Non-Ideal Practices

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.