Ruling Passions A Theory of Practical Reasoning

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Format: Paperback
Pub. Date: 2001-01-11
Publisher(s): Clarendon Press
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Summary

Simon Blackburn puts forward a compelling original philosophy of human motivation and morality. He maintains that we cannot get clear about ethics until we get clear about human nature. So these are the sorts of questions he addresses: Why do we behave as we do? Can we improve? Is ourethics at war with our passions, or is it an upshot of those passions? Blackburn seeks the answers in an exploration of guilt, shame, disgust, and other moral emotions; he draws also on game theory and cognitive science in his account of the structures of human motivation. Many philosophers have wanted a naturalistic ethics--a theory that integrates our understanding of human morality with the rest of our understanding of the world we live in. What is special about Blackburn's naturalistic ethics is that it does not debunk the ethical by reducing it to thenon-ethical. At the same time he banishes the spectres of scepticism and relativism that have haunted recent moral philosophy. Ruling Passions sets ethics in the context of human nature: it offers a solution to the puzzle of how ethics can maintain its authority even though it is rooted in thevery emotions and motivations that it exists to control.

Author Biography


Simon Blackburn is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. Previously he was the Edna J. Koury Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Adjunct Professor at the Australian National University's Research School of Social Sciences. From 1969 to 1990 he was Fellow and Tutor of Philosophy at Pembroke College, Oxford.

Table of Contents

Organizing Practice: The Elements Of Ethics
1(24)
A Practical Subject
1(3)
Inputs and Outputs
4(4)
Emotional Ascent
8(6)
Guilt, Shame, and the Rejection of Ethics
14(7)
Privacy and Principle
21(3)
Things That Concern Us
24(24)
Virtues, Ends, Duties
24(8)
Virtue First?
32(5)
Duty First?
37(3)
Explanation and Justification
40(3)
Consequentialism First: One Thought Too Few?
43(5)
Naturalizing Norms
48(36)
In the Beginning was the Deed
48(3)
Prelude: Norms and Functions
51(8)
States of Mind: Satan and Othello
59(9)
The Ethical Proposition and Frege's Abyss
68(9)
Representation and Minimalism
77(7)
The Ethical Proposition: What It Is Not
84(38)
Dionysus and Apollo
84(8)
Concepts, Rules, and Forms of Life
92(5)
Eighteenth-Century Philosophy of Mind?
97(4)
The Cute and the Lewd
101(3)
Response-Dependent Accounts
104(15)
Cornell Realism
119(3)
Looking Out For Yourself
122(39)
Emotions and Decisions
122(12)
Economic Man
134(3)
The Empirical Claim: Butler on Desire and Interest
137(7)
The Self and Biology
144(9)
Self-Regarding versus Self-Referential Desire
153(4)
Ought We to Be Selfish?
157(4)
Game Theory and Rational Choice
161(39)
Utilities, Preferences, and Choices
161(7)
Blackmailers and Centipedes
168(8)
The Prisoners' Dilemma
176(7)
Toxins, Boxes, and Reasons
183(8)
The Growth of Trust
191(9)
The Good, The Right, and the Common Point of View
200(38)
Vibrating in Sympathy: Hume and Smith
200(12)
Aristotle's Well-Being
212(2)
Kant's Dream
214(10)
Hare's Version
224(9)
The Knave Again
233(5)
Self-Control: Reason, and Freedom
238(41)
Self-Control: Hume-Friendly Reason
238(5)
The Kantian Captain
243(7)
The Fundamental Mistake about Deliberation
250(6)
Self-Legislation, Practical Identity, and the Normative Question
256(5)
Rational Selves
261(8)
Reason, Rawls, Contracts, and Liberalism
269(10)
Relativism, Subjectivism, Knowledge
279(32)
Relativism in a First-Order Ethic
279(7)
Postmodernist Relativism
286(8)
Ramsey's Ladder
294(4)
Relativism and Authority
298(6)
Knowledge, Objectivity, Truth
304(7)
Appendix: Common Questions 311(10)
Bibliography 321(8)
Index 329

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