| What role does ethical theory play in everyday deliberation? On the ideal view, agents are taken to have an overriding commitment to a theory that dictates the obligatory, permissible, and forbidden actions in every conceivable situation. I argue that the ideal view imposes undesirable psychological burdens, whereas a non-ideal view---on which agents act according to the norms of their local practices and appeal to theory only when those norms prove insufficient to resolve particular problems---does not. Inspired by J. S. Mill, I develop one non-ideal theory for practices of regret, toleration, punishment, and partiality. |
