This book is a provocative contribution to contemporary ethical theory challenging foundational conceptions of character that date back to Aristotle. John Doris draws on behavioral science, especially social psychology, to argue that we misattribute the causes of behavior to personality traits and other fixed aspects of character rather than to the situational context. More often than not it is the situation not the nature of the personality that really counts. The author elaborates the philosophical consequences of this research (...) for a whole array of ethical theories and shows that, once rid of the misleading conception of motivation, moral psychology can support more robust ethical theories and more humane ethical practices. (shrink)

Paul Katsafanas presents a clear, systematic study of Nietzsche's moral psychology. He analyzes Nietzsche's distinction between conscious and unconscious mental events, explains the nature of a type of motivational state that Nietzsche calls the 'drive', and examines the connection between drives, desires, affects, and values. He explores Nietzsche's account of willing unity of the self, freedom, and the relation of the self to its social and historical context. And he argues that Nietzsche's account enjoys a number of advantages (...) over the currently dominant models of moral psychology--especially those indebted to the work of Aristotle, Hume, and Kant--and considers the ways in which Nietzsche's arguments can reconfigure and improve upon debates in the contemporary literature on moral psychology and philosophy of action. (shrink)

The virtue of honesty has been stunningly neglected in contemporary philosophy, with only two papers appearing in the last 40 years. The first half of this paper is a conceptual exploration of one aspect of the virtue, namely the honest person’s motivational profile. I argue that egoistic motives for telling the truth or not cheating are incompatible with honest motivation. At the same time, there is no one specific motive that is required for a person to be motivated in (...) a virtuously honest way. Instead I advance a pluralistic theory of honest motivation, which allows for motives of caring, fairness, and virtue, among others. The second half of the paper then turns briefly to the empirical literature in psychology and behavioral economics on cheating, to see to what extent honest motives appear to be operative. The upshot is that we have good preliminary evidence for the claim that most people are not virtuously honest. (shrink)

The essays in this collection are concerned with the psychology of moral agency. They focus on moral feelings and moral motivation, and seek to understand the operations and origins of these phenomena as rooted in the natural desires and emotions of human beings. An important feature of the essays, and one that distinguishes the book from most philosophical work in moral psychology, is the attention to the writings of Freud. Many of the essays (...) draw on Freud's ideas about conscience and morality, while several explore the depths and limits of Freud's theories. An underlying theme of the volume is a critique of influential rationalist accounts of moral agency. John Deigh shows that one can subject the principles of morality to rational inquiry without thereby holding that reason alone can originate action. (shrink)

In both content and historical position, the “ Xing Zi Ming Chu ” is of obvious significance for understanding the development of classical Chinese philosophy, particularly Confucian moral psychology. This article aims to clarify one aspect of the text, namely, its account of human motivation. This account can be divided into two parts. The first describes human motivation primarily in passive terms of response to external forces, as emotions arise from our nature when stimulated by things (...) in the world. The second comes from the role of the heart, which takes a more active role in shaping our responses to the world. This article focuses on the role of the heart. At stake is the status of human agency, in particular, the degree to which the heart, through the formation of a stable intention, allows us to go beyond being simply pulled along by external forces. (shrink)

To advance a successful reading of Kant's theory of motivation, his interpreter must have a carefully developed position on the relation between our rational and sensible capacities of mind. Unfortunately, many of Kant's commentators hold an untenably dualistic conception, understanding reason and sensibility to be necessarily conflicting aspects of human nature that saddle Kant with a rigoristic and fundamentally divided moral psychology. Against these interpreters, I argue for a reading that maintains a unified conception, claiming that we (...) must think of reason and sensibility as interdependent capacities, which stand to one another as form to matter. Our sensible nature thus does not stand opposed to reason; its fundamental character is determined by reason's activity. I take Kant's account of moral motivation and the feeling of respect to represent the lynchpin of this unified account. Against interpreters who would emphasize either the intellectual or affective nature of respect, I claim that it should be understood as the formal element of moral sensibility, the result of practical reason determining the capacity to feel and fundamentally transforming its character. To make this argument, I draw on Kant's account of sensibility in the Critique of Pure Reason, claiming that space, time, and respect for the moral law are analogous formal elements of sensibility. (shrink)

This article takes the following two assumptions for granted: first, that gifts influence physicians and, second, that the influences gifts have on physicians may be harmful for patients. These assumptions are common in the applied ethics literature, and they prompt an obvious practical question, namely, what is the best way to mitigate the negative effects? We examine the negative effects of gift giving in depth, considering how the influence occurs, and we assert that the ethical debate surrounding gift-giving practices (...) must be reoriented. Our main claim is that the failure of recent policies addressing gift giving can be traced to a misunderstanding of what psychological mechanisms are most likely to underpin physicians’ biased behavior as a result of interaction with the medical industry. The problem with gift giving is largely not a matter of malicious or consciously self-interested behavior, but of well-intentioned actions on the part of physicians that are nonetheless perniciously infected by the presence of the medical industry. Substantiating this claim will involve elaboration on two points. First, we will retrace the history of policies regarding gift giving between the medical profession and the medical industry and highlight how most policies assume a rationalistic view of moral agency. Reliance on this view of agency is best illustrated by past attempts to address gift giving in terms of conflicts of interest. Second, we will introduce and motivate an alternate view of moral agency emerging from recent literature in social psychology on implicit social cognition. We will show that proper consideration of implicit social cognition paints a picture of human psychology at odds with the rationalistic model assumed in discussions of COIs. With these two pieces on the table we will be able to show that, without fully appreciating the social-psychological mechanisms of implicit cognition, policy-makers are likely to overlook significant aspects of how gifts influence doctors. (shrink)

Dishonesty is ubiquitous in our world. The news is frequently filled with high-profile cases of corporate fraud, large-scale corruption, lying politicians, and the hypocrisy of public figures. On a smaller scale, ordinary people often cheat, lie, misreport their taxes, and mislead others in their daily life. Despite such prevalence of cheating, corruption, and concealment, people typically consider themselves to be honest, and often believe themselves to be more moral than most others. This book aims to resolve this paradox by (...) addressing the question of why people are dishonest all too often. What motivates dishonesty, and how are people able to perceive themselves as moral despite their dishonest behaviour? What personality and interpersonal factors make dishonesty more likely? And what can be done to recognize and reduce dishonesty? This is a fascinating overview of state-of-the-art research on dishonesty, with prominent scholars offering their views to clarify the roots of dishonesty. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Kierkegaard on Self, Ethics, and Religion: Purity or Despair by Roe FremstedalVanessa RumbleRoe Fremstedal. Kierkegaard on Self, Ethics, and Religion: Purity or Despair. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. xiv + 280. Hardback, $99.99. Paperback, $32.99.Fremstedal’s impressive synthesis of the anthropological, ethical, and religious dimensions of Kierkegaard’s thought draws on the fruits of his earlier work, Kierkegaard and Kant on Radical Evil and the Highest Good (London: (...) Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). In each of the two volumes, Fremstedal argues for key points of agreement between Kant and Kierkegaard, and he proposes a precise and differentiated account of the way in which the anthropological assumptions of each thinker (a) undergird and shape their respective ethics and (b) pave the way for a religiosity that not only builds on but actively fortifies moral agency. The result, Fremstedal claims, is a rendering of Kierkegaard as by no means averse to the demands of systematic thought. Fremstedal’s Kierkegaard rejects the existence of “epistemic, objective evidence for or against faith” while nonetheless adducing “practical and subjective grounds” (252) for earnest ethical striving and religious faith. In addition to Fremstedal’s analysis of Kierkegaard’s debt to Kant, this book contains a finely drawn analysis of and response to the contemporary scholarship on ethical issues posed by (or to) Kierkegaard’s texts, drawing on the work of Rudd, Davenport, Helms, Stokes, Piety, and others, contributing thereby to the integration of Kierkegaardian ethics in larger discussions of moral psychology.Fremstedal’s stated aim is to provide both (i) the historical context for Kierkegaard’s authorship and (ii) a detailed consideration of Kierkegaard’s potential contribution to contemporary philosophical debates. With regard to (i), Fremstedal’s thirteen chapters offer considerably more than he is able to telegraph in the introduction. Fremstedal’s rough-and-ready appraisal of Kierkegaard’s relation to J. G. Fichte’s Ethics; his expert distillation of [End Page 513] the bearing of the Pantheism Controversy on the account of the “leap” in Postscript (173); and the alacrity with which he charts Kant’s, Jacobi’s, and Kiekegaard’s varying takes on the notion of “reason” (Vernunft/Fornuft) in its relation to “understanding” (Verstand/Forstand) all provide invaluable orientation and grist for further analysis. His discussion of the Pantheism Controversy lends support to his reading of the Postscript’s “leap” as indicating unavoidable discontinuities in “the transition from one normative domain to another” (179) rather than an espousal of fideism.What follows is a summary of Fremstedal’s central chapters on Kierkegaard’s ethics (chapters 2–9), with a particular focus on a key, contentious aspect of the former’s reading. Since the 1981 publication of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, Kierkegaard scholars queued up to defend the Danish philosopher against MacIntyre’s claim that Kierkegaard depicts the commitment to moral existence as criterionless. In Davenport and Rudd’s anthology, Kierkegaard after MacIntyre, Peter Mehl’s essay encapsulates the standard response: “Kierkegaard is primarily concerned with providing a philosophical anthropology as a basis for a coherent and reasonable approach to moral praxis,” a concern that is hardly compatible with a conception of morality as pure subjectivism (“Kierkegaard and the Relativist Challenge to Practical Philosophy,” in Kierkegaard after MacIntyre, ed. John J. Davenport and Anthony Rudd [Chicago: Open Court, 2001], 4).Like Mehl, Fremstedal believes Kierkegaard’s philosophical anthropology offers the best defense against MacIntyre’s charge of irrationalism. He grounds his account of Kierkegaard’s anthropology in The Sickness unto Death, citing Anti-Climacus’s depiction of the synthesis of finitude and infinitude as establishing the “fundamental tension between facticity and freedom,... constitutive of our human nature” (20). He parses the supervening relational task placed on the self (Selvet) as twofold: (a) recognition of the conjunction of the given and the chosen in the actual self and, crucially, (b) the evaluation and ranking of the “first order” motivations and inclinations of the actual self with a view to forging a coherent self, namely, the “pure” or “whole-hearted” self that is to evade despair and guide ethical striving. (Fremstedal nods here to work by Davenport and Stokes.) Fremstedal highlights the limitations of the “given” self by reminding... (shrink)

Entertainments and celebrations are meant to give audiences and participants pleasure. Pleasure and enjoyment are an integral part of flourishing human life, and the desire for pleasure and enjoyment is a distinctive aspect of human nature. Psychological hedonism is a descriptive doctrine concerned with giving an account of actual human motivation. Ethical hedonism is a prescriptive doctrine that advances the view that human beings ought to pursue pleasure and avoid pain, that prospective pleasure and pain are severally the (...) only good reasons for action. ‘Pleasure’, ‘enjoyment’, and ‘being pleased’ are three graces that stand at the intersection of psychology, axiology, and practical reasoning. The relation between pleasure and awareness or consciousness of pleasure is subtle and unlike the corresponding relation to having a pain. To live the life of a practical hedonist is to live a life guided by the pursuit of pleasure. (shrink)

This guide accompanies the following article: Matthew Kieran, ‘Art, Morality and Ethics: On the (Im)moral Character of Art Works and Inter‐Relations to Artistic Value’. Philosophy Compass 1/2 (2006): pp. 129–143, doi: 10.1111/j.1747‐9991.2006.00019.x Author’s Introduction Up until fairly recently it was philosophical orthodoxy – at least within analytic aesthetics broadly construed – to hold that the appreciation and evaluation of works as art and moral considerations pertaining to them are conceptually distinct. However, following on from the idea that artistic (...) value is broader than aesthetic value, the last 15 years has seen an explosion of interest in exploring possible inter‐relations between the appreciative and ethical character of works as art. Consideration of these issues has a distinguished philosophical history but as the Compass survey article suggests (‘Art, Morality and Ethics: On the (Im)Moral Character of Art Works and Inter‐Relations to Artistic Value.’Philosophy Compass 1.2 (2006): 129–43), it is only very recently that figures in the field have returned to it to develop more precisely what they take the relationships to be and why. Consensus is, unsurprisingly, lacking. The reinvigoration of the issues has led sophisticated formalists or autonomists to mount a more considered defence of the idea that aesthetic and literary values are indeed conceptually distinct from the justification or otherwise of the moral perspective or views endorsed in a work (Topic I). The challenges presented by such a defence are many but amongst them are appeals to critical practice (Lamarque and Olsen), scepticism about whether or not art really can give us bona fide knowledge (Stolnitz) and the recognition that truth often seems to be far removed from what it is we value in our appreciation of works (Lamarque). One way to motivate consideration of the relevance of a work’s moral character to its artistic value concerns the phenomena of imaginative resistance. At least sometimes it would seem that, as Hume originally suggested, we either cannot or will not enter imaginatively into the perspective solicited by a work due to its morally problematic character (Topic II). In some cases, it would seem that as a matter of psychological fact, we cannot do so since it is impossible for us to imagine how it could be that a certain attitude or action is morally permissible or good (Walton). The question then is whether or not this is a function of morality in particular or constraints on imaginative possibility more generally and what else is involved. At other times, the phenomena seem to be driven by a moral reluctance to allow ourselves to enter into the dramatic perspective involved (Moran) or evaluation of the attitude expressed (Stokes). Nonetheless, it is far from obvious that this is so of all the attitudes or responses we judge to be morally problematic. After all, it looks like we can and indeed often do suspend or background particular cognitive and moral commitments in engaging with all sorts of works (Nichols and Weinberg). If the moral character of a work interacts with how we appreciate and evaluate them, then the pressing question is this: is there any systematic account of the relationship available to us? One way is to consider the relationship between our emotional responses to works and their moral character (Topic III). After all, art works often solicit various emotional responses from us to follow the work and make use of moral concepts in so doing (Carroll). Indeed, whether or not a work merits the sought for emotional responses often seems to be internally related to ethical considerations (Gaut). Yet, it is not obvious that we should apply our moral concepts or respond emotionally in our imaginative engagement with works as art as we should in real life (Kieran, Jacobson). A different route is via the thought that art can convey knowledge (Topic IV). There might be particular kinds of moral knowledge art distinctively suited to conveying (Nussbaum) or it may just be that art does so particularly effectively (Carroll, Gaut, Kieran). Either way where this can be tied to the artistic means and appreciation of a work it would seem that to cultivate moral understanding contributes to the value of a work and to betray misunderstanding is a defect. Without denying the relevance of the moral character of a work some authors have wanted to claim that sometimes the immoral aspect of a work can contribute to rather than lessen its artistic value (Topic V). One route is to claim that there is no systematic theoretical account of the relationship available and what the right thing to say is depends on the particular case involved (Jacobson). Another involves the claim that this is so when the defect connects up in an appropriate way to one of the values of art. Thus, it has been claimed, only where a work reveals something which adds to intelligibility, knowledge or understanding in virtue of its morally problematic aspect can this be so (Kieran). The latter position looks like it could in principle be held whilst nonetheless maintaining that the typical or standard relationship is as the moralists would have it. Yet perhaps allowing valence change for such reasons is less a mark of principled explanation and more a function of downright inconsistency or incoherence (Harold). The topics themselves and suggested readings given below follow the structure articulated above as further amplified in the Compass survey article. The design and structure given below can be easily compressed or expanded further. Author Recommends 1 Carroll, Noël. ‘Art, Narrative and Moral Understanding.’Aesthetics and Ethics: Essay at the Intersection. Ed. Jerrold Levinson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 126–60. 2 This article develops the idea that engaging with narrative art calls on moral concepts and emotions and can thereby clarify our moral understanding. 2 Carroll, Noël. Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. 4 Part IV consists of six distinct essays on questions concerning the inter‐relations between art and morality including the essay cited above and the author’s articulation and defence of moderate moralism. 3 Gaut, Berys. ‘The Ethical Criticism of Art.’Aesthetics and Ethics: Essay at the Intersection. Ed. Jerrold Levinson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 182–203. 4 Gaut, Berys. Art, Emotion and Ethics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. 7 This monograph provides the most exhaustive treatment of the issues and defends the claim that, where relevant, whenever a work is morally flawed it is of lesser value as art and wherever it is morally virtuous the work’s value as art is enhanced. Chapters 7 and 8 defend concern ethical knowledge and chapter 10 is a development of the article cited above concerning emotional responses. Chapter 3 also gives a useful conceptual map of the issues and options in the debate. 5 Jacobson, Daniel. ‘In Praise of Immoral Art.’Philosophical Topics 25 (1997): 155–99. 9 A wide ranging and extended treatment of relevant issues which objects to generalising moral treatments of our responses to art works and defends the idea that particular works can be better because of rather than despite their moral defects. 6 Kieran, Matthew. ‘Forbidden Knowledge: The Challenge of Cognitive Immoralism.’Art and Morality. Ed. Sebastian Gardner and José Luis Bermúdez. London: Routledge, 2003. 56–73. 11 A general argument for immoralism is elaborated by outlining when, where and why a work’s morally problematic character can contribute to its artistic value for principled reasons (through enhancing moral understanding). 7 Kieran, Matthew. Revealing Art. London: Routledge, 2005. Chapter 4. 13 This chapter argues against both aestheticism and straightforward moralism about art, elaborating a defence of immoralism in relation to visual art whilst ranging over issues from pornographic art to the nature and demands of different genres in art. 8 Lamarque, Peter. ‘Cognitive Values in the Arts: Marking the Boundaries.’ Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Matthew Kieran. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006, 127–39. 15 This article concisely outlines and defends a sophisticated aestheticism that denies the importance of truth to artistic value. 9 Stolnitz, Jerome. ‘On the Cognitive Triviality of Art.’British Journal of Aesthetics 32.3 (1992): 191–200. 17 This article articulates and defends the claim that no knowledge of any interesting or significant kind can be afforded by works appreciated and evaluated as art. 10 Walton, Kendall. ‘Morals in Fiction and Fictional Morality, I.’Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. 68 (1994): 27–51. 19 This article builds on some comments from Hume to develop the idea that when engaging with fictions it seems impossible imaginatively to enter into radically deviant moral attitudes. Online Materials ‘Aesthetics and Ethics: The State of the Art.’American Society of Aesthetics online (Jeffrey Dean):. ‘Art, Censorship and Morality’ downloadable podcast of Nigel Warburton interviewing Matthew Kieran at Tate Britain (BBC/ou Open2.net as part of the Ethics Bites series):. ‘Art, Morality and Ethics: On the (Im)Moral Character of Art Works and Inter‐Relations to Artistic Value.’Philosophy Compass 1.2 (2006): 129–43 (Matthew Kieran):. ‘Ethical Criticism of Art.’Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Ella Peek):. ‘Fascinating Fascism.’New York Review of Books Piece Discussing Leni Riefenstahl (Susan Sontag):. ‘The Beheading of St. John the Baptist (1450s), Giovanni de Paolo’ (Tom Lubbock):. Vladimir Nabokov and Lionel Trilling discuss Lolita (CBS):. Sample Syllabus Topic I Autonomism/aestheticism • Anderson, James C. and Jeffrey T. Dean. ‘Moderate Autonomism.’British Journal of Aesthetics 38.2 (1998): 150–66. • Beardsley, Monroe. Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1958. Chapter 12. • Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgement.Trans. James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1952 [1790]. • Lamarque, Peter. ‘Cognitive Values in the Arts: Marking the Boundaries.’Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Matthew Kieran. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006, 127–39. • ——. ‘Tragedy and Moral Value.’Australasian Journal of Philosophy 73.2 (1995): 239–49. • Lamarque, Peter and Stein Olsen. Truth, Fiction and Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Chapter 10. • Stolnitz, Jerome. ‘On the Cognitive Triviality of Art.’British Journal of Aesthetics 32.3 (1992): 191–200. Topic II Imaginative Capacities, Intelligibility and Resistance • Moran, Richard. ‘The Expression of Feeling in Imagination.’Philosophical Review 103.1 (1994): 75–106. • Nichols, Shaun. ‘Just the Imagination: Why Imagining Doesn’t Behave Like Believing’. Mind & Language 21.4 (2006): 459–74. • Stokes, Dustin. ‘The Evaluative Character of Imaginative Resistance’. British Journal of Aesthetics 46.4 (2006): 387–405. • Tanner, Michael. ‘Morals in Fiction and Fictional Morality, II’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. Vol. 68 (1994): 51–66. • Walton, Kendall (1994). ‘Morals in Fiction and Fictional Morality, I’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. Vol. 68 (1994): 27–51. • Weinberg, Jonathan. ‘Configuring the Cognitive Imagination.’New Waves in Aesthetics. Eds. K. Stock and K. Thomson‐Jones. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 203–23. Topic III Moralism and Emotions • Carroll, Noël. ‘Moderate Moralism.’British Journal of Aesthetics 36.3 (1996): 223–37. • Carroll, Noël. ‘Art, Narrative and Moral Understanding.’Aesthetics and Ethics: Essay at the Intersection. Ed. Jerrold Levinson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.126–60. • Gaut, Berys. Art, Emotion and Ethics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Chapter 10. • ——. ‘The Ethical Criticism of Art.’Aesthetics and Ethics: Essay at the Intersection. Ed. Jerrold Levinson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 182–203. • Hume, David. ‘Of the Standard of Taste.’Selected Essays. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993 [1757]. 133–53. • Kieran, Matthew. ‘Emotions, Art and Immorality.’Oxford Handbook to the Philosophy of Emotions. Ed. Peter Goldie. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. 681–703. • Tolstoy, Leo. What is Art?. London: Penguin, 2004. Chapters 5 and 15. Topic IV Moralism and Knowledge • Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. M. Heath. London: Penguin, 1996 [367–322 BC]. • Carroll, Noël. ‘The Wheel of Virtue: Art, Literature and Moral Knowledge.’Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60.1 (2002): 3–26. • Gaut, Berys. Art, Emotion and Ethics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Chapters 7 and 8. • Gaut, Berys. ‘Art and Cognition.’Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Matthew Kieran. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. 115–26. • Kieran, Matthew. ‘Art, Imagination and the Cultivation of Morals.’Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54.4 (1996): 337–51. • Nussbaum, Martha. ‘Finely Aware and Richly Responsible: Literature and the Moral Imagination.’Love’s Knowledge. New York: Oxford UP, 1990. 148–68. • Plato. The Republic. Trans. D. Lee. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974. Book 10. Topic V Immoralist Contextualism • Harold, James. ‘Immoralism and the Valence Constraint.’British Journal of Aesthetics 48.1 (2008): 45–64. • Jacobson, Daniel. ‘In Praise of Immoral Art.’Philosophical Topics 25 (1997): 155–99. • ——. ‘Ethical Criticism and the Vices of Moderation.’Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Matthew Kieran. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. 342–55. • John, Eileen. ‘Artistic Value and Moral Opportunism.’Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Matthew Kieran. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. 331–41. • Kieran, Matthew. ‘Forbidden Knowledge:The Challenge of Cognitive Immoralism.’Art and Morality. Ed. Sebastian Gardner and José Luis Bermúdez. London: Routledge, 2003. 56–73. • Kieran, Matthew. Revealing Art. London: Routledge, 2005. Chapter 4. • Patridge, Stephanie. ‘Moral Vices as Artistic Virtues: Eugene Onegin and Alice.’Philosophia 36.2 (2008): 181–93. Focus Questions 1 What is the strongest argument for the claim that the moral character of a work is not relevant to its artistic value? Does artistic or literary criticism tend to concern itself with the truth or morality of works? If so, in what ways? If not, why do you think this is? 2 What different explanations might there be for difficulty with or resistance to imaginatively entering into attitudes you take to be immoral? How might this relate to the way our imaginings work as contrasted with belief? How might different literary or artistic treatments of the same subject matter make a difference? 3 How do narrative works draw on our moral concepts and responses? Can we suspend our normal moral commitments or application of moral concepts in responding emotionally to art works? Should we respond emotionally to art works as we ought to respond to real world events we witness? Why? Why not? 4 How, if at all, do art works convey moral understanding? How, if at all, is this related to the kinds of moral knowledge art works can teach or reveal to us? When, where and why might this be tied to the artistic value of a work? How can we tell where a work enhances our moral understanding as opposed to misleading or distorting it? 5 What art works do you value overall as art which commend or endorse moral values and attitudes that you do not? Is appreciation of them always marred or lessened by the morally dubious aspect? If not, what explains the differences in evaluation? What, if anything, might you learn by engaging with works which endorse moral attitudes or apply moral concepts different from those you take to be justified? How, if at all, might this connect up with what makes them valuable as art? (shrink)

We critically review themushrooming literature addressing the neuralmechanisms of moral cognition (NMMC), reachingthe following broad conclusions: (1) researchmainly focuses on three inter-relatedcategories: the moral emotions, moral socialcognition, and abstract moral reasoning. (2)Research varies in terms of whether it deploysecologically valid or experimentallysimplified conceptions of moral cognition. Themore ecologically valid the experimentalregime, the broader the brain areas involved.(3) Much of the research depends on simplifyingassumptions about the domain of moral reasoningthat are motivated by the need (...) to makeexperimental progress. This is a valuablebeginning, but as more is understood about theneural mechanisms of decision-making, morerealistic conceptions will need to replace thesimplified conceptions. (4) The neuralcorrelates of real-life moral cognition areunlikely to consist in anything remotely like a``moral module'' or a ``morality center.'' Moralrepresentations, deliberations and decisionsare probably highly distributed and notconfined to any particular brainsub-system. Discovering the basic neuralprinciples governing planning, judgment anddecision-making will require vastly more basicresearch in neuroscience, but correlatingactivity in certain brain regions withwell-defined psychological conditions helpsguide neural level research. Progress on socialphenomena will also require theoreticalinnovation in understanding the brain'sdistinctly biological form of computationthat is anchored by emotions, needs, drives,and the instinct for survival. (shrink)

Stereotype threat is a psychological phenomenon that occurs when individuals become aware that their behavior could potentially confirm a negative stereotype. Though stereotype threat is a widely studied phenomenon in social psychology, there has been relatively little scholarship on it in philosophy, despite its relevance to issues such as implicit cognition, epistemic injustice, and diversity in philosophy. However, most psychological research on stereotype threat discusses the phenomenon by using an overly narrow picture of it, which focuses on one of (...) its effects: the ability to hinder performance. As a result, almost all philosophical work on stereotype threat is solely focused on issues of performance too. -/- Social psychologists know that stereotype threat has additional effects, such as negatively impacting individuals’ motivation, interests, long-term health, and even their sense of self, but these other effects are often downplayed, or even forgotten about. Therefore, the “standard picture” of stereotype threat needs to be expanded, in order to better understand the theoretical aspects of the phenomenon, and to develop broader, more effective interventions. This dissertation develops such an “expanded picture” of stereotype threat, which emphasizes how the phenomenon can negatively impact both self-identity and epistemic agency. In doing so, I explore the nature of stereotypes more generally and argue that they undermine groups’ moral status and contribute to what is called “ontic injustice.” I also show how stereotype threat harms members of socially subordinated groups by way of coercing their self-identity and undermining their epistemic agency, which I argue is a form of epistemic injustice. Lastly, I analyze the expanded picture’s implications for addressing the low proportion of women in professional philosophy. I critically engage recent arguments that these low numbers simply reflect different interests women have, which if innate or benign, would require no intervention. My expanded picture shows the mistakes in this sort of reasoning, which is also present in discussions on the underrepresentation of women in science. The expanded picture of stereotype threat that this dissertation develops is not only practically important, but also advances key philosophical debates in social epistemology, applied ethics, and social metaphysics. (shrink)

The revolution in science and technology is significantly changing the character of production and work. One of the important aspects of this change is that labor becomes a scientifically organized process that makes increased demands on development of the human factor in production. The most productive scientific ideas, the most perfect technologies, when combined with production, may fail to produce the desired "yield" unless a sufficient number of well-trained personnel, or of the required organizational structures corresponding to the level of (...) societal relationships, the habits of collective work, and human psychology, are available. Implementation of a truly scientific organization of work presumes as a condition that a considerable level of development will already have been achieved in socialist labor discipline, as well as habits of collectivism and ethical motivations for work, and not merely occupational skills and qualities. More precisely, the list of qualities that, while they may not be occupational in the strict sense are nonetheless necessary features of the person employed in socialist society, includes general cultural and moral development, social activity, and political consciousness. The transformation of work into a scientifically organized process presumes an increasing demand for a highly skilled labor force with comprehensive development. Moreover, the development of the labor force and the rise in its skills should run ahead of the development of the means of production. It is precisely this that determines the need for conscious management of the development of the human being. For comprehensive development of the labor force to run ahead of the means of production requires considerable outlays for occupational and general cultural training of the direct participants in production. A worker of a new type, with a higher level of general and occupational education, will emerge in the course of implementation of a complex of economic, social, and scientific-technological measures. (shrink)

Mark Clavier's On Consumer Culture, Identity, The Church and the Rhetorics of Delight draws on Augustine of Hippo to provide a theological explanation for the success of marketing and consumer culture. Augustine's thought, rooted in rhetorical theory, presents a brilliant understanding of the experiences of damnation and salvation that takes seriously the often hidden psychology of human motivation. Clavier examines how Augustine's keen insight into the power of delight over personal notions of freedom and self-identity can be used (...) to shed light on how the constant lure of promised happiness shapes our identities as consumers. From Augustine's perspective, it is only by addressing the sources of delight within consumerism and by rediscovering the wellsprings of God's delight that we can effectively challenge consumer culture. To an age awash with commercial rhetoric, the fifth-century Bishop of Hippo offers a theological rhetoric that is surprisingly contemporary and insightful."-- Back cover. (shrink)

The notion that "the holy reality wills it" can provide both the rational justification (the move from "is" to "ought") and the psychological motivation for acting morally. But can the will of God be the criterion for the morally right? Although what is right cannot be reduced to what God wills (due to the perceptual aspect of the meaning of "right"), it can be deduced from it, given an understanding of perception that implies that an omniscient perceiver would necessarily (...) be an impartial sympathizer. This, however, presupposes the ideal observer criterion of rightness, which is based upon an appeal to holiness. Recognizing that the criteriological and religious meanings of moral terms are finally identical overcomes the problems of justification and motivation inevitable in apparently non-religious moral theories. (shrink)

_The most complete picture to date of the moral worlds of the political left and right and how their different views relate to specific political issues_ The left and right will always have strong policy disagreements, but constructive debate and negotiation are not possible when each side demonizes the other. We need to move past our poisonous politics. In this book, social psychologist Ronnie Janoff-Bulman provides a new framework for understanding why and how we disagree. Janoff-Bulman asks readers to (...) consider the challenging possibility that both liberalism and conservatism are morally based and reflect genuine concern for the country. Moral psychology is an invaluable lens for understanding the roots of political differences. She presents a “Model of Moral Motives” that maps the most fundamental motivations recognized by psychology—approach and avoidance—onto these differences. Liberal morality focuses on providing for the group’s well-being and ensuring social justice. Conservative morality focuses on protecting the group from threats and preserving order. These moralities can account for the psychological differences between liberals and conservatives and for why certain positions resonate on each side of the political spectrum. Why, for example, do conservatives oppose abortion and favor unfettered free markets while liberals favor a woman’s right to choose and economic regulation? Understanding that our political differences are rooted in two natural forms of morality can help us begin to detoxify our politics. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the analysis of the legal theories of P.I. Novgorodtsev and B.A. Kistyakovsky, based on the moral philosophy of I. Kant in comparison with the psychological theory of law of L.I. Petrazhitsky. The unity of the positions of Novgorodtsev and Kistyakovsky in focusing on the ethical aspects of law, as well as highlighting morality as the highest principle, is revealed. Attention is paid to the disclosure of neo-Kantian motives in the philosophy of law and (...) in the context of the development of the theory of natural law in Russia. The main content of the article is a consistent analysis of Novgorodtsevʼs ideas in their dynamics, compared with the neo-Kantian philosophy of law of Kistyakovsky. It is emphasized that the psychological theory of the source of Petrazhitskyʼs legal relations is in the same intention of thought with the motives of the Russian neo-Kantians, which allows them to be compared in the history of the development of the Russian theory of law. The modern scientific literature is analyzed in order to identify the problem of comparing different approaches in the history of Russian philosophy of law, in which German transcendental philosophy is one of the key foundations. The question of the independence of Russian scientists in the construction of ethical and legal doctrines is actualized, but, at the same time, a single motive is emphasized with the Kantian provision on the need to establish a general civil society on the principles of a developed system of rules and norms. (shrink)

I present and defend a naturalist, internalist, and realist theory of the foundations of ethics. The theory, grounded in a particular concept of humanity, combines features of the Mencian and the Humean moral traditions. ;An acceptable moral theory must contain accounts of human nature and moral phenomenology. The former includes analyses of moral agency and moral psychology, the latter the nature of moral perception and the meaning of moral language. Both Mencius and (...) Hume offer moral theories that attempt to meet these conditions. Neither, however, is entirely successful. Following Mencius and Hume, I defend the position that a moral judgment ascribes---truly or falsely---a definable and natural quality to an action, object, or person. ;I further argue that a true moral judgment must be made on the perceptual basis of the moral judge under normal conditions . These normal conditions are the conditions under which the sentiment of humanity is called for and expected. What is humanity? Hume describes humanity as consistent sympathy. We find ourselves very often extending sympathy to a friend, but not so often to a stranger. Humanity requires us to extend sympathy to all people consistently. Interpreted this way, Hume's concept is similar to Mencius' concept of humanity . Though similar, Hume and Mencius offer different accounts of certain aspects of humanity. On the one hand, Hume explains the cognitive importance of characteristically human feelings and the relation between humanity and reason. On the other, Mencius presents a theory of the actualization of humanity through self-cultivation. Mencius also makes it explicit that humanity, as the unity of virtues, is the single force by which all human activities achieve their integrity. ;The Ontological and epistemological commitments in this dissertation make an internalism not just possible but unavoidable. With regard to the relation between moral judgments and motivation or reasons for action, there are two positions: an irrealist position, namely, internalism, and a realist position, namely, externalism. Internalism is the claim that there is an analytic connection between moral judgments and motivation or reasons for action; but externalism denies the necessary connection. I contend that externalism is highly problematic for its inability to explain the motivational force of morality. I also contend that traditional internalism is not acceptable when it appeals to some forms of emotivism in rejecting moral realism because by doing so it falls into radical relativism and arbitrariness. (shrink)

One of the hardest parts of being a leader is handling disagreements about values. The skills required to do this are increasingly important in polarized societies where there is pressure for businesses and organizations to have a sense of purpose and "do the right thing." Our book helps readers address these challenges. To do this, we don''t give a simplistic cookie-cutter recipe for what is right and wrong. Rather, we guide readers on a journey to rigorously explore their values and (...) better understand the values of others. We discuss the human psychology that drives conflicts over values as well as the philosophical frameworks that have guided people for millennia. We provide strategies, based in research from psychology and the behavioral sciences, whichthat readers can use to implement their values in their lives and their organizations. Topics covered include moral intuitions, self-serving biases, situational pressures, social norms, the role of business in society, consequentialism/utilitarianism, motives, perspective-taking, justice, fairness, and liberty. (shrink)

This study aims to determine the opinions of teachers of Religious Culture and Ethics Course (DKAB) about subject-based classroom application in-depth. The research has been carried from qualitative research methods with a case study design. In order to determine the working group of the study, criteria sampling was used in the first stage, and the maximum diversity sampling method was used in the next step. The sample of this research consists of 8 DKAB teachers working in Ankara province. A semi-structured (...) interview form has been used as a data collection tool in the study. The data of the qualitative of this research has been analyzed with both descriptive and content analysis by NVivo 10 program. In order to ensure validity and reliability in the study, credibility, transferability, consistency, and verifiability strategies have been used. When the research data were analyzed, four themes were formed: positive opinions about the application, negative opinions and problems related to the application, contribution of the practice to religious education and training, and recommendations about the application. DKAB teachers find the application more positive than the classroom system. It has been found that the practice of subject-based classrooms is a motivational tool for Primary School students, while it causes some problems for lower secondary school and upper secondary school students.Summary: Learning environments are among the key elements in the acquisition of 21st-century skills. Classrooms are also a part of the learning environment. Classes are the learning environment in which teachers and students spend most of their education and training process. In this context, subject-based classroom application is one of the preferred methods in the arrangement of classrooms.Subject-based classroom application means that the teachers have a special classroom related to their branches in the school building, and students attend the teacher's classroom according to the syllabus. In this practice, the teacher can decorate walls, floor, ceiling, column, and beam of the classroom with students’ study materials such as banner, poster, painting, cartoon to make the course more effective and efficient and to create a psychological atmosphere called classroom atmosphere-air.This application aims to activate the student by enriching the classroom and make learning effective and efficient. The classroom equipped with appropriate equipment and materials provides a favorable environment for the implementation of effective teaching strategies. The application can create “class/classroom culture” by using ordinary meanings and symbols related to the course. It provides students the opportunity to exhibit their products and contributes to students' self-regulation skills development. Besides, real-life practices or practices close to reality can be brought into the classroom. As a result, permanent learning can be realized with the possibility of creating a shared living space and the number of sensory organs participating in learning.This current study aims to address in-depth information about the opinions of Religious Culture and Moral Ethics (DKAB) teachers in primary, secondary, and high schools regarding the subject-based classroom application. When the studies in the literature are examined, it is seen that the studies related to the subject-based classroom application have increased since 2010. However, it is clear that this research is directed towards social studies, geography, science, and mathematics courses and is based on the opinions of students, teachers, and administrators at the secondary school level. In the context of DKAB course, there has been no research including the views of teachers, students, or school administrators regarding the application of subject-based classrooms. This study is carried out revealing perspectives of DKAB teachers by examining their opinions on the subject-based classroom application and contribute to the field. The research was conducted with a case study design from the qualitative research methods. The participants consist of 8 DKAB teachers working in Ankara province. A mixed purposive sampling method was used to determine the study group. In the first stage, the teachers implementing the DKAB classrooms application were taken as criteria. In the next step, the study group was determined within the framework of the maximum diversity sampling method by considering the variables such as school level, gender, age, education level, duration of teachers' work. The data were collected through a semi-structured interview form with expert opinion. In the form, there are nine main questions and probe questions, which include questions related to subject-based classrooms application, the contribution of the application to religious education and training, the contribution of teachers to professional and personal development, the effect of teachers' belonging to the school, the effectiveness, and improvement of the application. Permission has been obtained from the Ankara Provincial Directorate of National Education and participants via consent form for the interview. The interviews were recorded in audio, 169.58-minute audio recording transcripts, and 52-page interview data obtained. The qualitative data of this research has been analyzed with both descriptive and content analysis by NVivo 10 program. In order to ensure validity and reliability in the study, credibility, transferability, consistency, and verifiability strategies have been used.When the data of the research were analyzed, the opinions of DKAB teachers about the subject-based classrooms application categorized under four themes; positive and negative opinions/problems about the practice, the contribution of the practice to religious education and teaching and practical suggestions. Under the theme of positive opinions on the application, positive aspects for the teacher, student, parents, and comparison with the classroom system were formed. According to the participants, the practice of DKAB classroom is a “facilitation” element for the teacher because of the factors such as the teacher not moving around the classroom, not carrying material, having freedom to organize the classroom, and material regularity. In this application, since the teacher has a class of his own, the teacher adopts and owns the classroom and the sense of belonging to school increases. This sense of belonging is felt so strongly that there is even a participant who plans to retire if the application is abandoned. The positive aspects of the application for the students are that; a classroom is a motivating tool, the boards and walls can be used, and the student has the opportunity to exhibit their activities. When compared with the classroom system, it was stated that as a result of the branch classroom practice, the school equipment could be better protected, class order and cleaning easier, and the success of the students would be increased.The negative views of the participants on the application were grouped under the categories of students, teachers, and parents. Not having a fixed class of their own, continually relocating and losing time in recess, staying in the classroom door when the classroom is locked, not adopting the classroom and lack of lockers constitute the negative aspects of the application for the students. The overuse of classrooms, less use of teachers' rooms, lack of communication between colleagues are the negative aspects of the application for the teachers. It was stated by (75%) most of the participants that branch classroom application contributed to the continual learning of students in religious education and teaching. To make the application more functional, DKAB teachers have proposed arrangements such as improving physical infrastructure, enriching teaching materials, and arranging school syllabus and keeping classrooms open. As a result, teachers find the application more positive than the classroom system. While it is a motivation tool for primary school students, it causes some problems for secondary and high school students, such as carrying bags, staying at the door, and wasting time. In this sense, the application is recommended to be applied in primary schools that have a sufficient number of classrooms. Also, the system should be applied in secondary and high schools where the number of students is low, or the number of classrooms is sufficiently provided that the problems experienced by the students are eliminated. School administrations and teachers need to take necessary measures to make the application effective and efficient. (shrink)

This concise book brings behavioral insights to the wide array of topics commonly taught in the required professional responsibility course, including admission to the practice of law, confidentiality, conflicts of interest, representing entities, prosecutorial and criminal defense ethics, litigation and negotiation ethics, legal billing, and managerial and subordinate responsibilities. Behavioral legal ethics relies on empirical research to explore how lawyers actually make ethical decisions in context, rather than how they predict they would decide an ethical dilemma. This approach (...) complements the law of lawyering by seeking to understand how various psychological factors and situational pressures explain and influence decision-making and resulting ethical (or unethical) action. Each chapter explores findings from behavioral science that pertain to ethical decision-making such as motivated reasoning, confirmation bias and other cognitive biases, fast thinking, the fundamental attribution error, wrongful obedience, conformity, moral disengagement, and much more. In addition, each chapter contains relevant case studies and reflection questions to deepen and cement students' understanding of the role of behavioral legal ethics in professional responsibility. Finally, the book offers ideas for individual attorneys and legal organizations to improve ethical decision-making."--Publisher's webpage. (shrink)

Human affectivity is a research topic situated at the intersection of psychology, philosophical anthropology, theory of action and ethics. This article reconstructs the Aristotelian theory of emotions in the context of his theory of aspiration /recij ) and in terms of their function as primary evaluators of situations, which forms the basis for virtue ethics. The Aristotelian model integrates desire, motivation and morality for a rational being in community. Affects reveal the profile of relevance of the world to (...) a person as an indispensable basis for the work of practical reason. They are analysed in the dimensions of their cognitive core, their social, bodily, and motivational aspects. Affectivity constitutes a primary evaluative response to situations and thereby disposes human beings to realise their call to morally good, virtuous and fulfilling action. (shrink)

It is clear that Kant's theory of motivation plays a central role in his ethical theory as a whole. Nevertheless, it has been subjected to many interpretations: (i) the 'orthodox' interpretation, (ii) the 'Aristotelian' or 'Humean' interpretation and (iii) the 'rationalist' interpretation. The first part of the thesis aims to provide an interpretation of Kant's theory of rational agency and motivation. I argue that the 'orthodox' and 'Aristotelian' interpretations should be rejected because they are incompatible with Kant's (...) conception of freedom, defending an account of Kant's position that goes along the lines of the rationalist interpretation. I show that Kant's theory of motivation is committed to a form of cognitivism, that is, the cognitive aspects of a motive are always the active factors in motivation. In Kant's terminology, the motives are provided by the agent's maxims, which express the reasons from which the agent acts. This part of the thesis examines Kant's theory of imperatives and his theory of motivation for cases of permissible, moral and immoral action. I conclude that in Kant's system, three levels of moral assessment can be distinguished: (i) rightness, (ii) moral worth, and (iii) virtue. However, my interest in Kant's theory is not merely exegetical; thus, the second aim of the thesis is to place Kant's position within the context of the following contemporary debates in metaethics: (i) debates about the relation between moral judgement and motivation, and (ii) debates about the nature of reasons for action, arguing that the Kantian position still represents an attractive philosophical view today. In relation to (i), I argue that Kant is committed to a form of motivational internalism, reconstruct Kant's argument for this view and reply to some possible externalist objections. In relation to (ii), I claim that since Kant's conception of reasons, based on the concept of maxims, differs from an internal conception of reasons (i.e., a conception that identifies reasons with the agent's desires), and from an external conception of reasons (i.e., a conception of reasons that identifies reasons with facts of the agent's situation), the term volitionism should be reserved to describe Kant's position. (shrink)

This article points out, descriptive moral psychology of human behavior patterns in the handling, in fact, from the outset exceed the boundaries of philosophy, and Cole tried to resort to ethics Fort formalism in order to avoid this problem in practice, can not be established. • Henry Rachael is further motivation for ethical behavior and the psychological concept of Cole Castle together. Although this is certainly an important contribution to the Fort Cole, but Cole Fort critical (...) reflection on the lack of methodology adopted only; secondly that the ideology behind their psychological factors; finally made ​​sense to remedy in the treatment program: to give up on life and psychological describe their condition or results of work. Authors propose a new proposal of psychology, first identified the relationship between psychologists and their research object, this object is, as the subject of people; secondly, from the possibility of speech. Description, either by himself or a third person described in the description, will be replaced by speech interaction. Authors proposed the concept of an interactive framework of doctrine, in which Cole and Rachael • Fort Henry's theory of language games can get a different position. This article attempts to demonstrate that the descriptive psychology, in its treatment of ethical problems, seems to have transgressed the boundary line against philosophy. This problematic situation cannot be circumvented by resorting to an ethical formalism-as L. Kohlberg does in his research program. Rachael M. Henry pushes one step forward to tie the psychodynamic aspect of moral behavior with Kohlberg's concept. The present author, all in affirming the important contribution of Kohlberg to psychology, indicates the insufficiency of a mere reflection of methods in Kohlberg's works. Then he dissects the ideologemes behind Kohlberg's psychology. At last he suggests a therapeutic proposal: the demand for describing psychic life, its conditions or effects, shall be dropped. The author proposes instead a program of new psychology that derives first from the relation of psychologist to his object, the human as subject; and second, from the possibilities of speech in communicative interaction. Description, whether made by oneself or by a third person, shall be substituted by speech interactions. These interactions are considered as successful when the partners in a discussion declare themselves to be understood. Within the framework of this interactionist concept, Kohlberg's and Rachael M. Henry 's theories could assume the status of various language-games. (shrink)

Philosophers and psychologists love psychopaths. They seem like a test case which was tailor-made for them to probe their most contested claims and theories. What is the psychological basis of moral judgment? Are moral beliefs intrinsically motivational? How should psychological disorders be defined, if they should be defined at all? Under what conditions can agents be reasonably held responsible for their conduct?Being Amoral. Psychopathy and Moral Incapacity, edited by Thomas Schramme brings together some of the world’s leading (...) experts on psychopathy and its philosophical implications. The book contains 12 original articles which are grouped into three sections: Moral Capacities and Incapacities , Issues in Moral Psychology , and Social Aspects: Blame, Transgression, and Dangerousness .The articles in this section are concerned with identifying the capacities or, rather, lack of capacities .. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Material Virtue: Ethics and the Body in Early ChinaEdward SlingerlandMaterial Virtue: Ethics and the Body in Early China. By Mark Csikszentmihalyi. Leiden: Brill, 2005. Pp. vi + 402. Hardcover $180.00.Material Virtue: Ethics and the Body in Early China by Mark Csikszentmihalyi is a fascinating and meticulously researched study of early Chinese discussions of virtue and moral education in the period following what we might call the "physiological (...) turn," marked by a growing interest in the body and the embodiment of social ideals that begins sometime in the fourth century B.C.E. In Csikszentmihalyi's usage, the phrase "material virtue" refers "narrowly to descriptions of the virtues in terms of their quasi-material properties. More generally, such descriptions are characteristic of the view that, once cultivated, the virtues manifest themselves through physiological changes in the body that can be observed by others" (p. 5). This early Chinese development of this sort of nondualistic model of the self is a topic of growing interest to scholars of early China, with relevance to many contemporary debates about ethics and the mind-body relationship. This study's focus on a recently discovered archeological find, the text of the Wuxing 五行 (datable to sometime before 300 B.C.E.), also places it at the center of one of the most exciting recent developments in the field: the trove of newly discovered and, in many cases, previously unknown texts that are in the process of enriching and transforming our understanding of early Chinese thought. The two versions of the Wuxing that Csikszentmihalyi discusses come from Guodian (tomb closed ca. 300 B.C.E.) and Mawangdui (tomb closed 168 B.C.E.; this version also includes what seems to be a later commentary), two of the richest finds from the perspective of early Chinese philosophical and religious thought. Two substantial appendixes contain critical annotated editions of both texts, which summarize the state of the field with regard to their textual scholarship—an invaluable resource in itself.As Csikszentmihalyi notes, one important aspect of these finds is how they "have augmented the [received textual] record with different kinds of texts, challenging received notions of school and genre" (p. 1). This is one of the more interesting contributions of Csikszentmihalyi's study, part of a recent trend among scholars of early China to move beyond traditional "school" labels. Csikszentmihalyi presents the Wuxing, which modern scholars attribute to the disciple Zisi 子思,1 as a hitherto unheard voice in "an important conversation about the nature of the virtues in early China from the fourth through the second centuries B.C.E." (p. 2), and by doing so significantly increases the subtlety of our picture of the early Chinese philosophical [End Page 694] landscape. For instance, in place of a more-or-less linear picture of the development of "Confucian" thought, originating with Kongzi and then diverging with the two followers Mengzi and Xunzi, Csikszentmihalyi argues for a view of the ru 儒 tradition that sees it as consisting of many competing disciple lineages, united by a shared technical vocabulary and the acknowledgment of Kongzi as an authority, but much more internally diverse than traditionally thought.Csikszentmihalyi contextualizes his discussion of the Wuxing by placing it firmly in the Mengzi-Zisi lineage that appears as one of Xunzi's targets in his famous "Against Twelve Masters" chapter. He makes a strong case for doing so: besides Xunzi's comment that the misguided followers of Mengzi and Zisi "created a theory, and called it 'Five Kinds of Action' (wuxing)" (p. 60), there are many textual and conceptual parallels between the Wuxing and the Mengzi. Csikszentmihalyi also makes a strong case that both the Mengzi and the Wuxing can be seen as springing from a similar motivation: defending Confucianism from Primitivist charges of moral hypocrisy by arguing for a more internalist conception of virtue, grounded in the physical body and its animating qi. As he notes, "The 'psychologizing' or 'embodiment' of moral self cultivation implies that genuine virtue cannot be simulated because it is an observable physical process" (p. 86). For instance, in his interesting discussion of the Mencian concept of haoranzhiqi 浩然之氣 (usually translated as "flood-like" qi), Csikszentmihalyi follows... (shrink)

This is the first philosophy textbook in moral psychology, introducing students to a range of philosophical topics and debates such as: What is moral motivation? Do reasons for action always depend on desires? Is emotion or reason at the heart of moral judgment? Under what conditions are people morally responsible? Are there self-interested reasons for people to be moral? Moral Psychology: A Contemporary Introduction presents research by philosophers and psychologists on these topics, (...) and addresses the overarching question of how empirical research is relevant to philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

This book offers an account of Kant's theory of moral motivation that comprehends the most challenging and controversial aspects of Kant's theory of the will and human moral motivational psychology. It argues for a new approach to the question about the purity of the Kantian moral motive.

The value‐action gap poses a considerable challenge to normative environmental ethics. Because of the wide array of empirical research results that have become available in the fields of environmental psychology, education, and anthropology, ethicists are at present able to take into account insights on what effectively motivates proenvironmental behavior. The emotional aspect apparently forms a key element within a transformational process that leads to an internalization of nature within one's identity structure. We compare these findings with studies on environmental (...) activists, which appear to a significantly lesser degree hampered by the value‐action gap, thereby attempting to understand what provides them with the drive to act more consistently on their moral attitudes. Hermeneutics is found to play a crucial role in the processes that lead to lasting and consistent motivation toward proenvironmental behavior. An empirically informed hermeneutical approach could therefore provide a promising impetus for contemporary environmental ethics. (shrink)

The value-action gap poses a considerable challenge to normative environmental ethics. Because of the wide array of empirical research results that have become available in the fields of environmental psychology, education, and anthropology, ethicists are at present able to take into account insights on what effectively motivates proenvironmental behavior. The emotional aspect apparently forms a key element within a transformational process that leads to an internalization of nature within one's identity structure. We compare these findings with studies on environmental (...) activists, which appear to a significantly lesser degree hampered by the value-action gap, thereby attempting to understand what provides them with the drive to act more consistently on their moral attitudes. Hermeneutics is found to play a crucial role in the processes that lead to lasting and consistent motivation toward proenvironmental behavior. An empirically informed hermeneutical approach could therefore provide a promising impetus for contemporary environmental ethics. (shrink)

The work of Luciano Floridi lies at the interface of philosophy, information science and technology, and ethics, an intersection whose existence and significance he was one of the first to establish. His closely related concepts of a philosophy of information (PI), informational structural realism, information logic (IL), and information ethics (IE) provide a new ontological perspective from which moral concerns can be addressed, especially but not limited to those arising in connection with the new information and communication technologies. In (...) this paper, I relate Floridi's approach to another novel perspective, namely, that of an extension of logic to complex real processes, including those of information production and transfer. This non-propositional, non-truth-functional logic (logic in reality (LIR)) is grounded in the fundamental dualism (dynamic opposition) inherent in energy and accordingly present at all levels of reality. The LIR description of the dynamics of processes and their evolution is relevant to what Floridi refers to as the possible non-linguistic aspects of information. It suggests answers to some of Floridi's “outstanding problems” in PI related to the ontological status of information and how it is used in cognition. Floridi's IL retains the formal structure of the doxastic and epistemic logics from which he correctly distinguishes it and is the basis for his conceptual PI. However, LIR fulfills Floridi's implied requirement that logic be regarded as a natural phenomenon dealing with other natural phenomena, recovering its original philosophical function. LIR provides a logical foundation for discussion of ethical questions based on kinds of information that complements IL. Both are reconsiderations of logic that, as Marijuan suggests, may be necessary for the advancement of information technology in an ethical direction (cf. also Brenner). IE focuses on entities as constituted by information in an overall strategy that generalizes the concept of moral agents. LIR and its related ontology naturalize critical aspects of Floridi's theses, especially, the moral value of being as such and a non-separable joint responsibility of individuals and groups. I compare IE to other current approaches to ethics and information technology (e.g., phenomenological and social constructivist). Ethical information is defined “ecologically” in process terms as reality in a physical space (cf. Floridi), with an intentional “valence,” positive and negative, in the morally valued interaction between producer and receiver. LIR is neither topic-neutral nor context independent and can support an ethics involving apparently contradictory perspectives (e.g., internalist and externalist). Ethics involves practical reasoning, and unlike standard logics, LIR supports Magnani's approach to abductive reasoning in rational moral decision making. The basis of moral responsibility and the consequent behavior of individuals involved in information and communications technologies is the same logical–metaphysical principle of dynamic opposition instantiated at other levels of reality. The way moral responsibilities are actively accepted (or not) by individuals supervenes on their primitive psychological structure, which in turn reflects an evolutionary development grounded in the fundamental dualism of the physical world. The paper concludes with some suggestions of areas of philosophical research, such as causality, identity, and the ontological turn, where convergence of the Floridi and LIR approaches might be envisaged. Their overall motivation is the same, namely, the development of strategies for reinforcing and increasing ethical sensitivity wherever possible. The ethical information concept outlined in the paper supports the function of IE, assigned to it by Floridi, of potentially determining what is right and what is wrong. (shrink)

Increasingly, psychologists and neuroscientists have become interested in moral psychology and moral judgment. Despite this, much of moral philosophy remains isolated from this empirical research. I seek to integrate these two literatures. Drawing on a wide range of research, I develop an empirically adequate account of moral judgment. I then turn to issues in philosophical moral psychology, arguing that empirical research sheds light on old debates and raises new questions for investigation. The neuropsychological (...) mechanisms underlying moral judgment exhibit a large degree of complexity. Different processes contribute to moral judgment under different conditions, depending both upon the kind of case under consideration and on individual differences. Affective processes subserved by a broad base of brain regions including the orbitofrontal cortex, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, amygdala, and basal ganglia are crucial for normal moral judgment. These affective processes also provide an important link to motivation. More explicit cognition dependent upon areas of the medial temporal lobe and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex also play a crucial role in some kinds of moral judgment though they exhibit less direct connections to motivation. The descriptive account of moral judgment I defend makes sense of debates in moral psychology over two influential views: motivation internalism, according to which moral judgment necessitates motivation to act accordingly and the Humean Theory of Motivation, according to which belief and desire are distinct and motivation requires both a desire and an appropriate means-end belief. Moral judgments that derive from affective processes exhibit a connection between motivation and moral judgment. However, not all moral judgments derive from such processes. More explicit representations are not closely connected to motivation, thus motivation can come apart from moral judgment. While explicit beliefs are distinct from desires, affective representations have both cognitive (albeit nonpropositional) content and direct connections to motivation. This challenges Humean theories of motivation. This account helps resolve these traditional disputes. Anti-Humean, internalist theories offer an approximately accurate account of these affective mechanisms. Externalist, Humean theories offer an approximately accurate account of more explicit cognitive processes. Thus, several prominent philosophical theories offer a plausible account of some aspect of moral psychology. Because of the complexity of moral psychology, none of these accounts offers a complete account. This account also raises new questions for investigation. Some researchers have argued that the representation of a moral rule like the Doctrine of Double Effect helps explain the pattern of judgments in response to different kinds of Trolley cases. I argue that these judgments are better explained in terms of the details of the associative mechanisms underlying these judgments and not in terms of the representation of a moral rule. These findings raise a unique concern about the evidential value of our intuitions in these cases—a concern that could not arise from armchair reflection alone. The approach taken in this dissertation illustrates how integrating the results of empirical research contributes to philosophical work in ethical theory. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Christ’s second love command implies not only that people’s volitions and actions be Christ-like, but also that their affective-motivational dispositions be Christ-like. More specifically, I argue that the command implies that people have aretaic obligations to strive to cultivate a merciful heart with the kind of affective depth described by St. Isaac of Syria in his 71st ascetical homily—i.e., one that is disposed to becoming inflamed, such that it is gripped by “strong and vehement (...) mercy.”. (shrink)

"This book presents a collection of chapters that contribute significantly to the field of business ethics by promoting much needed insights into the motives that drive people to act ethically or unethically. It acknowledges that business ethics plays a pivotal role in the way business is conducted and adds insights derived from a behavioral view that will make us more aware of morality and provide recommendations into how we can improve our actions"--Provided by publisher.

IN THIS ESSAY I EXPLORE THE THEME OF MORAL MOTIVATION IN BONAventure's writings on evangelical poverty. By searching for an implied account of moral motivation in these more directly practical writings, I chart three trajectories of exemplification: meditation on the life of the exemplar as student and teacher, meditation on the exemplar as one who responds in a mediating way to social changes, and meditation on the exemplar with respect to future control of one's own environment. (...) By examining each of these trajectories in Bonaventure's thought with reference to the case of voluntary poverty, I offer an account of moral motivation that embraces individual and psychological, as well as historical and institutional, aspects of moral exemplarity. (shrink)

Jacques Lacan was constantly and consistently motivated by the aims of carrying out, improving, and critically understanding psychoanalytic practice and theory. In his work and teaching, he examined and (re)incorporated a number of key experiences, conceptions, and insights from moral life and moral theories into psychoanalysis. -/- One particularly interesting aspect of Lacan’s work, particularly in terms of moral theory, is that while problematizing them, and reconceiving how we must understand them, his approach remains anchored by key (...) themes, concepts, and experiences of older moral theories and perspectives, such as the truth of the human subject, the nature of the good, and the processes and pitfalls of moral development. -/- Three main sets of issues are analysed and discussed in this chapter. First, we examine Lacan’s criticisms of modes and schools of psychoanalysis that converted it into a simplistically moralistic discipline such as ego-psychology. Second, we run over Lacan’s main discussions and partial appropriations of Aristotelian, Kantian, Utilitarian, Sadean, and Judeo-Christian moral perspectives. Third and finally, we go deeper into discussing the implications Lacan’s reinterpretation of selected Freudian concepts bear for ethics, particularly in terms of ethics of subjectivity. Put very briefly, we might say that Lacan is situating a process of becoming-subject within a never-complete field of ethical discourses. (shrink)

Virtue ethics is now well established as a substantive, independent normative theory. It was not always so. The revival of virtue ethics was initially spurred by influential criticisms of other normative theories, especially those made by Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, John McDowell, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Bernard Williams. 1 Because of this heritage, virtue ethics is often associated with anti-theory movements in ethics and more recently, moral particularism. There are, however, quite a few different approaches to ethics that can reasonably (...) claim to be versions of virtue ethics. The predominant strand of virtue ethics is broadly Aristotelian, although some accounts bear little resemblance to Aristotle's. In its most general form, virtue ethics is compatible with a wide range of meta-ethical and normative commitments. This diversity makes it difficult to compare virtue ethics as such with other normative theories. It can also be a challenge to see just what the various versions of virtue ethics have in common with each other. Three major types of virtue ethics are represented in the books by Rosalind Hursthouse, Michael Slote, and Christine Swanton, recommended in the following section. Each of these book sets forward a considerably self-standing form of virtue ethics. The authors differ on central issues such as the relationship between virtue and flourishing and the link between virtuous agents and right or virtuous actions. Unlike Swanton and Slote, Hursthouse defends a version of ethical naturalism that has affinities with theories recently defended by Philippa Foot and Alasdair MacIntyre. 2 Slote's theory is agent-based, meaning that his account derives judgments about the moral status of actions from moral features of agents. Hursthouse and Swanton defend theories according to which the moral status of an action depends on its broader relationship to human flourishing (Hursthouse) or whether it hits the target of a virtue (Swanton). Although these three books presently form the core of contemporary virtue ethics, there are other approaches that might reasonably be described as versions of virtue ethics, such as those presented by Julia Driver, Linda Zagzebski, and Robert Adams. 3 There are also, of course, a large number of articles in which authors defend or criticize tenets that are central to most versions of virtue ethics. Some recent articles on especially important topics are listed in the following section. Current 'hot topics' in virtue ethics include whether its account of right action is adequate and whether virtue ethics is at odds with empirical psychology. Articles on these debates and others are listed in the following section. Author Recommends: Books These three books are foundational works in contemporary virtue ethics, and represent quite different approaches to virtue ethics. For each book, I have also listed an article by the same author in which he or she articulates some similar themes. Those pressed for time or space on a syllabus might start by examining those articles. 1. Hursthouse, Rosalind. On Virtue Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Hursthouse defends a eudaimonistic version of virtue ethics with Aristotelian affinities. *See also Hursthouse, Rosalind. 'Normative Virtue Ethics.' How Should One Live? Ed. Roger Crisp. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. 19–36. 2. Slote, Michael. Morals from Motives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Slote defends a version of virtue ethics based on evaluations of motives, drawing on historical figures like Martineau, Hutcheson, and Hume. Note that this book represents a fairly significant departure from his first book in virtue ethics, From Morality to Virtue (New York: Oxford, 1992). *See also Slote, Michael. 'Agent-Based Virtue Ethics.' Virtue Ethics . Ed. Roger Crisp and Michael Slote. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. 3. Swanton, Christine. Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Swanton defends a pluralistic, non-eudaimonistic version of virtue ethics that draws on influences ranging from Aristotle to Nietzsche to contemporary psychoanalytic theory. *See also Swanton, Christine. 'A Virtue Ethical Account of Right Action.' Ethics 112 (2001): 32–52. Articles The following is a selection of articles that address some of the central and controversial topics within virtue ethics. 1. Annas, Julia. 'Being Virtuous and Doing the Right Thing.' Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 78.2 (2004): 61–75. This article addresses the problem of action guidance and the role that an account of right action should play in virtue ethics. 2. Conly, Sarah. 'Flourishing and the Failure of the Ethics of Virtue.' Midwest Studies in Philosophy Vol. XIII, Ethical Theory: Character and Virtue . Eds. P. French et al. South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988. 83–96. This article articulates the central problems faced by versions of virtue ethics that rely on a conception of human flourishing. 3. Das, Ramon. 'Virtue Ethics and Right Action.' Australasian Journal of Philosophy 81 (2003): 324–39. This article raises objections about insularity and circularity to accounts of right action presented by Hursthouse, Slote, and Swanton. 4. Doris, John M. 'Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics.' Nous 32 (1998): 504–30. This article argues that situationist psychology undermines the concept of a character trait on which virtue ethicists rely. An expanded version of this criticism can be found in Doris, Lack of Character, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 5. Hursthouse, Rosalind. 'Virtue Theory and Abortion.' Philosophy and Public Affairs 20.3 (1991): 223–46. This article argues that virtue ethics is capable of providing action guidance in the difficult problem of abortion. 6. Johnson, Robert N. 'Virtue and Right.' Ethics 113 (2003): 810–34. This article raises several objections against the accounts of right action in virtue ethics, one of which is that they cannot make sense of the rightness of self-improving actions. The criticism is directly primarily at Hursthouse's theory, but Swanton and Slote are discussed as well. 7. Kamtekar, Rachana. 'Situationism and Virtue Ethics on the Content of Our Character.' Ethics 114 (2004): 458–91. This article argues that situationist critiques of virtue ethics rely on a mistaken understanding of virtuous character. 8. Kawall, Jason. 'Virtue Theory and Ideal Observers.' Philosophical Studies 109 (2002): 197– 222. This article argues for an ideal observer-style account of right action in virtue ethics. 9. Nussbaum, Martha. 'Non-Relative Virtues: An Aristotelian Approach.' Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. XIII, Ethical Theory: Character and Virtue . Ed. P. French et al. South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988. 32–53. This article presents a view of the virtues on which the virtues are excellences in spheres of activity. Although the spheres are common to all humans, the manifestation of excellence in a given sphere is subject to cultural variation. 10. Sreenivasan, Gopal. 'Errors about Errors: Virtue Theory and Trait Attribution.' Mind 111 (2002): 47–68. This article addresses the situationist critique of character traits by arguing that virtue ethics does not depend on the concept of a character trait as Doris and others understand it. 11. Stangl, Rebecca. 'A Dilemma for Particularist Virtue Ethics.' Philosophical Quarterly 58 (2008): 665–78. This article addresses the relationship between virtue ethics and radical moral particularism, arguing that the latter may have undesirable consequences for virtue ethicists unless they accept the unity of the virtues. 12. Stohr, Karen. 'Contemporary Virtue Ethics.' Philosophy Compass 1.1 (January 2006): 22–7. This article provides an overview and analysis of contemporary virtue ethics. It includes discussion of main problems and challenges for the future. 13. Stohr, Karen. 'Moral Cacophony: When Continence is a Virtue.' Journal of Ethics 7 (2003): 339–63. This article raises problems for the commonly accepted distinction between virtue and continence, arguing that the mixed emotions normally associated with continence are sometimes characteristic of virtue instead. 14. van Zyl, Liezl. 'Agent-Based Virtue Ethics and the Problem of Action Guidance.' Journal of Moral Philosophy 6 (2009): 50–69. This article defends agent-based virtue ethics against objections that it cannot distinguish agent-appraisal from act-appraisal and that it cannot provide adequate action guidance. Anthologies 1. Crisp, Roger, ed. How Should One Live? Essays on the Virtues. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. This is one of the first virtue ethics anthologies published, and so reflects a correspondingly earlier picture of the field. The essays, however, are important and interesting in their own right, and cover a broad array of topics. 2. Crisp, Roger and Michael Slote, eds. Virtue Ethics . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. This anthology was published over a decade ago and does not capture recent developments in the field. It is, however, an admirably thorough collection of the most influential essays from the early days of virtue ethics, both promoting and criticizing it. 3. Darwall, Stephen, ed. Virtue Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. This anthology is distinctive in that it includes material from Aristotle, Hutcheson, and Hume, along with some central contemporary sources. 4. Walker, Rebecca L. and Philip J. Ivanhoe, eds. Working Virtue. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. This recent anthology focuses on applied virtue ethics and has an excellent selection of essays by influential thinkers on topics including the environment, business, medicine, war, and poverty. Online Sources 'Virtue Ethics', Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/ Entry written by Rosalind Hursthouse and updated in 2007. 'Bibliography on Virtue Ethics', maintained by Jörg Schroth. http://www.ethikseite.de/bib/cvirtue.pdf Extensive list of work published in virtue ethics. Updated regularly, listed in both alphabetical and chronological order, and contains abstracts of papers. 'Janusblog', maintained by Guy Axtell. http://janusblog.squarespace.com/ Blog devoted to current work in virtue ethics and virtue epistemology, although with an emphasis on the latter. It contains spirited discussion among the many contributors, as well as a library of papers. Sample Syllabus This syllabus is for a graduate seminar or intense upper-level undergraduate course. Books for purchase for this course might include the Crisp and Slote anthology, the Walker and Ivanhoe anthology, and Hursthouse's On Virtue Ethics. Week 1: The Roots of Contemporary Virtue Ethics Anscombe, Elizabeth. 'Modern Moral Philosophy' (Crisp and Slote) Foot, Philippa. 'Virtues and Vices' (Crisp and Slote) MacIntyre, Alasdair. 'The Nature of the Virtues' (Crisp and Slote) Week 2: The Roots of Contemporary Virtue Ethics Stocker, Michael. 'The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories' (Crisp and Slote) Williams, Bernard. 'Morality, the Peculiar Institution' (Crisp and Slote) McDowell, John. 'Virtue and Reason' (Crisp and Slote) Week 3: Aristotelian Virtue Ethics Hursthouse, Rosalind. On Virtue Ethics, Part I Hursthouse, Rosalind. 'Practical Wisdom: A Mundane Account.' Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 106.3 (2006): 283–307. Stangl, Rebecca. 'A Dilemma for Particularist Virtue Ethics' Week 4: Aristotelian Virtue Ethics Hursthouse, Rosalind. On Virtue Ethics, Part II Stark, Susan. 'Virtue and Emotion.' Nous 33.5 (2001): 440–55. Stohr, Karen. 'Moral Cacophony: When Continence is a Virtue' Week 5: Aristotelian Virtue Ethics Hursthouse, Rosalind. On Virtue Ethics, Part III Conly, Sarah. 'Flourishing and the Failure of an Ethics of Virtue' Nussbaum, Martha. 'Non-Relative Virtues: An Aristotelian Approach' MacIntyre, Alasdair. Dependent Rational Animals, chapter 10 Week 6: Agent-Based Virtue Ethics Slote, Michael 'Agent-Based Virtue Ethics' (Crisp and Slote) Slote, Michael, Morals from Motives, chapters 1 and 3 Week 7: Pluralistic Virtue Ethics Swanton, Christine. Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View , chapters 3, 4, and 11. Week 8: The Situationist Critique of Virtue Ethics Doris, John. 'Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics' Kamtekar, Rachana. 'Situationism and Virtue Ethics on the Content of Our Character' Sreenivasan, Gopal. 'Errors about Errors: Virtue Theory and Trait Attribution' Merritt, Maria. 'Aristotelian Virtue and the Interpersonal Aspect of Ethical Character.' Journal of Moral Philosophy 6 (2009): 23–49. Week 11: Right Action – Problems Johnson, Robert. 'Virtue and Right' Das, Ramon. 'Virtue Ethics and Right Action' Week 12: Right Action – Virtue Ethics Solutions Annas, Julia. 'Being Virtuous and Doing the Right Thing' van Zyl, Liezl. 'Agent-Based Virtue Ethics and the Problem of Action Guidance' Kawall, Jason. 'Virtue Theory and Ideal Observers' Week 13: Virtue Ethics and Professional Roles Pelligrino, Edmund. 'Professing Medicine, Virtue Based Ethics, and the Retrieval of Professionalism' (Walker and Ivanhoe) Swanton, Christine. 'Virtue Ethics, Role Ethics, and Business Ethics' (Walker and Ivanhoe) Sherman, Nancy. 'Virtue and a Warrier's Anger' (Walker and Ivanhoe) Week 14: Virtue Ethics and the Non-Human World Hursthouse, Rosalind. 'Environmental Virtue Ethics' (Walker and Ivanhoe) Walker, Rebecca. 'The Good Life for Non-Human Animals: What Virtue Requires of Humans' (Walker and Ivanhoe) Focus Questions 1. What is the relationship between virtue and flourishing? Are the virtues necessary for flourishing? Sufficient? 2. Can virtue ethics provide an adequate account of right action? 3. On what concept of a character trait does virtue ethics rely, and does situationist psychology undermine it? 4. Is the project of ethical naturalism a plausible one? To what extent does the success of Aristotelian virtue ethics depend on it? 5. How does virtue ethics affect the way that applied ethics is done? (shrink)

The article is devoted to the analysis of the phenomenon of hatred in philosophic, psychological, and ethical aspects, and of its motivating role during the war. Explicating the philosophical un- derstanding of hatred, the author analyzes the “Treatise of Human Nature” by Hume and ex- plains the structure of hatred as the unity of the elements “cause-object-end” as well as the role of empathy in their genesis. In the article, the author proves that hatred as a passion is not (...) a hu- man instinct or only an emotion, while having an intention towards the understanding of another person and ethical evaluation of his or her motives and actions. The author analyzes the psycho- logical structure of hatred as a durable complex of negative attitudes, motives, emotions, and dispositions of a person formed in individual and social existence. The multilevel way of experience and content of hatred explicated by the range from simple negation of other beings to the ex- pression of moral judgement and demand of the retribution of hurt and struggle against evil. The author analyzes the concept of hatred by R. and K. Sternberg as a negation of intimacy of the other combined with various emotions and commitments of a person to act. Based on that, the article discusses the possibilities of the acquisition of ethical content by hatred and analyzes the typology of hatred by J. Gee (simple hatred, prejudicial hatred, malice and spite, retributive hatred, and moral hatred). The author of the article argues that the higher forms of conscious and controlled hatred possess rational components and moral content. The author concludes that the retributive hatred as a reactive moral attitude towards the blame of the wrongdoer and the de- mand of holding him responsible is an appropriate form of motivation for the resistance during the war and the establishment of peace. This kind of hatred plays a legitimate role in a mature person’s moral life and can be ethically justified. (shrink)

The understanding of value in moral naturalism as a descriptivist endeavor will be analized through an application of the naturalistic fallacy on an evolutive perspective of moral psychology. From a brief analysis of the naturalistic fallacy as proposed by Dall’Agnol, I’ll criticize the author’s application of such on what he refers to as moral naturalism. Contrasting E. Wilson’s sociobiology with R. Triver’s theory of reciprocal altruism I will procure a definition of naturalized ethics by investigating the (...) psychological roots of moral motivation. Once identified the descriptive and non-reductionist aspects of contemporary moral naturalism, the naturalistic fallacy presents itself as unbecoming of its hallmark and metaethical importance, and it becomes clear that a naturalized comprehension of human moral behavior is vital to the understanding of the motivations for action and the conception of value; though weak under a normative perspective. (shrink)

Ex interiore ipso exeas. Preface. This book reconstructs the history of a still open dialectics between several ethoi, that is, shared codes of unwritten rules, moral traditions, or self-aware attempts at reforming such codes, and ethical theories discussing the nature and justification of such codes and doctrines. Its main claim is that this history neither amounts to a triumphal march of reason dispelling the mist of myth and bigotry nor to some other one-way process heading to some pre-established (...) goal, but instead to a chain of controversies where the partners’ will to win unintentionally yields a wealth of insights on human existence that has still something to teach us. -/- 1. The Hellenic moral tradition. -/- Two different traditions of morality in vi-v century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. -/- 2. Plato and the Good. -/- Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates rejoinder to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 3. Aristotle and practical philosophy. -/- Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistency in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater families, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics, is illustrated. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexes, or ‘dispositions’. Prudence, or better, practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with boùleusis or deliberation is discussed, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 4. Cynics and Stoics: ethics as therapy. -/- The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place that was given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of the science of well-being aiming, more than pleasure understood as in the popular view, the reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Roman and Imperial Moralists. -/- The chapter is dedicated to the reconstruction of a particular kind of literature, whose specific features have long been under-stressed, namely the Roman and Imperial moral literature. Cicero is treated at some length, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is given pride of place, stressing the novelty of his approach to ethics as cognitive therapy, in this case just following an already existing new wave of interest after nineteenth-century oblivion justified by alleged lack of authentic ‘philosophical’ character. -/- 6. The Hebrew moral tradition. -/- A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torah (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Levitic is stressed as the turning point when the stress on mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, starts being combined with legal tradition yielding the change in the sensibility of the Second Temple time. -/- 7. Second Temple Judaism. -/- This chapter describes the Long March leading from the post-exile Zadokite restoration to the first-century aevi vulgaris. The first topic reconstructed is the Zadokite theology of the double retribution. The second is the alternative Enochic tradition consistently rejecting the central role of the Temple, the Priesthood and worship as atonement for sins and offering as an alternative God’s unlimited mercy and preaching mercy, not sacrifice as the way of behaving requested by God. Wisdom literature, the third subject discusses, is a kind of third way, on the one hand increasingly critical towards the double retribution and ruling theology’s optimism facing the world as it is and on the other mocking at the Enochic current as a band of dreamers and visionaries. The third way consists in disenchantment facing the word as it is combined with a refusal of vain and childish hope of prizes for the righteous, suggesting instead the leading idea of right deeds for righteousness’s sake. Rabbi Hillel, Rabbi Yeshua and Philo of Alexandria are described as the three leading figures at the culminating point of such process of emergence of a new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This starting point consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, whose meaning is, arguably, more consistent than a long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine made us believe. And Christian morality, vis-à-vis allegedly legalist ‘Ancient Testament’ teachings, is less of a novelty than most early Christian writers announced. -/- 8. Talmudic moral doctrines and proto-Christian paraenesis. -/- The first three sections examine the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirke Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deot, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexes and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was "the tool by which the world was built"; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous, but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The last two sections examine first the various Christian currents and then Gnostic para-Christian or non-Christian currents as well as Manicheism. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure, purest Judaism. The last section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manicheism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. -/- 9. Christianity as “philosophy”. -/- The chapter reconstructs the stormy story of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and several rhetorical topics from the Stoic and Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua himself had been influenced by cynical preachers, is a proof of the necessity to translate the original Christian message in a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 10. Ethics in the Arabic-Islamic Philosophy. -/- The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on the retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince, had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries, a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with the disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 11. Ethics in the Jewish philosophy. -/- The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place for the first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed too a few traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Tora and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirke Avot could be translated. -/- 12. The practical philosophy revival in Latin Europe. -/- A reconstruction is carried out of a fresh start of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium rescuing a Platonic and Augustinian legacy, with Anselm and Peter Abelard. In this phase remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions, gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of a full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. -/- 13. Scholastic practical philosophy: Thomas Aquinas. -/- Aquinas’s ethics is theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to the repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave pure nature incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too ambitious, and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Prima Secundae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas was able to solve the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from the knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethics, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of the death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not the Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is no way an ethical ‘absolutism’, as both the traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularists tend to believe, but rather an ethic of prudential judgment on the individual case. Exceptions to this approach – or better the result of logical fallacies – are provided by the thesis of the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of so-called intrinsically evil acts, a thesis that would simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences that Thomas did not live long enough to draw. -/- 14. Scholastic practical philosophy: John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. A reconstruction is carried out of the ethical doctrines by both most authoritative Franciscan doctors. Their continuity with Aquinas is vindicated against prejudice carried by centuries of polemics within the Catholic Church and tendentious disparaging of both as forerunners of execrable Reformation. Besides aspects of continuity, also the important novelties are illustrated, first John’s abandonment of Aquinas’s and Augustine’s eudemonism, asserting righteousness for righteousness’s sake, and then William’s explicit defence of the philosopher’s virtues, that is, natural morality, and his solution to the dilemma of God’s omnipotence and the universal validity of natural law extending to God himself. -/- 15. Aristotelianism interpreted by the Magistri Artium. -/- A reconstruction of the until recently forgotten ethical doctrines by the Parisian Magistri Artium, falsely depicted as ‘Averroists’ and either deprecated as heretics or mistaken for predecessors of modern secularism. In fact, they illustrate a view of ‘natural’ virtue as may be understood by human reason without the assistance by Revelation. -/- Etiamsi daremus Deum non esse. Intermediate considerations. Three considerations may be suggested by the story told in the book. The first one is that intellectual histories have been mounted in the past with the same state of mind as one may mount a war chariot. Such constructions are not very helpful as tools for understanding the past. Wars waged in the past have left the field obstructed by ruins not easy to remove even by those historians who have animated by an impartial academic motivation. They have been influenced too by consequences of past emphasis on some authors and damnatio capitis suffered by others, by stratifications left on sources by secondary literature and translations, by allotment of originally close sources to different literary genres, by the monopolization of religious texts by churches with full cooperation by secular scholars who still fear contamination. The second one is that aware or unaware ethnocentrism has carried various calamities to our comprehension of the past. Their last vestiges have surfaced again in the semi-scholarly discussion on the idea of Europe occasioned by the debate on a project of a European Constitution. Mention of Europe’s Christian roots has been the clumsiest move. Proclamations of such roots were so obvious in what they affirmed as they were totally off-path concerning what they omitted, namely that he modern European moral tradition included legacies from Middle-Eastern wisdom, Hellenic philosophy, Roman Imperial legal literature, and, besides, a Jewish legacy in turn incorporating other more ancient Middle-Eastern legacies and which has been partly conveyed by Christianity. And the Islamic-Arabic philosophy too, in so far it made the Nicomachean Ethics available to Latin Christian scholars, is one more of Europe’s roots. The third is that religious traditionalists and secularist fundamentalists have gone hand in hand for a couple of centuries in either extolling or deprecating the allegedly Modern idea of Ethics without God, first formulated by Hugo Grotius with the claim that natural law would still be valid ‘etiamsi daremus – quod sine summo scelere dari potest – Deum non esse’. The facts are, firstly, that this is not an irreligious claim and Grotius was just a pious and meek Christian and, secondly, that it is not a ‘modern’ claim but rather one more formulation of the claim that there is a natural morality, independent of divine revelation, a claim shared by Moshe ben Maimon, Aquinas and William of Ockham. -/- . (shrink)

What drives us to do good things, and to avoid doing bad? This book offers an integrative examination of the role of motivation in shaping moral cognition, judgement, and behavior.

Autonomy has been central to moral and political philosophy for millenia, and has been positioned as a critical aspect of both justice and wellbeing. Research in psychology supports this position, providing empirical evidence that autonomy is critical to motivation, personal growth and psychological wellness. Responsible AI will require an understanding of, and ability to effectively design for, human autonomy (rather than just machine autonomy) if it is to genuinely benefit humanity. Yet the effects on human autonomy of (...) digital experiences are neither straightforward nor consistent, and are complicated by commercial interests and tensions around compulsive overuse. This multi-layered reality requires an analysis that is itself multidimensional and that takes into account human experience at various levels of resolution. We borrow from HCI and psychological research to apply a model (“METUX”) that identifies six distinct spheres of technology experience. We demonstrate the value of the model for understanding human autonomy in a technology ethics context at multiple levels by applying it to the real-world case study of an AI-enhanced video recommender system. In the process we argue for the following three claims: 1) There are autonomy-related consequences to algorithms representing the interests of third parties, and they are not impartial and rational extensions of the self, as is often perceived; 2) Designing for autonomy is an ethical imperative critical to the future design of responsible AI; and 3) Autonomy-support must be analysed from at least six spheres of experience in order to approriately capture contradictory and downstream effects. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.1 (2001) 143-144 [Access article in PDF] Scott MacDonald and Eleonore Stump, editors. Aquinas's Moral Theory. Essays in Honor of Norman Kretzmann. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. Pp. vi i+ 291. $49.95 Although medieval philosophy generally hasn't received much attention from Anglo-American philosophers in the last few centuries, the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas has long been the exception to that rule. In (...) one sense, then, the collection of essays in Aquinas's Moral Theory fits into a long-standing and rich tradition of critical analysis and thoughtful reconstruction. In another sense, however, the book treads ground that is, if not entirely new, then at least not well worn. Most treatments of Aquinas's ethics discuss it in separation from the rest of his work. Aquinas himself, however, sees his moral theory as intrinsically tied up with other aspects of his philosophical system, such as his metaphysics and his philosophical theology. Aquinas's Moral Theory argues that fully understanding Aquinas's ethics, then, requires attention to the way in which "his interests in moral issues often flow into and inform and shape his work in other areas, just as his moral reflections are shaped and grounded by them" (3).MacDonald and Stump have drawn together a group of ten essays by respected scholars in medieval philosophy—essays written with the explicit intent of examining Aquinas's moral theory both in its own right and in light of Aquinas's broader philosophical system. Not surprisingly, the papers in the book range over a wide number of philosophical and theological topics. Moreover, they explore connections not only within Aquinas's work, but between Aquinas and Aristotle, between Aquinas and his contemporaries, and between Aquinas's thought and problems in contemporary philosophy. [End Page 143] It's useful, then, that the papers are grouped under three main headings: Moral Theory and Moral Theology, Moral Psychology and Practical Reason, and Moral Theory in Philosophy of Language and Metaphysics.Perhaps the most striking feature of this particular collection of essays is the diversity of scholarship it represents. Although the ten essays contribute to the same larger project, the individual authors use at least three distinct approaches in accomplishing that goal: for example, Anthony Kenny ("Aquinas on Aristotelian Happiness") and Mark Jordan ("Ideals of Scientia Moralis and the Invention of the Summa theologiae") examine motivations for some of the distinctive innovations in Aquinas's moral thought. By contrast, the essays by Jan Aertsen ("Thomas Aquinas on the Good: The Relation between Metaphysics and Ethics"), E. J. Ashworth ("Aquinas on Significant Utterance: Interjection, Blasphemy, Prayer"), John Boler ("Aquinas on Exceptions in Natural Law"), and Paul Spade ("Degrees of Being, Degrees of Goodness: Aquinas on Levels of Reality") seek primarily to raise or resolve difficulties within Aquinas's philosophical system. Finally, Peter King ("Aquinas on the Passions"), Scott MacDonald ("Practical Reasoning and Reasons-Explanations: Aquinas's Account of Reason's Role in Action"), Gareth Matthews ("Saint Thomas and the Principle of Double Effect"), and Eleonore Stump ("Wisdom: Will, Belief, and Moral Goodness") consider what light Aquinas has to shed on issues of particular interest to contemporary philosophers.The rich variety of viewpoints and interpretations that constitute one of the main strengths of this volume also constitutes one of its main weaknesses, however. The difference between the approaches of, say, Stump, Jordan, and Aertsen are almost dizzying. So the collection of essays doesn't yield a unified picture of Aquinas's moral theory; readers looking for an introduction to Aquinas's ethics or for a comprehensive overview of its relation to his broader metaphysical system will be disappointed. In particular, the papers in the section devoted to moral theory in philosophy of language and metaphysics raise more questions than they answer; the reader is left wondering what further consequences the provocative claims made there have for Aquinas's ethics.Still, this represents not as much a flaw in the book itself as it does a conscious call to further scholarship. As Aertsen and Spade both remark... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Go's Command by John HareJoshua T. MauldinGod's Command John Hare OXFORD: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2015. 368 pp. $110.00Divine command theory has received a significant amount of high-powered philosophical attention in recent years, notably in works by C. Stephen Evans, Robert Adams, and Philip Quinn. John Hare's book God's Command joins this [End Page 197] discussion and advances it by attending not only to the Christian tradition but also (...) to Judaism and Islam, and by engaging with evolutionary psychology. Central to Hare's account of divine command theory is the claim that human nature is a "mixture," characterized by the dual affections for advantage and for justice. Against theories that assume a single-source account of motivation (e.g., eudaimonism), Hare contends that human beings experience the pull of competing motivations, toward morality and self-interest. Any adequate moral theory will account for both motivations and indicate how they can be reconciled. Hare contends that his version of divine command theory is up to this task.It is on this point that Hare most clearly adheres to his claim at the beginning and the end of God's Command that the book "defends the thesis that what makes something morally obligatory is that God commands it, and what makes something morally wrong is that God commands us not to do it" (1). Elsewhere in the book, this kind of philosophical defense recedes. After an initial chapter describing divine command theory in general, and two chapters on eudaimonism and naturalistic deductivism, Hare provides three chapters illustrating how divine command theory is worked out by representative thinkers in the traditions of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, followed by a chapter on how divine command theory can accommodate the findings of evolutionary psychology. The book ends with a summary, showing how the various pieces of the book, which at times read like a series of independent essays, constitute a single picture. In these latter chapters, Hare seems to leave behind the philosophical defense of divine command theory, turning instead toward a discussion of what kind of divine command theory theists should adopt, given their predetermined commitment to theism and divine command theory in general.In one sense, this shift can be understood in terms of audience. Initially, Hare addresses anyone interested in ethics. By the second half of the book, Hare has shifted to convincing theistic ethicists that the best way to hold together their various commitments is to adopt a divine command theory, as opposed to other options such as Eudaimonism. This shift arises as an attempt to fend off a potential criticism of divine command theory—the possibility that people will do terrible things in the name of God's command. Hare suggests that Kant provides one solution to this problem, which is that if we think God is commanding us to do something that is at odds with practical reason, we ought to doubt that God is really commanding us to do this thing. Hare is sympathetic to Kant here, but he also seems to think that Kant's solution would undermine his own project, insofar as it makes God's command appear superfluous. Hare's alternative approach involves acknowledging that religious traditions possess safeguards to protect against the possibility that appeal to a divine command is used to justify horrendous evils. For Hare, the Abrahamic traditions provide historical evidence that the benefits of divine command ethics can be enjoyed without accepting the apparently bad aspects. [End Page 198]Hare himself notes that there is a kind of circularity here. He has made the point as a kind of hypothetical: If you already believe in God as the divine commander, and adhere to one of the Abrahamic traditions, you will possess resources to overcome this problem. As he admits at the end of chapter 5, he has not addressed the question of why someone who does not already believe in God as the source of morality ought to begin to do so. Nevertheless, the question of whether thinkers within religious traditions have provided compelling answers to the epistemological problems at the center of divine command theory will be of interest to... (shrink)

There is growing concern that a global economic system fueled predominately by financial incentives may not maximize human flourishing and social welfare externalities. If so, this presents a challenge of how to get economic actors to adopt a more virtuous motivational mindset. Relying on historical, psychological, and philosophical research, we show how such a mindset can be instilled. First, we demonstrate that historically, financial self-interest has never in fact been the only guiding motive behind free markets, but that markets themselves (...) are representations of our individual and collective moral identities. Building on this understanding, we review the research on how economic incentives crowd out virtue-oriented concerns. We then introduce the concept of moral self-awareness (MSA), an evolving mindset informed by reflection on moral identity, namely what one’s actions say about oneself given the impacts on others or society that one’s action may effect. MSA comprises three fundamental aspects of virtue-oriented reasoning: pride, shame, and guilt. Finally, we offer a four-stage model anchored in systems theory, yielding ever more refined motivating strategies for maximizing human flourishing and social welfare externalities. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 66–75 ~*~ We’re Doomed. Pessimism is the night-side of thought, a melodrama of the futility of the brain, a poetry written in the graveyard of philosophy. Pessimism is a lyrical failure of philosophical thinking, each attempt at clear and coherent thought, sullen and submerged in the hidden joy of its own futility. The closest pessimism comes to philosophical argument is the droll and laconic “We’ll never make it,” or simply: “We’re doomed.” Every effort doomed to failure, every (...) project doomed to incompletion, every life doomed to be unlived, every thought doomed to be unthought. Pessimism is the lowest form of philosophy, frequently disparaged and dismissed, merely the symptom of a bad attitude. No one ever needs pessimism, in the way that one needs optimism to inspire one to great heights and to pick oneself up, in the way one needs constructive criticism, advice and feedback, inspirational books or a pat on the back. No one needs pessimism, though I like to imagine the idea of a pessimist activism. No one needs pessimism, and yet everyone—without exception—has, at some point in their lives, had to confront pessimism, if not as a philosophy then as a grievance—against one’s self or others, against one’s surroundings or one’s life, against the state of things or the world in general. There is little redemption for pessimism, and no consolation prize. Ultimately, pessimism is weary of everything and of itself. Pessimism is the philosophical form of disenchantment—disenchantment as chanting, a chant, a mantra, a solitary, monophonic voice rendered insignificant by the intimate immensity surrounding it. In pessimism, the first axiom is a long, low, funereal sigh. ~*~ We’re Still Doomed. No one has time for pessimism. After all, there are only so many hours in a day. Whatever our temperament, happy or sad, engaged or disengaged, we know pessimism when we hear it. The pessimist is usually understood as the complainer, forever pointing out what is wrong with the world without ever once offering a solution. But more often than not pessimists are the quietest of philosophers, submerging their own sighs within the lethargy of discontent. What little sound it makes is of interest to no one—“I’ve heard it all before,” “tell me something I don’t know,” sound and fury, signifying nothing. In raising problems without solutions, in posing questions without answers, in retreating to the hermetic, cavernous abode of complaint, pessimism is guilty of that most inexcusable of Occidental crimes—the crime of not pretending it’s for real. Pessimism fails to live up to the most basic tenet of philosophy—the “as if.” Think as if it will be helpful, act as if it will make a difference, speak as if there is something to say, live as if you are not, in fact, being lived by some murmuring non-entity both shadowy and muddied. Had it more self-assurance and better social skills, pessimism would turn its disenchantment into a religion, possibly calling itself The Great Refusal. But there is a negation in pessimism that refuses even such a Refusal, an awareness that, from the start, it has already failed, and that the culmination of all that is, is that all is for naught. Pessimism tries very hard to present itself in the low, sustained tones of a Requiem Mass, or the tectonic rumbling of Tibetan chant. But it frequently lets loose dissonant notes at once plaintive and pathetic. Often, its voice cracks, its weighty words abruptly reduced to mere shards of guttural sound. ~*~ Maybe It’s Not So Bad, After All. If we know pessimism when we hear it, this is because we’ve heard it all before—and we didn’t need to hear it in the first place. Life is hard enough. What you need is a change of attitude, a new outlook, a shift in perspective... a cup of coffee. If we have no ears for pessimism, this is because it is always reducible to something as reliably mutable as a voice. If pessimism is so frequently disparaged, it is because it brings everyone down, determined as it is to view each day as a bad day, if only by virtue of the fact that it is not yet a bad day. For pessimism the world is brimming with negative possibility, the collision of a bad mood with an impassive world. In fact, pessimism is the result of a confusion between the world and a statement about the world, a confusion that also prevents it from fully entering the hallowed halls of philosophy. If pessimism is so often dismissed, this is because it is often impossible to separate a “bad mood” from a philosophical proposition (and do not all philosophies stem from a bad mood?) The very term “pessimism” suggests a school of thought, a movement, even a community. But pessimism always has a membership of one—maybe two. Ideally, of course, it would have a membership of none, with only a scribbled, illegible note left behind by someone long forgotten. But this seems unrealistic, though one can always hope. ~*~ Anatomy of Pessimism. Though it may locate itself at the margins of philosophy, pessimism is as much subject to philosophical analysis as any other form of thought. Pessimism’s lyricism of failure gives it the structure of music. What time is to the music of sorrow, reason is to a philosophy of the worst. Pessimism’s two major keys are moral and metaphysical pessimism, its subjective and objective poles, an attitude towards the world and a claim about the world. For moral pessimism, it is better not to have been born at all; for metaphysical pessimism, this is the worst of all possible worlds. For moral pessimism the problem is the solipsism of human beings, the world made in our own image, a world-for-us. For metaphysical pessimism, the problem is the solipsism of the world, objected and projected as a world-in-itself. Both moral and metaphysical pessimism are compromised philosophically; moral pessimism by its failure to locate the human within a larger context, and metaphysical pessimism by its failure to recognize the complicity in the very claim of realism. This is how pessimism makes its music of the worst, a generalized misanthropy without the anthropos . Pessimism crystallizes around this futility—it is its amor fati , rendered as musical form. ~*~ Melancholy of Anatomy. There is a logic of pessimism that is fundamental to its suspicion of philosophical system. Pessimism involves a statement about a condition . In pessimism each statement boils down to an affirmation or a negation, just as any condition boils down to the best or the worst. With Schopenhauer, that arch-pessimist, the thinker for whom the philosopher and the curmudgeon perfectly overlap, we see a no-saying to the worst, a no-saying that secretly covets a yes-saying (through asceticism, mysticism, quietism), even if this hidden yes-saying is a horizon at the limits of comprehension. With Nietzsche comes the pronouncement of a Dionysian pessimism, a pessimism of strength or joy, a yes-saying to the worst, a yes-saying to this world as it is. And with Cioran yet another variation, futile yet lyrical, a no-saying to the worst, and a further no-saying to the possibility of any other world, in here or out there. With Cioran one approaches, but never reaches, an absolute no-saying, a studied abandonment of pessimism itself. The logic of pessimism moves through three refusals: a no-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-for-us, or Schopenhauer’s tears); a yes-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-in-itself, or Nietzsche’s laughter); and a no-saying to the for-us and the in-itself (a double refusal, or Cioran’s sleep). Crying, laughing, sleeping—what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent? ~*~ Cosmic Pessimism. Both moral and metaphysical pessimism point to another kind, a pessimism that is neither subjective nor objective, neither for-us nor in-itself, and instead a pessimism of the world-without-us. We could call this a cosmic pessimism ... but this sounds too majestic, too full of wonder, too much the bitter aftertaste of the Great Beyond. Words falter. And so do ideas. And so we have a cosmic pessimism, a pessimism that is first and last a pessimism about cosmos , about the necessity and possibility of order. The contours of cosmic pessimism are a drastic scaling-up or scaling-down of the human point of view, the unhuman orientation of deep space and deep time, and all of this shadowed by an impasse, a primordial insignificance, the impossibility of ever adequately accounting for one’s relationship to thought—all that remains of pessimism is the desiderata of affects—agonistic, impassive, defiant, reclusive, filled with sorrow and flailing at that architectonic chess match called philosophy, a flailing that pessimism tries to raise to the level of an art form (though what usually results is slapstick). ~*~ Song of Futility. An ethics of futility pervades pessimism. Futility, however, is different from fatality, and different again from simple failure (though failure is never simple). Failure is a breakage within the heart of relations, a fissure between cause and effect, a fissure hastily covered over by trying and trying again. With failure, there is always plenty of blame to go around; it’s not my fault, it’s a technical difficulty, it’s a miscommunication. For the pessimist, failure is a question of “when,” not “if”—failure as a metaphysical principle. Everything withers and passes into an obscurity blacker than night, everything from the melodramatic decline of a person’s life to the banal flickering moments that constitute each day. Everything that is done undone, everything said or known destined for a kind of stellar oblivion. When scaled up in this way, failure becomes fatality. Fatality is the hermeticism of cause and effect. In fatality, everything you do, whatever you do, always leads to a certain end, and ultimately to the end—though that end, or the means to that end, remain shrouded in obscurity. Nothing you do makes a difference because everything you do makes a difference. Hence the effects of your actions are hidden from you, even as you deceive yourself into thinking that, at last, this time you will outwit the order of things. By having a goal, planning ahead, and thinking things through carefully, we attempt, in a daily Prometheanism, to turn fatality to our advantage, to gain a glimpse of an order that seems buried deeper and deeper in the fabric of the universe. But even fatality has its comforts. The chain of cause and effect may be hidden from us, but that’s just because disorder is the order we don’t yet see; it’s just complex, distributed, and requires advanced mathematics. Fatality still clings to the sufficiency of everything that exists... When fatality relinquishes even this idea, it becomes futility. Futility arises out of the grim suspicion that, behind the shroud of causality we drape over the world, there is only the indifference of what exists or doesn’t exist; whatever you do ultimately leads to no end, an irrevocable chasm between thought and world. Futility transforms the act of thinking into a zero-sum game. ~*~ Song of the Worst. At the center of pessimism lies the term pessimus , “the worst,” a term as relative as it is absolute. The worst is about as bad as it gets, “the worst” as “the best” in disguise, shrouded by the passage of time or the twists and turns of fortune. For the pessimist, “the worst” is the propensity for suffering that gradually occludes each living moment, until it eclipses it entirely, overlapping perfectly in death... which, for the pessimist, is no longer “the worst.” Pessimism is marked by an unwillingness to move beyond “the worst,” something only partially attributable to a lack in motivation. In pessimism “the worst” is the ground that gives way beneath every existent—things could be worse, and , things could be better. “The worst” invariably implies a value judgment, one made based on scant evidence and little experience; in this way, pessimism’s greatest nemesis is its moral orientation. Pessimism’s propositions have all the gravitas of a bad joke. Perhaps this is why the true optimists are the most severe pessimists—they are optimists that have run out of options. They are almost ecstatically inundated by the worst. Such an optimism is the only possible outcome of a prolonged period of suffering, physical or metaphysical, intellectual or spiritual. But does this not also describe all the trials and tribulations of each day—in short, of “life?” It seems that sooner or later we are all doomed to become optimists of this sort (the most depressing of thoughts...) ~*~ Song of Doom. Rather than serving as a cause for despair, gloom and doom are the forms of consolation for any pessimist philosophy. Neither quite affects nor quite concepts, gloom and doom transform pessimism into a mortification of philosophy. Doom is not just the sense that all things will turn out badly, but that all things inevitably come to an end, irrespective of whether or not they really do come to an end. What emerges from doom is a sense of the unhuman as an attractor, a horizon towards which the human is fatally drawn. Doom is humanity given over to unhumanity in an act of crystalline self-abnegation. Gloom is not simply the anxiety that precedes doom. Gloom is literally atmospheric, climate as much as impression, and if people are also gloomy, this is simply the by-product of an anodyne atmosphere that only incidentally involves human beings. Gloom is more climatological than psychological, the stuff of dim, hazy, overcast skies, of ruins and overgrown tombs, of a misty, lethargic fog that moves with the same languorousness as our own crouched and sullen listening to a disinterested world. In a sense, gloom is the counterpoint to doom—what futility is to the former, fatality is to the latter. Doom is marked by temporality—all things precariously drawn to their end—whereas gloom is the austerity of stillness, all things sad, static, and suspended, a meandering smoke hovering over cold lichen stones and damp fir trees. If doom is the terror of temporality and death, then gloom is the horror of a hovering stasis that is life. At times I like to imagine that this realization alone is the thread that connects the charnel ground Aghori and the graveyard poets. ~*~ Song of Spite. There is an intolerance in pessimism that knows no bounds. In pessimism spite begins by fixing on a particular object of spite—someone one hardly knows, or someone one knows too well; a spite for this person or a spite for all of humanity; a spectacular or a banal spite; a spite for a noisy neighbor, a yapping dog, a battalion of strollers, the meandering idiot walking in front of you on their smart phone, large loud celebrations, traumatic injustices anywhere in the world regurgitated as media blitz, spite for the self-absorbed and overly performative people talking way too loud at the table next to you, technical difficulties and troubleshooting, the reduction of everything to branding, spite of the refusal to admit one’s own errors, of self-help books, of people who know absolutely everything and make sure to tell you, of all people, all living beings, all things, the world, the spiteful planet, the inanity of existence... Spite is the motor of pessimism because it is so egalitarian, so expansive, it runs amok, stumbling across intuitions that can only half-heartedly be called philosophical. Spite lacks the confidence and the clarity of hatred, but it also lacks the almost cordial judgment of dislike. For the pessimist, the smallest detail can be an indication of a metaphysical futility so vast and funereal that it eclipses pessimism itself—a spite that pessimism carefully places beyond the horizon of intelligibility, like the experience of dusk, or like the phrase, “it is raining jewels and daggers.” ~*~ Song of Sleep. A paraphrase of Schopenhauer: what death is for the organism, sleep is for the individual. Pessimists sleep not because they are depressed, but because for them sleep is a form of ascetic practice. Sleep is the askesis of pessimism. If, while sleeping, we have a bad dream, we abruptly wake up, and suddenly the horrors of the night vanish. There is no reason to think that the same does not happen with the bad dream we call “life.” ~*~ Song of Sorrow. Nietzsche, commenting on pessimism, once castigated Schopenhauer for taking things too lightly. He writes: ...Schopenhauer, though a pessimist, really —played the flute. Every day, after dinner: one should read his biography on that. And incidentally: a pessimist, one who denies God and the world but comes to a stop before morality—who affirms morality and plays the flute... what? Is that really—a pessimist? We know that Schopenhauer did possess a collection of instruments, and we also know that Nietzsche himself composed music. There is no reason to think that either of them would ever banish music from the Republic of philosophy. But Nietzsche’s jibes at Schopenhauer are as much about music as they are about pessimism. For the pessimist who says no to everything and yet finds comfort in music, the no-saying of pessimism can only be a weak way of saying yes—the weightiest statement undercut by the flightiest of replies. The least that Schopenhauer could’ve done is to play the bass. I’m not a big fan of the flute, or, for that matter, wind instruments generally. But what Nietzsche forgets is the role that the flute has historically played in Greek tragedy. In tragedy, the flute ( aulos ) is not an instrument of levity and joy, but of solitude and sorrow. The Greek aulos not only expresses the grief of tragic loss, but it does so in a way that renders weeping and singing inseparable from each other. The classicist Nicole Loraux calls this the mourning voice . Set apart from the more official civic rituals of funerary mourning, the mourning voice of Greek tragedy constantly threatens to dissolve song into wailing, music into moaning, and the voice into a primordial, disarticulate anti-music. The mourning voice delineates all the forms of suffering—tears, weeping, sobbing, wailing, moaning, and the convulsions of thought reduced to an elemental unintelligibility. In the collapsed space between the voice that speaks and the voice that sings, pessimism discovers its mourning voice. Pessimism: the failure of sound and sense, the disarticulation of phone and logos . Have we rescued Schopenhauer from Nietzsche? Probably not. Perhaps Schopenhauer played the flute to remind himself of the real function of the mourning voice—sorrow, sighs, and moaning rendered indistinguishable from music, the crumbling of the human into the unhuman. Failure par excellence of pessimism. ~*~ Song of Nothing. In Buddhist thought, the First Noble Truth of existence is encapsulated in the Pali term dukkha , conventionally translated as “suffering,” “sorrow,” or “misery.” The Buddhist teachings are clear, however, that this is an objective claim, and not simply one point of view among others. Existence is suffering and sorrow—and yet this is not, the teachings tell us, a pessimistic attitude. It is likely that Schopenhauer, reading the Buddhist texts available to him, recognized some filiation with the concept of dukkha . But dukkha is a multi-faceted term. There is, certainly, dukkha in the usual sense of the suffering, strife, and loss associated with living a life. But this is, in turn, dependent on the finitude and temporality of dukkha , existence as determined by impermanence and imperfection. And this ultimately points to the way in which both suffering and finitude are grounded by the paradoxical groundlessness of dukkha as a metaphysical principle—the insubstantiality and the emptiness of all that is. Beyond what is worse to me, beyond a world ordered for the worst, there is the emptiness of dukkha as an impersonal suffering... the tears of the cosmos. In this context, it is easy to see how Schopenhauer’s pessimism attempts to compress all the aspects of dukkha into a nothingness at the core of existence, a Willlessness coursing through the Will. Though one thing for certain is that with Schopenhauer we do not find the “ever-smiling” countenance of Buddhism—or do we? The texts of the Pali Canon also contain lists of the different types of happiness—including the happiness of renunciation and the strange happiness of detachment. But Buddhism considers even the different types of happiness as part of dukkha , in this final sense of nothingness or emptiness. Perhaps Schopenhauer understood Buddhism better than he is usually given credit for. Thus the experiment of Schopenhauer’s philosophy—the point at which a Western pessimus and an Eastern dukkha overlap or exchange glances. Empty sorrow, a lyricism of indifference. The result is a strange, and ultimately untenable, nocturnal form of Buddhism. ~*~ Cioran once called music a “physics of tears.” If this is true, then perhaps metaphysics is its commentary. Or its apology. ~*~ Pessimism would be more mystical were it not for its defeatism. Mysticism is much too proactive for the pessimist, and pessimism too impassive even for the mystic. At the same time, there is something enviable about mysticism—despite its sufferings. There is a sense in which pessimists are really failed mystics. ~*~ You, the Night, and the Music. In a suggestive passage, Schopenhauer once noted that, “music is the melody to which the world is the text." Given Schopenhauer’s view on life—that life is suffering, that human life is absurd, that the nothingness before my birth is equal to the nothingness after my death—given all this, one wonders what kind of music Schopenhauer had in mind when he described music as the melody to which the world is text—was it opera, a Requiem Mass, a madrigal, or perhaps a drinking song? Or something like Eine kleine Nachtmusik , a little night music for the twilight of thought, a sullen nocturne for the night-side of logic, an era of sad wings sung by a solitary banshee. Perhaps the music Schopenhauer had in mind is music eliminated to non-music. A whisper would suffice. Perhaps a sigh of fatigue or resignation, perhaps a moan of despair or sorrow. Perhaps a sound just articulate enough that it could be heard to dissipate. ~*~ Teach me to laugh through tears. ~*~ Pessimism always falls short of being philosophical. My back aches, my knees hurt, I couldn’t sleep last night, I’m stressed-out, and I think I’m finally coming down with something. Pessimism abjures all pretenses towards system—towards the purity of analysis and the dignity of critique. We didn’t really think we could figure it out, did we? It was just passing time, taking a piss, something to do, a bold gesture put forth in all its fragility, according to rules that we have agreed to forget that we made up in the first place. Every thought marked by a shadowy incomprehension that precedes it, and a futility that undermines it. That pessimism speaks, in whatever voice, is the singing testimony to this futility and this incomprehension—take a chance and step outside, lose some sleep and say you tried... ~*~ Is there a music of pessimism? And would such a music be audible? ~*~ The impact of music on a person compels them to put their experience into words. When this fails, the result is a faltering of thought and language that is itself a kind of music. Cioran writes: “Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.” ~*~ If a thinker like Schopenhauer has any redeeming qualities, it is that he identified the great lie of Western culture—the preference for existence over non-existence. As he notes: “If we knocked on the graves and asked the dead whether they would like to rise again, they would shake their heads.” In Western cultures it is commonly accepted that one celebrates birth and mourns death. But there must be a mistake here. Wouldn’t it make more sense to mourn birth and celebrate death? Strange though, because the mourning of birth would, presumably, last the entirety of that person’s life, so that mourning and living would the be same thing. ~*~ To the musical idea of the harmony of the universe corresponds the philosophical principle of sufficient reason. Like the music of mourning, pessimism gives voice to the inevitable breakdown of word and song. In this way, music is the overtone of thought. ~*~ The Patron Saints of Pessimism. The patron saints of pessimism watch over suffering. Laconic and sullen, the patron saints of pessimism never seem to do a good job at protecting, interceding, or advocating for those who suffer. Perhaps they need us more than we need them. Lest we forget, there do exist patron saints of philosophy, but their stories are not happy ones. There is, for instance, the fourth century Saint Catherine of Alexandria, or Catherine of the Wheel, named after the torture device used on her. A precocious fourteen year old scholar, Catherine was subject to continual persecution. After all forms of torture failed—including the “breaking wheel”—the emperor finally settled for her decapitation, a violent yet appropriate reminder of the protector of philosophers. There are also patron saints of music and musicians, but theirs too are sad stories. In the second century, Saint Cecilia was also subject to persecution and torture. As she knelt to receive the blade that would separate her head from her body, she ardently sang a song to God. It took three attempts before she was fully decapitated, all the while she continued, perhaps miraculously, to sing. Does pessimism not deserve its own patron saints, even if they are unworthy of martyrdom? But in our search, even the most ardent nay-sayers frequently lapse into brief moments of enthusiasm—Pascal’s love of solitude, Leopardi’s love of poetry, Schopenhauer’s love of music, Nietzsche’s love of Schopenhauer, and so on. Should one then focus on individual works of pessimism? We could include Kierkegaard’s trilogy of horror— Sickness Unto Death , The Concept of Dread , and Fear and Trembling —but all these are undermined by their fabricated and unreliable authors. Besides, how can one separate the pessimist from the optimist in works like Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life , Shestov’s Postetas Clavium , or Edgar Saltus’ under-read The Philosophy of Disenchantment ? Even in cases where the entire corpus of an author is pessimistic, the project always seems incomplete—witness Cioran’s trajectory, from his first book, On the Heights of Despair , to the last unpublished notebooks of acrid and taut aphorisms. And this is to say nothing of literary pessimism, from Goethe’s sorrowful Werther, to Dostoevsky’s underground man, to Pessoa’s disquiet scribbler; Baudelaire’s spleen and ennui, the mystical Satanism of Huysmans and Strindberg, the hauntologies of Mário de Sá-Carniero, Izumi Kyoka, H.P. Lovecraft, grumpy old Beckett... even the great pessimist comedians. All that remains are singular, perhaps anomalous statements of pessimism, a litany of quotes and citations crammed into fortune cookies. Patron saints are traditionally named after a locale, either a place of birth or of a mystical experience. Perhaps the better approach is to focus on the places where pessimists were forced to live out their pessimism—Schopenhauer facing an empty Berlin lecture hall, Nietzsche mute and convalescent at the home of his sister, Wittgenstein the relinquished professor and solitary gardener, Cioran grappling with Alzheimer’s in his tiny writing alcove in the Latin Quarter. ~*~ There’s a ghost that grows inside of me, damaged in the making, and there’s a hunt sprung from necessity, elliptical and drowned. Where the moving quiet of our insomnia offers up each thought, there’s a luminous field of grey inertia, and obsidian dreams burnt all the way down. ~*~ If pessimism has any pedagogical value, it is that the failure of pessimism as a philosophy is inextricably tied to the failure of pessimism as voice. I read the following, from Shestov’s The Apotheosis of Groundlessness : When a person is young he writes because it seems to him he has discovered a new almighty truth which he must make haste to impart to forlorn humankind. Later, becoming more modest, he begins to doubt his truths: and then he tries to convince himself. A few more years go by, and he knows he was mistaken all round, so there is no need to convince himself. Nevertheless he continues to write, because he is not fit for any other work, and to be accounted a superfluous person is so horrible. (shrink)

Rather than occurring abstractly (autonomously), ethical growth occurs in interpersonal relationships (IRs). It requires optimally functioning cognitive processes [attention, working memory (WM), episodic/autobiographical memory (AM), inhibition, flexibility, among others], emotional processes (physical contact, motivation, and empathy), processes surrounding ethical, intimacy, and identity issues, and other psychological processes (self-knowledge, integration, and the capacity for agency). Without intending to be reductionist, we believe that these aspects are essential for optimally engaging in IRs and for the personal constitution. While they (...) are all integrated into our daily life, in research and academic work, it is hard to see how they are integrated. Thus, we need better theoretical frameworks for studying them. That study and integration thereof are undertaken differently depending on different views of what it means to live as a human being. We rely on neuroscientific data to support the chosen theory to offer knowledge to understand human beings and interpersonal relational growth. We should of course note that to describe what makes up the uniqueness of being, acting, and growing as a human person involves something much more profound which requires too, a methodology that opens the way for a theory of the person that responds to the concerns of philosophy and philosophical anthropology from many disciplines and methods (Orón Semper, 2015;Polo, 2015), but this is outside the scope of this study. With these in mind, this article aims to introduce a new explanatory framework, called the Interprocessual-self (IPS), for the neuroscientific findings that allow for a holistic consideration of the previously mentioned processes. Contributing to the knowledge of personal growth and avoiding a reductionist view, we first offer a general description of the research that supports the interrelation between personal virtue in IRs and relevant cognitive, emotional, and ethic-moral processes. This reveals how relationships allow people to relate ethically and grow as persons. We include conceptualizations and descriptions of their neural bases. Secondly, with the IPS model, we explore neuroscientific findings regarding self-knowledge, integration, and agency, all psychological processes that stimulate inner exploration of the self concerning the other. We find that these fundamental conditions can be understood from IPS theory. Finally, we explore situations that involve the integration of two levels, namely the interpersonal one and the social contexts of relationships. (shrink)

Philosophers often mention Friedrich Schiller as the author of a famous epigram taking aim at Kant’s account of moral motivation: Gladly I serve my friends, but alas I do it with pleasure. Hence I am plagued with doubt that I am not a virtuous person. To this, the answer is given: Surely, your only resource is to try to despise them entirely, And then with aversion do what your duty enjoins. These joking lines capture a natural objection to (...) Kant’s rationalist picture of moral motivation, especially as it appears in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Schiller himself, however, intended his poem as a caricature of Kant’s view, reserving his considered critique of Kant’s practical philosophy for his extended treatise ‘On Grace and Dignity’. It is in this major work that Schiller begins his debate with Kant about the aesthetic aspect of morality, sets out a systematic account of his own ethics, and argues for an account of character according to which the virtuous person is inclined to do her duty and takes pleasure in moral action. This essay aims to highlight the importance of Schiller’s ‘On Grace and Dignity’, which is a valuable resource in relation to contemporary debates about Kant’s moral psychology. Section 1 outlines the main features of Schiller’s concerns with Kantian rationalism. Section 2 surveys a number of recent critical discussions of Schiller’s interpretation of Kant. Finally, Section 3 concludes with some observations about the historical and broader philosophical significance of ‘On Grace and Dignity’. (shrink)

Rational Sentimentalism develops a novel theory of the sentimental values. These values, which include the funny, the disgusting, and the shameful, are profoundly important because they set standards for emotional responses that are part of our shared human nature. Yet moral philosophers have neglected them relative to their prominence in human mental life. The theory is sentimentalist because it holds that these values are emotion-dependent—contrary to some prominent accounts of the funny and the disgusting. Its rational aspect arises from (...) its insistence that the shameful (e.g.) is not whatever elicits shame but what makes shame fitting. Shameful traits provide reasons to be ashamed that do not depend on whether one is disposed to be ashamed of them. Furthermore, these reasons to be ashamed issue in reasons to act as shame dictates: to conceal. Sentimentalism requires a compatible theory of emotion and emotional fittingness. The book explicates a motivational theory of emotion that explains the peculiarities of emotional motivation, as other theories cannot. It argues that a class of emotions are psychological kinds with the same goal across cultures, despite differences in their elicitors. It then develops an account of fittingness that helps to differentiate reasons of fit, which bear on the sentimental values, from other considerations for or against having an emotion. Some significant and controversial conclusions emerge from rational sentimentalism. The sentimental values conflict with one another, and with morality, but nevertheless provide practical reasons that apply to humans—though not to all rational agents. (shrink)