Virtue and Practical Deliberation

Tiberius, Valerie. "Virtue and Practical Deliberation," Philosophical Studies, Volume 111, No. 2, November 2002, pp. 147-72.

 The question of how to reason well is an important normative question, one which ultimately motivates some of our interest in the more abstract topic of the principles of practical reason. It is this normative question that I propose to address by arguing that given the goal of an important kind of deliberation, we will deliberate better if we develop certain virtues. I give an account of the virtue of stability and I argue that stability makes reasoners (of a certain sort) reason better. Further, I suggest at the end of the paper that an account of virtues that conduce to good reasoning might go a long way toward answering some of the traditional questions about the principles of practical reason.