My main concern in this paper is to develop and defend an account of why we ought to devote our lives to virtue—of the ground or reason for why we ought to do so—according to René Descartes. On my account, the answer is that we thereby, and indeed only thereby, do everything in our power to promote our own degree of intrinsic perfection or goodness. Descartes’s moral philosophy, as I understand it, thus constitutes a form of ethical perfectionism. While I (...) am not the first to interpret Descartes as an ethical perfectionist, there is as of yet no detailed account in the literature of what his particular form of ethical perfectionism would then entail. This is something that I hope to remedy here. (shrink)

I argue that Lisa Shapiro’s rational reconstruction of Descartes’s provisional moral code in terms of a broad conception of morality supplies us with an interpretative framework that make historiographical sense of the reception of Descartes’s moral philosophy in an Anglophone context on three occasions: the appeal to Descartes made by Henry More, Henry Sidgwick’s abrupt dismissal, and the ensuing reaction to Sidgwick found in Grace Neal Dolson. This case shows, I maintain, how reception history can be utilized to inform and (...) support rational reconstruction of philosophical texts. (shrink)