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This book contains chapters on various features of Kant's moral psychology and moral theory, with particular emphasis on a conception of rational agency autonomy. The opening chapters explore different elements of Kant's views about motivation, including an account of respect for morality as the distinctive moral motive and a view of the principle of happiness as a representation of the shared structure of non-moral choice. These chapters stress the unity of Kant's moral psychology by arguing that moral and non-moral considerations motivate in essentially the same way. Several of the chapters develop an original approach to Kant's conception of autonomy that emphasizes the political metaphors found throughout Kant's writings on ethics. They argue that autonomy is best interpreted not as a psychological capacity, but as a kind of sovereignty: in claiming that moral agents have autonomy, Kant regards them as a kind of sovereign legislator with the power to give moral law through their willing. The final chapters explore some of the implications of this conception of autonomy elsewhere in Kant's moral thought, arguing that his Formula of Universal Law uses this conception of autonomy to generate substantive moral principles and exploring the connection between Kantian self-legislation and duties to oneself.

This is a study of the key features of the moral psychology and metaethics of three important medieval Jewish philosophers, Saadia Gaon, Bahya ibn Pakuda, and Moses Maimonides. They are selected because of the depth and subtlety of their thought and because of their relevance to central, enduring issues in moral philosophy. The book examines their views of freedom of the will, the virtues, the rationality of moral requirements, and the relation between rational justification and revelation. Their appropriations of Neoplatonic and Aristotelian thought are explicated, showing how their theistic commitments make crucial differences to moral psychology and moral epistemology. All three thinkers developed rationalistic philosophies and sought to show how Judaism does not include doctrines in conflict with reason. Maimonides receives the fullest attention, given that he articulated the most systematic and influential accounts of the main issues. While explicating the main claims and arguments of these thinkers, the book also shows the respects in which their thought remains relevant to several important issues and debates in moral philosophy. These thinkers' views of ‘the reasons of the commandments’ (in Torah) include resources for a sophisticated moral epistemology of tradition. The points of contact and contrast between medieval Jewish moral thought and the practical wisdom approach to moral theory and also natural law approaches are examined in detail.

Most of their history human beings have lived in comparatively small and close‐knit societies, with a primitive technology that allowed them to affect only their most immediate environment. Their moral psychology is therefore adpated to make them fit to live in these conditions; it is myopic, restricted to a concern about kin and people in the neighbourhood in the immediate future. But by scientific technology humans have radically changed their living conditions, while their moral psychology has remained fundamentally the same through this change, which is occurring with an accelerating speed. Human beings now live in societies with millions of citizens, and with an advanced scientific technology that enables them to exercise an influence that extends all over the world and far into the future. This is leading to increasing environmental degradation and to deleterious climate change. The advanced scientific technology has also equipped human beings with nuclear and biological weapons of mass destruction, which might be used by states in wars over dwindling natural resources, or by terrorists. Liberal democracies cannot overcome these threats merely by developing novel technology. What is needed is an enhancement of the moral dispositions of their citizens, an extension of their moral concern beyond a small circle of personal acquaintances and further into the future. Otherwise, human civilization is jeopardized. It is doubtful whether this moral enhancement could be accomplished solely by means of traditional moral education. Therefore, we should explore, in addition, the prospects of moral enhancement by alternative, biomedical means.

This volume develops a new account of the nature of moral judgment. Evidence from developmental psychology and psychopathologies suggests that emotions play a crucial role in normal moral judgment. This indicates that philosophical accounts of moral judgment that eschew the emotions are mistaken. However, the volume also argues that prevailing philosophical accounts that embrace a role for the emotions are also mistaken. The empirical work points to a quite different account of moral judgment than philosophers have considered, an account in which normative rules and emotions make independent contributions to moral judgment. Further, the volume argues that the emotions play an important role in the normative rules that get fixed in the culture. The history of norms indicates that norms that resonate with our emotions are more likely to survive.

This book is concerned with Plato's examination of the nature and aims of human desire, and the role that it plays in our ethical lives. For Plato, analysing our desires is a way of reflecting on the kind of people that we are, and on our prospects for a worthwhile and happy life. This assumes that desires are the sorts of thing that are amenable to such reflection. This book considers why Plato held such a view, and in what direction he thought our desires could best be shaped. The kind of relationships which typically took place at symposia was an important way in which young men learnt how to value and desire the right kinds of things, and in the appropriate manner. They were, in short, a way in which virtue was transmitted to the young. The book argues that seen in this light, the Symposium belongs amongst those dialogues concerned with moral education. The Symposium offers a distinctive approach to central Platonic themes concerning education, virtue, epistemology, and moral psychology, one that is grounded in an account of the nature and goals of a loving relationship.

The idea that animals can act morally—can act for moral reasons—has been almost universally rejected by philosophers and scientists alike. According to tradition, while animals may be objects of moral concern, they cannot be regarded as subjects of moral motivation. This book argues against the traditional view. Animals can act for moral reasons—at least there are no compelling reasons for supposing that that they can’t. Animals can act on the basis of moral emotions—emotions that possess moral content—and these emotions provide reasons for their actions. Animals can, in this sense, be moral subjects. Using recent empirical work in cognitive ethology as a springboard, this book embarks on a meticulous examination of the idea of moral motivation—an examination that weaves its way through central topics in the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, metaethics, and moral psychology. The result of this investigation is a powerful defense of an extraordinarily controversial claim—animals can, in fact, be moral—that is sure to engender heated debate.

The theory of action underlying Immanuel Kant's moral theory is the subject of this book. What “maxims” are, and how we act on maxims, are explained here in light of both the historical context of Kant's thought, and his classroom lectures on psychology and ethics. Arguing against the current of much recent scholarship, a strong case is made for interpreting Kant as having embraced psychological determinism, a version of the “belief-desire model” of human motivation, and a literal, “two-worlds” metaphysics. On this interpretation, actions in the familiar, sensible world are always effects of prior psychological causes. Their explaining causal laws are the maxims of agents' characters. And agents act freely if, acting in an intelligible world, what they do there results in their having the characters they have here, in the sensible world. In this way Kant's theory of action coordinates thoroughgoing causal determinism in the natural world with human freedom and moral responsibility. This line of interpretation is fruitful also for addressing some familiar problems in Kant's moral psychology. It allows explaining actions caused by admirable inclinations as “virtuous”, without requiring the motive of duty behind every morally praiseworthy action.

This book presents a positive theory of moral worth. Chapter 1 examines the complexities of moral life that appear to differ from the paradigmatic cases of moral psychology. Chapter 2 argues against the common assumption that akrasia is always irrational, or at least, always less rational than the corresponding self-controlled action. The theory is presented in Chapter 3 — that people are praiseworthy for acts of good will and blameworthy for acts of ill will or absence of good will, and the amount of praise or blame they deserve varies with the depth of their motivation or extent of their indifference. Chapter 4 and 5 defend this theory against potential objections to the effect that there is something wrong with its failure to invoke autonomy, and clarifies the theory’s implications about some issues in moral responsibility often associated with autonomy (i.e., responsibility of kleptomaniacs, drug addicts, makers of Freudian slips, and persons driven to murder by hypnotists).

Drawing on the role morality developed in previous applications of virtue ethics to professional practice, The Virtuous Psychiatrist shows that the ethical practice of psychiatry depends on the character of the practitioner. The book is built upon three key tenets: ethics is important to any professional practice, including psychiatry; the settings within which psychiatry is practiced impose ethical demands on its practitioners that are distinctive enough to warrant a separate analysis; and an emphasis on character and moral psychology in a virtue theory significantly augments our understanding of the ethical demands of psychiatric practice. In addition to the ethical guidelines imposed on every biomedical practice, the ethical practitioner should cultivate additional traits of character or virtues. These include gender sensitive virtues. Implicated in the normative presuppositions of psychiatric practice and lore, gender stands in for other such categories including race, class and ethnicity; it is also a factor at once unremittingly controversial, and inescapably tied to the self identity often at the heart of the therapeutic project. Virtues can and should be taught – that is, instilled, deepened and augmented. The setting where trainees are learning the ideals and responses of their particular professional role, it is emphasized, is where such virtues can be habituated, using pedagogical techniques associated with moral education, such as training in empathic emotions. Psychiatric training should address trainee's character alongside practice skills.

This book offers a detailed introduction to Iris Murdoch's philosophical work, especially the moral philosophy of The Sovereignty of Good (1970). Murdoch argued for an important and distinctive position, in opposition to the mid‐20th‐century analytic philosophers like R. M. Hare and Stuart Hampshire, and to existentialists like Sartre. Murdoch combined a form of moral realism or ‘naturalism’, allowing into the world cases of such properties as humility or generosity; an anti‐scientism; a rejection of Humean moral psychology; a sort of ‘particularism’; special attention to the virtues; and emphasis on the metaphor of moral perception or ‘seeing’ moral facts. (A similar combination of views is found in the work of John McDowell.) What we can choose depends on what we can see; what we can see depends in turn upon the conceptual scheme we have. This book presents some intellectual biography; the book investigates the arguments of The Sovereignty of Good and other articles; the book comments on the influence on Murdoch of Simone Weil, Plato, Kant and Wittgenstein; and on her historical approach; and the book introduces the contributions in the present volume.

This book offers a survey of contemporary moral psychology, integrating evidence and argument from philosophy and the human sciences. The chapters cover major issues in moral psychology, including moral reasoning, character, moral emotion, positive psychology, moral rules, the neural correlates of ethical judgment, and the attribution of moral responsibility.

There are many senses in which we can be said to be free agents, and to be morally responsible. There is also, however, a strong, fundamental, and natural sense in which these things are impossible. Very briefly: we cannot be ultimately responsible for how we act. Why not? Because when we act, we do what we do because of the way we are, all things considered, and we cannot be ultimately responsible for the way we are. Suppose this is right: ultimate responsibility is impossible. Can we nevertheless state what would be necessary and sufficient for someone to possess ultimate responsibility (as we can state the necessary and sufficiently conditions of being a round square)? One proposal is that one would have to be causa sui, truly, ultimately the cause or source of oneself, at least in fundamental mental or characteral respects. Another proposal considered in this book is that one could not really count as a free agent (even if one was somehow causa sui) unless one also experienced oneself as, or believed oneself to be, a free agent. This raises the question whether believing something to be the case could ever be a condition of its actually being the case (the idea is highly paradoxical). It also leads to a sustained discussion of the experience of agency, and of being a free agent. Generally speaking, the metaphysical possibilities seem fairly clear when it comes to the question of free will. The remaining questions of interest may have more to do with the phenomenology of freedom, and more generally, moral psychology.