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 our ethics 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 the non-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 the very emotions and motivations that it exists to
control.
Table of Contents
Introduction; 1. Organizing Practice: The Elements
of Ethics; 2. Things That Concern Us; 3. The Ethical Proposition: What It Is
Not; 4. Naturalizing Norms; 5. Looking Out For Yourself; 6. Game Theory and
Rational Actors; 7. The Good, the Right, and the Common Point of View; 8.
Self-Control, Reason, and Freedom; 9. Relativism, Subjectivism, Knowledge;
Appendix; Bibliography; Index
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.
Paperback
11 January 2001
344 Pages
ISBN: 9780199241392
Ruling Passions : A Theory of Practical Reasoning
by Simon Blackburn (2001, Paperback)
