How do our feelings for others shape our attitudes and conduct towards them? Is morality primarily a matter of rational choice, or instinctual feeling? Joseph Duke Filonowicz takes the reader on an engaging, informative tour of some of the main issues in philosophical ethics, explaining and defending the ideas of the early-modern British sentimentalists. These philosophers - Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith - argued that it is our feelings, and not our 'reason', which ultimately determine how we judge what is (...) good or bad, right or wrong, and how we choose to act towards our fellow human beings. Filonowicz draws on contemporary sociology and evolutionary biology as well as present-day moral theory to examine and defend the sentimentalist view and to challenge the rationalistic character of contemporary ethics. His book will appeal to readers interested in both the history of philosophy and current ethical debates. (shrink)

How do our feelings for others shape our attitudes and conduct towards them? Is morality primarily a matter of rational choice, or instinctual feeling? Joseph Duke Filonowicz takes the reader on an engaging, informative tour of some of the main issues in philosophical ethics, explaining and defending the ideas of the early-modern British sentimentalists. These philosophers - Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith - argued that it is our feelings, and not our 'reason', which ultimately determine how we judge what is (...) good or bad, right or wrong, and how we choose to act towards our fellow human beings. Filonowicz draws on contemporary sociology and evolutionary biology as well as present-day moral theory to examine and defend the sentimentalist view and to challenge the rationalistic character of contemporary ethics. His book will appeal to readers interested in both the history of philosophy and current ethical debates. (shrink)

Shaftesbury is widely regarded as an early champion of sentimentalism in ethics, yet no one appears to have succeeded at stating, in terms congenial to modern moral philosophy, a theory of ethics which can appropriately be ascribed to him. Two themes of his doctrine of fellow feeling, I argue, contain implicitly the two basic principles of his ethical system and the proper key to his sentimentalism. Shaftesbury is a sentimentalist in virtue of his attempt to discover a foundation for morality (...) through a study of human emotion, sentiment and desire, rather than by appeal to "reason's" demand for consistency and impartiality in practical choice. Without "natural affection"--sympathy, compassion and fellow concern--not only would humans lack sufficient motivational resources for the practice of altruism in their lives, but any attempt by moralists to rationally justify other-regarding and benevolent moral principles would necessarily be futile. I further clarify the nature of sentimentalism as it speaks to questions both of explanation and of justification by means of a comparison with parts of Thomas Nagel's argument in The Possibility of Altruism . Nagel's rationalist arguments against the feasibility of ethical sentimentalism are by no means conclusive; the sentimentalist account can shed light on important philosophical problems of morality which Nagel's view is ill-equipped to discuss. I then render my own modernized versions of various traditional objections to Shaftesbury's view, and, while acknowledging the presence of several serious problems for contemporary sentimentalism, I argue that the same type of approach which distinguished Shaftesbury from his predecessors and peers is still quite defensible within current moral theory and psychology of ethics. I believe I have achieved my two most significant objectives: to do something to loosen the grip of a certain widely accepted picture of ethics and morality which I take to be misguided--the view that moral principle must be seen to have "rational force" independent of the actual desires, emotions and attachments of human beings--and to get some contemporary handle on the ethical thought of this puzzling and neglected, though very influential, early British Moralist. (shrink)