A genuinely agent-based theory must treat the normative properties of motivations and dispositions as irreducible — not derivable from eudaimonia, states of affairs, or any other more fundamental normative ground.
(What the statement says agent-based theory rejects as the basis for ethics)
The basic foundation or source from which we derive what is right, wrong, good, or bad.
Normative properties(in ethics)
Qualities that tell us what we should do or what makes something good or bad—basically, the evaluative aspects of something rather than just describing how it is.
eudaimonia(Aristotle's ethical theory; the broadest sense of the good life)
Often translated as 'happiness'; for Aristotle, consists in being a virtuous person over a complete life, requiring both virtuous qualities/dispositions and acting on them
irreducible(Personalist anthropology; distinguishes personhood from mere biological individuality)
That which is unique and unrepeatable in each human being, by virtue of which a person is not merely an individual of a species but a personal subject.
states of affairs(Stumpf's terminology in his contribution to logic)
However, there could also be less ambitious agent-based approaches to virtue ethics (see Slote 1997). At the very least, an agent-based approach must be committed to explaining what one should do by reference to the motivational and dispositional states of agents. But this is not yet a sufficient condition for counting as an agent-based approach, since the same condition will be met by every virtue ethical account. For a theory to count as an agent-based form of virtue ethics it must also be the