ABSTRACT
The virtue of reciprocity generates obligations that have an important bearing on what social practices and institutions can be justified. The virtue theory must concern itself with social structure. The empirical hypotheses necessary for connecting virtue theory to questions about social structure. This chapter examines the connections between behavior and dispositions are empirical matters, subject to significant individual variations. Furthermore, moral theory in general has a complex connection to social institutions. On the one hand, its finality requires social structure to conform. The rules of morally justifiable institutions must themselves be justifiable. On the other hand, theory justifies arrangements that shelter people from explicit moral concerns, and some evidently good institutions have at least a few rules that are, in the final analysis, arbitrary or inefficient or objectionable in some way. Some obvious examples of this complexity are escapist entertainments, games, sports, rituals, and all the social settings that license us to drop the effort to be fully moral.
