 John Hacker-Wright argues that what is needed to replace a “legalistic” concern with moral status (as on modern liberal conceptions of justice) is instead an ethic of virtue with a different conception of the virtue of justice. Instead of a concern for the resolution of claims in something like reciprocal, contractual relations, Hacker-Wright’s conception of the virtue of justice is a matter of sensitivity to “vulnerability of value” in things, animate and otherwise. Thus, the threat of unjust — vicious -- wronging hangs not only over people who are sufficiently cognitively impaired so as not to perceive insults, but also corpses, animals, and even rare and valuable rock formations (p. 463). This counts as a sense of justice in that, on Hacker-Wright’s view it is not merely that we can act wrongly or viciously toward such entities, but (following Midgley 1983) that they can be wronged by us by our doing so. However, while Hacker-Wright claims that on a virtue ethic “The character of the agent is recognized as ineliminable in picking out facts as they figure in our moral deliberation,” this does not strictly speaking seem to be true, as prior to virtue there is value which it is up to the just or virtuous person to respond with sensitivity (Hacker-Wright 2007, pp. 461, 463, 464).