Abstract

I argue that desires and emotions have a cognitive element that leaves them open to direct moral assessment. I maintain that a wide range of affects enter into moral reasoning as initial mappings of practical reasons onto the world. This suggests a way of characterizing conflicts between persistent desires and all-things-considered practical judgments. Such conflicts indicate that our considered judgments lack the status of wholehearted convictions. The dissertation culminates in a distinctive account of certain interpersonal obligations that builds upon this idea of wholehearted conviction. ;In Chapter 1, I examine the conception of moral worth and the companion conception of virtue at work in Kant's seminal moral writings. I argue that these conceptions leave Kant without resources to explain the critical distinction between self-interested and malicious violations of duty. ;In Chapter 2, I ask how significant a revision must be made to Kantian moral theory in order to accommodate my criticisms. I argue that there are demanding affective preconditions for the full recognition of the equal moral standing of other humans, and that these provide the core of a more plausible conception of moral virtue than is usually associated with Kant. I maintain that the Kantian who accepts this picture of virtue must give up the attractive claim that we can always voluntarily will to do whatever morality requires. Such a Kantian might still preserve the essential Kantian equation of dutiful action and autonomy--here understood as self-governance in accordance with laws we wholeheartedly accept. ;In the course of Chapters 1 and 2, I argue that when there are conflicts between our desires and our all-things considered judgments of what we have reason to do, this shows that our considered beliefs are not wholehearted convictions. In Chapters 3 and 4, I attempt to show that the obligations which bind together intimates and fellow members of certain face-to-face communities are best analyzed in terms of wholehearted convictions. I argue that this approach is truer to the phenomenology of moral deliberation than rival analyses.