaluation with an aretaic one, there are no logical reasons that would make it
impossible (it would not work, of course, in the opposite direction). From that perspective, attractive ethical theories
seem to be much better off than the imperative ones.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chisholm, Roderick, "Supererogation and Offence. A Conceptual Scheme for Ethics", Ratio, Vol. 5, 1963.

Hare, R. M., The Language of Morals, Oxford University Press, 1952.

Johnson, Oliver A., Rightness and Goodness, Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1959.

Ladd, John, The Structure of Moral Code, Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge Mass., 1957.

Levinson, Jerry, "Properties and Related Entities", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 39, 1978.

Parsons, Terence, Events in the Semantics of English, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1990.

Ross, W. David, Foundations of Ethics, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1968.

Ross, W. David, The Right and the Good, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1967.

Sidgwick, Henry, The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed., Macmillan, London 1907.

Stocker, Michael, "Rightness and Goodness: Is There a Difference?", American Phil. Quarterly, Vol. 10, April 1973.

25
A quantum quality is a quality that is only available for possession in a single, fixed amount. This term was
introduced by Jerry Levinson, in: Levinson 1978.
Slote, Michael, From Morality to Virtue, Oxford Univ. Press, New York 1992.

Urmson, J.O., "Saints and Heroes", in: Joel Feinberg, Moral Concepts, Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford 1969, pp. 60-73.

Von Wirght, Georg Henrik, The Varieties of Goodness, Routlage and Kegan Paul, 1963.