Abstract

The dissertation is about the place of ideals in ethical reflection. Ideals are distinguished from principles. Principles are expressed as universalizable imperatives of right behavior. Ideals are expressed as models of the good life essentially tied to the character of the individual self. I argue that moralities of principle, such as Kant's, do not adequately resolve two fundamental difficulties in current ethical theory: the problem of relativism, and what I call the theoretician's dilemma. ;I develop a theory of ideals as complex mental structures operating through the imagination. These structures have a twofold nature, an "inner" and an "outer" aspect. On the one hand, ideals are a schematizing procedure for interpreting concrete situations in terms of their relevance to the realization of what the self takes to be its good life. On the other hand, idealization is a dynamic operation within the structure of the self which both generates the schematism and provides the ongoing motivation for pursuing modeled ideals. ;Chapters 1 and 2 examine the need for a theory of ideals, develop the notion of the schematism in terms of the "seeing as" concept, and examine imagination's operation in sympathy, moral judgement and feeling, and idealization. Chapters 3 and 4 seek to show what it is that makes some ideals "ethical", without appealing to the notion of principle. It does this in terms of two contrasting moral psychologies, each deriving from different psychoanalytic theories of the self: classical psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic self psychology. I argue that those ideals are ethical which the mature self take to be good in its relations to other persons in so far as they are persons. This notion of ethical idealization is better treated within self psychology. Classical moral psychology of the superego, despite recent innovations, inevitably divorces morality and rationality, leaving no room for rational evaluation of ends and projects within the relativities of concrete life and existence. Chapter 5 reappraises the concepts of the ethical and the rational in the light of a theory of imaginative ideals. The problem of relativism and the theoretician's dilemma are re-examined