1. Michael SloteMorals from Motives, Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 142.
2. Slote (2001), p. 4.
3. Slote (2001), p. 5.
4. Slote is not the only person who maintains that virtuous motives have intrinsic worth. InVirtues of the Mind(Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 203–208) Linda Zagzebski defends the view that the intellectually virtuous motive of love of knowledge counts as intrinsically and independently good.
5. The fact that agent-based virtue ethics regards the goodness of motives as fundamental does not entail that the virtuous person is only concerned with her own motives, and is thus isolated from the external world. Slote is explicit that the virtuous agent must take the external world into account if they are to have virtuous motives: in order for someone to be genuinely benevolent, they must make the effort to discover who is in need, and how they can be cared for. The benevolent person will thus be engaged with morally relevant features of the world. (SeeMorals from Motives, pp. 15–18.) Nevertheless, the agent-based approach maintains that it is the fact that actions stem from benevolent motives, and not the fact of some external normative relation, which matters to a determination of the rightness of the action.