ABSTRACT
To describe an agent ethically is to ascribe to him some virtue or vice; to describe an action ethically is to interpret it as somehow virtuous or vicious. Such description is higher-level in that mastery of the concepts it deploys involves some ability to cite reasons explaining when and why they apply. Thus a grasp of courage or justice is manifested by an ability to ground ascriptions by pertinent observations of the kind 'He is brave, for he is undeflected by danger', or That is just, for it is the keeping of a promise'. One might then expect to be able to analyze any ethical concept in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions that are not only lower-level but neutral, in the sense that attitudes play no part in detecting whether or not they obtain. For it may be supposed that the object of an attitude is only identifiable if it can be identified independently of the attitude, and that an ethical description is only determinate in content if it is equivalent to a description that is neutral. Otherwise, perhaps, we incur an unacceptable degree of indeterminacy (as in the early maps that shrouded most of the world in cloud). Explaining what one admires may require a language that is not the language of admiration, and a virtuous act may have to be of a virtuous kind that can be demarcated otherwise than as virtuous. Apparently, therefore, determinacy may demand a reduction of ethical to neutral concepts.
