Normativity and the Will: Selected Essays on Moral Psychology and Practical Reason
R. Jay Wallace
Language: English
Pages: 360
ISBN: 019928749X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Normativity and the Will collects fourteen important papers on moral psychology and practical reason by R. Jay Wallace, one of the leading philosophers currently working in these areas. The papers explore the interpenetration of normative and psychological issues in a series of debates that lie at the heart of moral philosophy. Themes that are addressed include reason, desire, and the will; responsibility, identification, and emotion; and the relation between morality and other normative domains. Wallace's treatments of these topics are at once sophisticated and engaging. Taken together, they constitute an advertisement for a distinctive way of pursuing issues in moral psychology and the theory of practical reason, and they articulate and defend a unified framework for thinking about those issues. The volume also features a helpful new introduction.
Business Ethics in the 21st Century (Issues in Business Ethics / Eminent Voices in Business Ethics)
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Objection, found in very recent work by John Collins, challenges the argument’s premise that rational belief-revision is always by conditionalization (or its nonquantitative analogue). Collins now thinks that there are independent reasons for holding that belief revision follows two, distinct methods: conditionalization, which is appropriate for genuine updating of belief; and the merely hypothetical revision implicit in the decision theoretic definition of expected value, which has quite.
The virtuous agent has, while the amoral agent lacks, a dispositional desire to perform actions that are helpful or just, where this dispositional desire is the real source of the virtuous person’s motivations. Phenomenological evidence, in other words, seems rather to support the Humean approach than to confute it. The rationalist may try to avoid this outcome, perhaps, by denying that the beliefs which seem to explain motivations and motivated desires are ordinary beliefs, available equally to.
Are normatively significant features of our situation, features that cast prospective actions in a favorable light. The explanatory task to which the theory of motivating reasons is a response will accordingly be to cite psychological states of agents that render intelligible their seeing things this way in the deliberative point of view, compatibly with the denial of genuine normativity in the world. The strategy that naturally suggests itself in this context is to appeal to the agent’s desires,.
Truth, and this yields a different sense in which belief— by contrast to choice or intention—can be claimed to be an essentially normative stance. ²⁵ For examples of this tendency, see Philip Pettit and Michael Smith, ‘Freedom in Belief and Desire’, Journal of Philosophy, 93 (1996), 429–49; Peter Railton, ‘On the Hypothetical and NonHypothetical in Reasoning about Belief and Action’, in Cullity and Gaut (eds.), Ethics and Practical Reason, 53–79; Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other, ch. 1; and.
Governed—in the sense I have specified—by the principles or norms of reason. By contrast, the Originally published in Mind, 99 (July 1990), 355–85. Copyright © Oxford University Press 1990. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press. I have had helpful comments on predecessors of this paper from Simon Blackburn, John Collins, Samuel Freeman, Gilbert Harman, Sally Haslanger, Katharina Kaiser, Wolfgang Mann, and an audience at the University of Pennsylvania. I owe a special debt to Michael.