There is also the question of how such an identification can support judgments of intrinsic rightness and wrongness.
Yet the suggestion that we see the characters in opera as composers of what they sing has an intuitive feel of rightness about it.
It is about the internal structure of goodness, not about the relation between rightness and goodness.
Utilitarians try to distinguish between the rightness of the act and the goodness of the agent, taking ethics to be concerned primarily with the former.
Let us suppose, suppressing doubts, that this sort of action driven by the rational apprehension of rightness is achievable.
For in this case, rightness is no particular moral virtue but rather the master virtue of acting morally, all things considered.
According to anti-reductionist consequentialism, action optimality and rightness are distinct properties, and a thing has the latter because it has the former.
And if the morality of right- and wrongdoing does not exhaust morality, the claim that rightness is law's first virtue is a truism.