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Parliamentary government is the most common way to organize delegation and accountability in contemporary democracies. Parliamentary government is a system of government in which the prime minister and his or her cabinet are accountable to any majority of the members of parliament and can be voted out of office by the latter. Parliamentary democracy is a chain of delegation and accountability, from the voters to the ultimate policy makers, in which at each link (stage), a principal (in whom authority is originally) delegates to an agent, whom the principal has conditionally authorized to act in his or her name and place. The parliamentary chain of delegation is characterized by indirectness and singularity (i.e. at each link of the parliamentary chain, a single principal delegates to a single agent). At each stage of this chain, delegation problems (such as adverse selection and moral hazard) can occur.

Nietzsche's moral perspectivism is one of the central and best-known themes of his philosophy. I interpret his genealogical argument in On the Genealogy of Moralsas an ad hominem argument, not so much history as moral psychology. In particular, Nietzsche mentions resentment (ressentiment) as a diagnostic tool in moral criticism. But Nietzsche has mixed intentions here. On the one hand, he adopts what I call a “blaming” perspective.” On the other, he urges us to get “beyond judgment.”

The conclusion is brief as each chapter has its own part-conclusion. It summarises the argument to the effect that Greek historiography was moral-didactic from its inception, and that techniques developed while lessons stayed largely stable, with individual historiographers having individual quirks and preferences. The stability of the moral messages is surprising considering the time span and changes in political situation and so demonstrates the power of tradition in morality and of imitation in literature. The thorny question of whether moralising meant inventing details and writing poor history is then discussed, and the conclusion is ventured that no historiographer is ever objective and that Moral History was in and of itself no poorer than any other kinds of History. The quality of the history writing was determined by the historian’s handling of sources and ability to analyse them, and not by his, probably unconscious, decision to view the world through a moralistic lens.

This chapter seeks to understand the self-conception of the German soldier and the nature of his institution through the lens of moral history. It approaches the story of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front from a novel angle. Rather than addressing why soldiers fought or what crimes they committed—important questions that have already been the subject of much scholarly attention—the chapter investigates how value systems within the German Army came to be deployed to hinder or advance Nazi goals and what the men who participated in the Vernichtungskrieg thought about who they were and what they were doing. As the chapter emphasizes, such an approach helps to explain how committed Nazis and non-Nazis alike came to willingly accept their part in the crimes of the Third Reich, now that these have been extensively uncovered. Beyond the Wehrmacht itself, the chapter illuminates the relationship between ideology, morality, and identity in the Third Reich, providing insight into how the Nazi state appropriated existing value systems and how Germans oriented their preexisting beliefs toward Nazi goals. It presents a new interpretation of the origins of the Wehrmacht myth that proved so influential in shaping the country's collective memory and serves as a useful case study in how perpetrators violate moral boundaries.

This opening chapter spells out the key concepts deployed throughout the book. It also contends, against integrity skeptics of various types, that personal integrity, understood as fidelity to one’s fundamental commitments, can actually have independent moral significance. The focus is on two arguments, both revolving around unconditional commitments. The first, the unfairness argument, holds that since morality itself pushes agents to incorporate certain unconditional commitments into their self-conception, it is unfair to criticize agents who go on to treat these commitments as an independent factor in their moral deliberation. The second argument links agents’ unconditional moral commitments to their self-respect. Both arguments allow us to see why one’s integrity is not simply parasitic upon one “doing the right thing.” Rather, integrity can inform the analysis of what one morally ought to do.

This Introduction sketches the methodological approach and content of Moral Motivation. It argues that a complex history of moral motivation, as opposed to of the concept of motive itself, traces issues beginning in Plato and Aristotle that end up central to ethical theory more broadly. While contemporary concern with moral motivation tends to focus on either on the issue of internalism and externalism or on Humeanism and anti-Humeanism, careful consideration of historical texts shows interesting commonalities in treating how cognitive, emotional, and argumentative resources ought to be assembled to generate moral motivation in the agent. There are brief discussions of Plato, Aristotle, Medieval Philosophy, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Kant, Fichte, Hegel and consequentialism.

This book outlines an everyday Christian ethics: an ethics which Christianly imagines the fundamental moments of the human life course and in dialogue with alternative imaginations of human being. This chapter argues that the challenge of providing such an ethics is the greater because of deficient and dominant self‐understandings in moral theology and moral philosophy, and consequent misrelations between these disciplines and social anthropology. It suggests that moral theology is misconceived as essentially an ethics of hard cases, that moral philosophy generally fails to reckon with moral practice, and so itself contributes to moral theology's misdirection, and that social anthropology provides a more promising partner for a more adequate Christian ethics. The chapter closes with a treatment of the Mérode Altarpiece as inviting the viewer, as this book invites the reader, to imagine human life in the light of the life of Christ.

The richness of the history of the moral argument is a well-kept secret. Numerous luminaries from its history devoted their best intellectual energies to its exploration. Several of them gave Gifford lectures on the topic. From before Kant until the present day, the story of the moral argument has been unfolding. Its adherents have had much to say about morality, its disparate features, and their evidential potential. This book will chronicle this long and fertile history. We trust the story will serve as inspiration for a new generation to recapture some of the vision and passion shared by these luminaries in the field who had learned to live long and well with these arguments, making them part of the air they breathed, and in so doing breathing new life back into them.

This chapter outlines what I refer to as the self-knowledge tradition: that we can attain self-knowledge via our natural reason, that the attainment of self-knowledge is a key goal of philosophy, and that it is desirable and important. Then I focus on an attack on this tradition beginning with Jean Calvin and Conrad Jansenius that questioned the attainment of self-knowledge via natural reason due to the corruptness or inefficacy of our natural reason. This corruption was a consequence of our natural predilection for self-deceit. The chapter considers self-deceit as undermining of self-knowledge in the French Moralists, Thomas Hobbes, and Bernard Mandeville. I conclude with a brief discussion of the consequences of the seventeenth-century and early eighteenth century attack on self-knowledge in a few of the most important philosophers of the eighteenth century: Joseph Butler, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.