The paper examines the question of whether a person could know the difference between right and wrong and have the capacity to control his or her conduct yet not be moved by his or her knowledge of right or wrong. It proceeds by considering psychopathy and inquiring into the nature of the psychopath's cognitive deficits, if any. One possibility is that psychopaths are inconsistent in the sense of Kant's test of universalizability. This possibility is rejected after considerable argument. A second (...) possibility is that psychopaths are incapable of empathy. Consideration of recent work in developmental psychology leads to the conclusion that this possibility remains open. (shrink)
Stocker intends this book to redress the common failures of contemporary moral philosophers to see the importance of emotions for their field. His aim is not merely to point out deficiencies in current thinking about emotions and their place in ethics, however. It is also to show how emotions are important for ethics. The book is divided into ten chapters, four of which are written in collaboration with Elizabeth Hegeman, an anthropologist and psychoanalyst. The first seven present criticisms of current (...) thinking and argue for some general theses about the way emotions are related to values. The last three examine specific emotions, notably, compassion, pity, pride, shame, and anger. They serve to substantiate the general theses about the way emotions are related to values that the first seven chapters promote. In this review I will concentrate on the material in these first seven chapters. Though some of it is jointly authored, I will for convenience' sake mostly refer just to Stocker as the author. (shrink)
Reason and Ethics in Hobbes's Leviathan JOHN DEIGH HOBBES'S ETHICS teaches the ways of self-preservation. Its lessons are arranged in a system of rules that Hobbes understood to be the laws of nature. These two themes, self-preservation and natural law, have inspired opposing inter- pretations of Hobbes's text. The historically dominant and still prevailing interpretation, which develops the former theme, is that Hobbes's ethics is a form of egoism. A later and less popular interpretation, which develops the latter theme, is (...) that his ethics is a system of absolutes, "a strict deontology. ''1 These two interpretations represent a dispute between what I will call ortho- doxy and dissent in Hobbes scholarship. The dispute chiefly turns on two questions: What is the basis of Hobbes's ethics? and How stringent are the rules it comprises?' Orthodoxy takes Hobbes's ethics to be based on his moral psychology, specifically, his theory of motivation. That theory, on the orthodox reading, is thoroughly egocentric. It holds that all voluntary action springs from self- interest.3 Hence, on this reading, one can attribute to Hobbes the view that a I am grateful to Ed Curley, Bernard Gert, Richard Kraut, Connie Rosati, and Ira Singer for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay. ' A. E. Taylor, "The Ethical Doctrine of Hobbes," Philosophy a 3 : 406-24, esp. 408. ' One can find the orthodox interpretation in Henry Sidgwick's Outline of the History.. (shrink)
The essays in this collection are concerned with the psychology of moral agency. They focus on moral feelings and moral motivation, and seek to understand the operations and origins of these phenomena as rooted in the natural desires and emotions of human beings. An important feature of the essays, and one that distinguishes the book from most philosophical work in moral psychology, is the attention to the writings of Freud. Many of the essays draw on Freud's ideas about conscience and (...) morality, while several explore the depths and limits of Freud's theories. An underlying theme of the volume is a critique of influential rationalist accounts of moral agency. John Deigh shows that one can subject the principles of morality to rational inquiry without thereby holding that reason alone can originate action. (shrink)
This book examines the central questions of ethics through a study of theories of right and wrong that are found in the great ethical works of Western philosophy. It focuses on theories that continue to have a significant presence in the field. The core chapters cover egoism, the eudaimonism of Plato and Aristotle, act and rule utilitarianism, modern natural law theory, Kant's moral theory, and existentialist ethics. Readers will be introduced not only to the main ideas of each theory but (...) to contemporary developments and defenses of those ideas. A final chapter takes up topics in meta-ethics and moral psychology. The discussions throughout draw the reader into philosophical inquiry through argument and criticism that illuminate the profundity of the questions under examination. Students will find this book to be a very helpful guide to how philosophical inquiry is undertaken as well as to what the major theories in ethics hold. (shrink)
This article concerns the problems of proportionality in the theory of punishment. The problem is how to determine whether the severity of a punishment for a criminal offense is proportional to the seriousness of that offense. The resolution to this problem proposed in the article is that, first, one understand punishment as pain or loss intentionally and openly inflicted on someone S in retaliation for something S did, by a person or agent who is at least as powerful as S, (...) and, second, one take such retaliatory pain or loss as, within stable social groups, a means for preserving social order. Accordingly, it is argued that, on this proposal, the measure by which the severity of punishment is determined to be proportional to the seriousness of the crime for which it is inflicted is the minimal amount of pain or loss necessary to preserve social order. Sentencing policies that follow this measure, it is then observed, tend to yield less severe punishments than the policies that classical deterrence theory yields. Finally, the article offers an argument for regarding as morally more defensible sentencing policies whose goal is preserving social order than sentencing policies whose goal is that of classical deterrence theory, which is to achieve the smallest incidence of crimes consistent with not diminishing the overall welfare of society. (shrink)
This is a critical study of Martha Nussbaum's Hiding from Humanity. Central to Nussbaum's book are arguments against society's or the state's using disgust and shame to forward the aims of the criminal law. Patrick Devlin's appeal to the common man's disgust to determine what acts of customary morality should be made criminal is an example of how society might use disgust to forward the aims of the criminal law. The use of so-called shaming penalties as alternative sanctions to imprisonment (...) is an example of how society might use shame for this purpose. I argue that despite Nussbaum's own view to the contrary, her arguments against such uses of disgust and shame are best understood as criticisms of programs of conservative political philosophy like Devlin's and not of the emotions themselves. (shrink)
Emotions, Values, and the Law brings together ten of John Deigh's essays written over the past fifteen years. In the first five essays, Deigh ask questions about the nature of emotions and the relation of evaluative judgment to the intentionality of emotions, and critically examines the cognitivist theories of emotion that have dominated philosophy and psychology over the past thirty years. A central criticism of these theories is that they do not satisfactorily account for the emotions of babies or animals (...) other than human beings. Drawing on this criticism, Deigh develops an alternative theory of the intentionality of emotions on which the education of emotions explains how human emotions, which innately contain no evaluative thought, come to have evaluative judgments as their principal cognitive component. The second group of five essays challenge the idea of the voluntary as essential to understanding moral responsibility, moral commitment, political obligation, and other moral and political phenomena that have traditionally been thought to depend on people's will. Each of these studies focuses on a different aspect of our common moral and political life and shows, contrary to conventional opinion, that it does not depend on voluntary action or the exercise of a will constituted solely by rational thought. Together, the essays in this collection represent an effort to shift our understanding of the phenomena traditionally studied in moral and political philosophy from that of their being products of reason and will, operating independently of feeling and sentiment to that of their being manifestations of the work of emotion. (shrink)
Martha Nussbaum, in her compelling new book in moral psychology, gives an account of the nature of compassion. This account is the topic of my contribution to this symposium. I believe it illuminates an important human emotion that we call ‘compassion.’ At the same time, I believe there is a different emotion that we also call ‘compassion.’ Recognizing these two forms of compassion leads to seeing that the general theory of emotions from which Nussbaum draws her account falls short of (...) explaining all emotions. While my contribution concludes with this point, I intend it as probative rather than conclusive. (shrink)
This paper uses a study of the opinions in a case recently decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., to explain the role of empathy in legal interpretation. I argue for two theses: (1) that empathy is essential to an interpretation of law if that interpretation is to serve the interests of justice and (2) that no interpretation of a law is sound if it ignores whether so interpreting the law serves the interests of (...) justice. (shrink)
Martha Nussbaum, in her compelling new book in moral psychology, gives an account of the nature of compassion. This account is the topic of my contribution to this symposium. I believe it illuminates an important human emotion that we call ‘compassion.’ At the same time, I believe there is a different emotion that we also call ‘compassion.’ Recognizing these two forms of compassion leads to seeing that the general theory of emotions from which Nussbaum draws her account falls short of (...) explaining all emotions. While my contribution concludes with this point, I intend it as probative rather than conclusive. (shrink)
Recent attempts by philosophers to revive William James’s theory of emotions rest on a basic misunderstanding of James’s theory. To see why, one needs to see how James’s theory completed the transformation of the study of emotions from a study in moral philosophy to a scientific study. This essay charts that transformation.
This volume brings together philosophical essays on emotions by eleven leading thinkers in the field. The essays cover a variety of topics that relate emotions to humor, opera, theater, justice, war, death, our intellectual life, authenticity, personal identity, self-knowledge, and science.
Reason and Ethics in Hobbes's Leviathan JOHN DEIGH HOBBES'S ETHICS teaches the ways of self-preservation. Its lessons are arranged in a system of rules that Hobbes understood to be the laws of nature. These two themes, self-preservation and natural law, have inspired opposing inter- pretations of Hobbes's text. The historically dominant and still prevailing interpretation, which develops the former theme, is that Hobbes's ethics is a form of egoism. A later and less popular interpretation, which develops the latter theme, is (...) that his ethics is a system of absolutes, "a strict deontology. ''1 These two interpretations represent a dispute between what I will call ortho- doxy and dissent in Hobbes scholarship. The dispute chiefly turns on two questions: What is the basis of Hobbes's ethics? and How stringent are the rules it comprises?' Orthodoxy takes Hobbes's ethics to be based on his moral psychology, specifically, his theory of motivation. That theory, on the orthodox reading, is thoroughly egocentric. It holds that all voluntary action springs from self- interest.3 Hence, on this reading, one can attribute to Hobbes the view that a I am grateful to Ed Curley, Bernard Gert, Richard Kraut, Connie Rosati, and Ira Singer for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay. ' A. E. Taylor, "The Ethical Doctrine of Hobbes," Philosophy a 3 : 406-24, esp. 408. ' One can find the orthodox interpretation in Henry Sidgwick's Outline of the History... (shrink)
This article concerns two themes in Bart Schultz's recent biography of Henry Sidgwick, Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe. The first is the importance of Sidgwick's conflict over his religious beliefs to the development of his thinking in The Methods of Ethics. I suggest that, in addition to the characteristics of Methods that Schulz highlights, the work's epistemology, specifically, Sidgwick's program of presenting ethics as an axiomatic system on the traditional understanding of such systems, is due to the conflict. The (...) second is the relative neglect into which Methods fell in the first part of the twentieth century, neglect Schultz attributes to changes in philosophical fashions and to the undue influence of the Bloomsbury literati on British intellectual culture. I suggest that there is a deeper explanation, which lies in Sidgwick's program of presenting ethics as an axiomatic system on the traditional understanding of such systems. Such programs, I argue, became obsolete in analytic philosophy owing to changes in how axiomatization in mathematics was understood that resulted initially from the rise of non-Euclidean geometries and ultimately from the collapse of Frege's and Russell's logicism. (shrink)
This anthology focuses on emotions and motives that relate to our status as moral agents, our capacity for moral judgement, and the practices that help to define our social lives. Attachment, trust, respect, conscience, guilt, revenge, depravity, and forgiveness are among the topics discussed. Collectively, the thirteen essays in this collection represent a time-honored tradition in ethics: the effort to throw light on fundamental questions concerning the complexities of the human soul.
Theories about man's moral sensibilities, particularly his sense of justice, tend to reflect either optimism or pessimism about human nature. Among modern theorists Hobbes, Hume, and Freud are perhaps the most outstanding representatives of pessimism. Recently, optimistic theories, which view the sense of justice as linked essentially to the sentiments of love and friendship, have found favor with philosophers. Of these theories John Rawls's is the most notable. Section I considers the conceptual scheme optimists advance to establish this view of (...) the sense of justice and argues that it has serious problems. Section II examines Rawls's account of moral development, which is an especially well worked out account on the optimistic side, and argues that, because it relies on the conceptual scheme discussed in Section I, it too is seriously problematic. Finally, Section III suggests that behind these problems lie reasons favoring a pessimistic view like Hume's or Freud's. (shrink)
This article is a reply to Anthony Skelton's . Professor Skelton, in his article, makes several objections to the account of Sidgwick's epistemology I presented in my earlier article . I answer these objections by further explaining my account.
This commentary on Bernard Gert’s Hobbes: Prince of Peace offers criticism of Gert’s assumption that the conceptual basis of the moral and political theory that Hobbes expounds in De Cive is the same as the conceptual basis of his moral and political theory in Leviathan.
J. B. Schneewind's Sidgwick's Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy surpassed all previous treatments of Sidgwick's The Methods of Ethics by showing how Sidgwick's work follows a coherent plan of argument for a conception of ethics as grounded in practical reason. Schneewind offered his interpretation as the product of a historical rather than a critical study. This article undertakes a critical study of Sidgwick's work based on Schneewind's interpretation. Its thesis is that the conception of ethics for which Sidgwick argued is (...) incoherent. As a result, it is argued, the coherent plan of argument in the Methods that Schneewind disclosed masks a deep incoherence in the argument itself. Correspondence:c1 [email protected] (shrink)
The essays in this collection belong to the tradition of naturalism in ethics. Taken together they support the tradition's program of explaining moral thought and action as wholly natural phenomena. To this end they present studies of emotions, practical reason, moral judgment and motivation, moral ideals, and retributive justice.
