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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.

The Dialogue of Ipuwer and the Lord of All is one of the major works from the golden age of Egyptian literature, the Middle Kingdom (c. 1980–1630 bc). The poem provides one of the most searching explorations of human motivation and divine justice to survive from ancient Egypt, and its stark pessimism questions many of the core ideologies that underpinned the Egyptian state and monarchy. It begins with a series of laments portraying an Egypt overwhelmed by chaos and destruction, and develops into an examination of why these disasters should happen, and who bears responsibility for them: the gods, the king, or humanity. This volume provides the first full literary analysis of this poem for a century. It provides a detailed study of questions such as: its date of composition; its historicity; the identity of its protagonists and setting; its reception history within Egyptian culture; and whether it really is a unified literary composition, or a redacted collection of texts of heterogenous origin.

Understanding human beings and their distinctive rational and volitional capacities is one of the central tasks of philosophy. The task requires a clear account of such things as reasons, desires, emotions, and motives, and of how they combine to produce and explain human behaviour. Kinds of Reasons offers a fresh and incisive treatment of these issues, focusing in particular on reasons as they feature in contexts of agency. The account offered builds on some important recent work in the area; but it takes its main inspiration from the tradition that receives its seminal contemporary expression in the writings of G. E. M. Anscombe, a tradition that runs counter to the broadly Humean orthodoxy that has dominated the theory of action for the past forty years. The book offers an alternative to the Humean view that our reason for acting are mental states: it explains and develops a distinctive version of the view that our reasons for acting are facts, and defends it against difficulties that have been thought to be insurmountable. In addition, it proposes an account of the relation between reasons and desires, and of the role these play in practical reasoning and in the explanation of action.

This book attempts to solve two problems in deliberative democratic theory and practice: How can agreements reached inside deliberative forums be legitimate for those who did not take part? And why should people with strongly-held views participate in the first place? The solution involves rethinking deliberative theory, but also draws on lessons from practical experience with deliberative forums in Britain’s National Health Service. The book discusses the competing representation claims that different participants make, the pros and cons of different approaches to democratic accountability, and different conceptions of rationality and public reasoning. It concludes by rejecting the idea that we can have authentic, legitimate deliberation in any one forum. Instead, authentic, legitimate deliberation can only result from linkages between different kinds of institutions, drawing on different kinds of participants, at different points of a decision-making cycle. That is, it promotes a macro, society-wide view of deliberative democracy quite different from the micro, deliberative-forum view which dominates thinking on the subject in the UK. The book sketches the outline of such a deliberative system, suggesting how various institutions in civil society and elected government might link together to create public decisions, which are both more rational and more democratic.

The idea of free exchange of child labor, human organs, reproductive services, weapons, life saving medicines, and addictive drugs, strike many as toxic to human values. What considerations ought to guide the debates about such markets? What is it about the nature of particular exchanges that concerns us to the point that some types of markets are problematic? How should our social policies respond to these more noxious markets? Categories previously used by philosophers and economists are of limited help, because they assumed markets to be homogenous and of limited scope. This book develops a broader and more nuanced view of markets whereby they not only allocate resources and incomes, but shape our culture, foster or thwart human development, and create and support structures of power.

Can we rely on the public service ethos to deliver high quality public services? Are professionals such as doctors and teachers really public‐spirited altruists—knights—or self‐interested egoists—knaves? And how should the recipients of those services, patients, parents, and pupils, be treated? As passive recipients—pawns—or as active consumers—queens?

This book offers answers to these questions. It argues that the original welfare state was designed on the assumptions that those who worked within it were basically altruists or knights and that the beneficiaries were passive recipients or pawns. In consequence, services were often of low quality, delivered in a patronising fashion and inequitable in outcome. However, services designed on an opposite set of assumptions—that public service professionals are knaves and that users should be queens—also face problems: exploitation by unscrupulous professionals, and overuse by demanding consumers, especially middle class ones.

The book draws on evidence from Britain and abroad to show that, in fact, public policies designed on the basis that professionals are a mixture of knight and knave and recipients a mixture of pawn and queen deliver better quality and greater equity than policies based on more simplistic assumptions about motivation and agency. In particular, contrary to popular mythology, the book shows that policies that offer choice and competition within public services such as education and health care can deliver both excellence and equity. And policies aimed at building up individual assets and wealth ownership can empower the poor and powerless more effectively than those aimed simply at bolstering their current income.

The virtue ethics movement in recent philosophical ethics can usefully be divided into two quite separate streams of thought. Some have turned to the texts of Plato and Aristotle for new answers to established questions in philosophical ethics, while others have sought a vantage point from which the basic questions of the field could themselves be put in question. The aim of this book is to elaborate and defend a version of the second, more radical sort of virtue ethics. The book begins with a fundamental reconsideration of the way in which thought makes itself practical in temporally extended activities and lives. This reconsideration yields an alternative picture of the self — a picture with recognizably Aristotelian and Platonic elements — and puts that picture to work in retrieving an unfamiliar conception of the proper task of philosophical ethics, one that provides a suitable home for retrieving the virtue concepts. The critical bite of the book is directed in the first instance at ideas that are prevalent among philosophers. Yet there is reason to think that these philosophical ideas express a conception of the self that shapes contemporary Western culture, and that hinders our capacity to make full sense of our activities, passions, and lives, or to attain full articulacy about the values to which we might hope to answer. The book argues that the rise of the fact/value distinction and of the characteristically modern distinction between person‐relative and impersonal goods are best understood as a story of encroaching confusion and not as the story of progressive discovery that they are often taken to be. The book culminates in an attempt to show that the ethical and epistemic virtues conduce to a single, monistic sort of goodness that fosters intimate relationships as well as healthy political community, and that overcomes the putative opposition between self‐interest and morality.

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.

People backslide. They freely do things they believe it would be best on the whole not to do – and best from their own point of view, not just the perspective of their peers or their parents. The aim of this book is to explain why that happens. The first main item of business is to clarify the nature of backsliding – of actions that display some weakness of will. To this end, Mele uses traditional philosophical techniques dating back to Plato and Aristotle (whose work on weakness of will or “akrasia” he discusses) and some new studies in the emerging field of experimental philosophy. He then attacks the thesis that backsliding is an illusion because people never freely act contrary to what they judge best. Mele argues that it is extremely plausible that if people ever act freely, they sometimes backslide. The biggest challenge posed by backsliding is to explain why it happens. At the book’s heart is the development of a theoretical and empirical framework that sheds light both on backsliding and on exercises of self-control that prevent it. Here, Mele draws on work in social and developmental psychology and in psychiatry to motivate a view of human behavior in which both backsliding and overcoming the temptation to backslide are explicable. He argues that backsliding is no illusion and our theories about the springs of action, the power of evaluative judgments, human agency, human rationality, practical reasoning, and motivation should accommodate backsliding.

Manifest Activity examines Thomas Reid's efforts to provide answers to a host of traditional philosophical questions concerning the nature of the will, the powers of human beings, motivation, and the relation between human action and natural change. The concept of ‘active power’ stands at the centre of Reid's philosophy of action. He holds that actions are all and only the events of which some creature is the ‘efficient cause’, and he thinks a creature is the efficient cause of an event just in case it has the power to bring that event about and exerts it. Reid's conception both of human actions and changes in nature is deeply teleological. He holds that to exert a power is to direct an event towards an end, and he holds that all changes, whether actions or events in nature, flow from the exertion of power. The book explains the details of this view, Reid's reasons for holding it, and its implications to our understanding of action, agency, and our relation to the natural world.

Plato’s Republic introduces and employs an elaborate psychological theory whose core commitment it is that human motivation comes in three forms: rational, spirited, and appetitive. The Brute Within offers a detailed philosophical analysis of appetitive motivation and of Plato’s conception of appetite as a part of the soul. In doing so, it explores both the psychological theory of the Republic and its afterlife in Plato’s later dialogues as well as in Aristotle’s psychology and ethics. It shows that Plato’s Timaeus, a relatively late dialogue, preserves the substance of the Republic’s conception of appetite as a distinct part of the soul. At the same time, the Timaeus offers a number of important clarifications and amplifications of the theory of the tripartite soul, whose full significance emerges once the Timaeus is read in the context of a number of other later dialogues, most importantly the Theaetetus and the Philebus. In turning to Aristotle’s psychological theory and moral psychology, the book calls attention to the remarkable continuity between Aristotle’s and Plato’s thought in this area. It shows how Aristotle made Plato’s psychological theory his own both by modifying it where appropriate and by giving it a more determinate and precise formulation.