Download or read book Beyond Moral Judgment written by Alice Crary and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-09-30 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is moral thought and what kinds of demands does it impose? Alice Crary's book Beyond Moral Judgment claims that even the most perceptive contemporary answers to these questions offer no more than partial illumination, owing to an overly narrow focus on judgments that apply moral concepts (for example, "good," "wrong," "selfish," "courageous") and a corresponding failure to register that moral thinking includes more than such judgments. Drawing on what she describes as widely misinterpreted lines of thought in the writings of Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, Crary argues that language is an inherently moral acquisition and that any stretch of thought, without regard to whether it uses moral concepts, may express the moral outlook encoded in a person's modes of speech. She challenges us to overcome our fixation on moral judgments and direct attention to responses that animate all our individual linguistic habits. Her argument incorporates insights from McDowell, Wiggins, Diamond, Cavell, and Murdoch and integrates a rich set of examples from feminist theory as well as from literature, including works by Jane Austen, E. M. Forster, Tolstoy, Henry James, and Theodor Fontane. The result is a powerful case for transforming our understanding of the difficulty of moral reflection and of the scope of our ethical concerns.

Download or read book Regard for Reason in the Moral Mind written by Joshua May and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-04 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The burgeoning science of ethics has produced a trend toward pessimism. Ordinary moral thought and action, we're told, are profoundly influenced by arbitrary factors and ultimately driven by unreasoned feelings. This book counters the current orthodoxy on its own terms by carefully engaging with the empirical literature. The resulting view, optimistic rationalism, shows the pervasive role played by reason our moral minds, and ultimately defuses sweeping debunking arguments in ethics. The science does suggest that moral knowledge and virtue don't come easily. However, despite the heavy influence of automatic and unconscious processes that have been shaped by evolutionary pressures, we needn't reject ordinary moral psychology as fundamentally flawed or in need of serious repair. Reason can be corrupted in ethics just as in other domains, but a special pessimism about morality in particular is unwarranted. Moral judgment and motivation are fundamentally rational enterprises not beholden to the passions.

Download or read book Moral Development and Reality written by John C. Gibbs and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2003-04-23 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A supplementary textbook for a graduate or advanced undergraduate course dealing with moral psychology. It looks at implications of and problems with theories of moral development put forward by Lawrence Kohlberg and Martin L. Hoffman. Annotation (c) Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

Download or read book Sentimental Rules written by Shaun Nichols and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2004-11-04 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shaun Nichols' theory is that emotions play a critical role in both the psychological and the cultural underpinnings of basic moral judgement, in that the norms prohibiting the harming of others are fundamentally associated with our emotional responses to those harms.

Download or read book The Practice of Moral Judgment written by Barbara Herman and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Barbara Herman argues for a radical shift in the way we perceive Kant's ethics. She convincingly reinterprets the key texts, at once allowing Kant to mean what he says while showing that what Kant says makes good moral sense. She urges us to abandon the tradition that describes Kantian ethics as a deontology, a moral system of rules of duty. She finds the central idea of Kantian ethics not in duty but in practical rationality as a norm of unconditioned goodness. This book both clarifies Kant's own theory and adds programmatic vitality to modern moral philosophy.

Download or read book Moral Brains written by S. Matthew Liao and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last fifteen years, there has been significant interest in studying the brain structures involved in moral judgments using novel techniques from neuroscience. This is the first volume to take stock of fifteen years of research of this fast-growing field of moral neuroscience and recommend future directions for research.

Download or read book Morality in Context written by Wolfgang Edelstein and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2005-07-25 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Morality in context is a timely topic. A debate between philosophers and social scientists is a good way to approach it. Why is there such a booming interest in morality and why does it focus on context? One starting point is the change in the sociostructural and sociocultural conditions of modern societies. This involves change in the empirical conditions of moral action and in the social demand on morality. As these changes are accounted for and analyzed in the social sciences, new perspectives emerge that give rise to new ways of framing issues and problems. These problems are best addressed by way of cooperation between philosophers and social scientists. As Habermas (1990) has pointed out in a much cited paper, philosophers depend on social science to fill in the data they require to answer the questions raised by philosophy in its "placeholder" function. The reverse also holds true: Social science needs the conceptual clarifications that philosophy can provide. With respect to morality, such mutual interchanges are of particular importance the contributions to this book show convincingly.

Download or read book Inside Ethics written by Alice Crary and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-05 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alice Crary offers a transformative account of moral thought about human beings and animals. Instead of assuming that the world places no demands on our moral imagination, she underscores the urgency of treating the exercise of moral imagination as necessary for arriving at an adequate world-guided understanding of human beings and animals.

Download or read book Moral Thinking Fast and Slow written by Hanno Sauer and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a new theory of the philosophy and cognitive science of moral judgment. Hanno Sauer defends an account of 'triple-process' moral psychology, arguing that moral thinking and reasoning are insufficiently understood when described in terms of a twin-track quick but intuitive and slow but rational type of cognition.

Download or read book Beyond Certainty written by Don E. Marietta and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique study, Beyond Certainty is a phenomenological approach to the connection between factual knowledge and moral judgment. Marietta holds logical certainty to be unnecessary for moral decision-making. In point of fact, logical certainty about our moral judgments, according to the author, is impossible. Key dilemmas in recent moral theory are caught within this impasse represented through an "is/ought" dichotomy. Marietta trumps this impasse through a return to concrete reflection on our most primal consciousness of the world.

Download or read book Psychology of Learning and Motivation written by and published by Academic Press. This book was released on 2009-02-09 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents a variety of perspectives from within and outside moral psychology. Recently there has been an explosion of research in moral psychology, but it is one of the subfields most in need of bridge-building, both within and across areas. Interests in moral phenomena have spawned several separate lines of research that appear to address similar concerns from a variety of perspectives. The contributions to this volume examine key theoretical and empirical issues these perspectives share that connect these issues with the broader base of theory and research in social and cognitive psychology. The first two chapters discuss the role of mental representation in moral judgment and reasoning. Sloman, Fernbach, and Ewing argue that causal models are the canonical representational medium underlying moral reasoning, and Mikhail offers an account that makes use of linguistic structures and implicates legal concepts. Bilz and Nadler follow with a discussion of the ways in which laws, which are typically construed in terms of affecting behavior, exert an influence on moral attitudes, cognition, and emotions. Baron and Ritov follow with a discussion of how people's moral cognition is often driven by law-like rules that forbid actions and suggest that value-driven judgment is relatively less concerned by the consequences of those actions than some normative standards would prescribe. Iliev et al. argue that moral cognition makes use of both rules and consequences, and review a number of laboratory studies that suggest that values influence what captures our attention, and that attention is a powerful determinant of judgment and preference. Ginges follows with a discussion of how these value-related processes influence cognition and behavior outside the laboratory, in high-stakes, real-world conflicts. Two subsequent chapters discuss further building blocks of moral cognition. Lapsley and Narvaez discuss the development of moral characters in children, and Reyna and Casillas offer a memory-based account of moral reasoning, backed up by developmental evidence. Their theoretical framework is also very relevant to the phenomena discussed in the Sloman et al., Baron and Ritov, and Iliev et al. chapters. The final three chapters are centrally focused on the interplay of hot and cold cognition. They examine the relationship between recent empirical findings in moral psychology and accounts that rely on concepts and distinctions borrowed from normative ethics and decision theory. Connolly and Hardman focus on bridge-building between contemporary discussions in the judgment and decision making and moral judgment literatures, offering several useful methodological and theoretical critiques. Ditto, Pizarro, and Tannenbaum argue that some forms of moral judgment that appear objective and absolute on the surface are, at bottom, more about motivated reasoning in service of some desired conclusion. Finally, Bauman and Skitka argue that moral relevance is in the eye of the perceiver and emphasize an empirical approach to identifying whether people perceive a given judgment as moral or non-moral. They describe a number of behavioral implications of people's reported perception that a judgment or choice is a moral one, and in doing so, they suggest that the way in which researchers carve out the moral domain a priori might be dubious.

Download or read book Beyond Moral Fundamentalism written by Steven Fesmire and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Moral fundamentalism" is Steven Fesmire's term for the habit of acting as though one has access to the exclusively right way to diagnose problems, along with the only practical solution. This habit causes us to oversimplify situations, neglect broader context, take refuge in dogmatic absolutes, ignore possibilities for finding common ground, assume privileged access to the right way to proceed, and shut off honest inquiry. Moral fundamentalism makes it impossible to debate and achieve superordinate social goals, such as public health, justice, security, sustainability, peace, and democracy. Drawing from John Dewey's pluralistic and pragmatic approach to philosophical questions, Fesmire develops an alternative to both the oversimplification of moral fundamentalism and the arbitrariness of relativism, which he terms "pragmatic pluralism."

Download or read book Like minded written by Andrew Sneddon and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A proposal that the cognitive processes that make us moral agents are partially constituted by features of our external environments.

Download or read book The Evolution of Morality written by Richard Joyce and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2007-08-24 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moral thinking pervades our practical lives, but where did this way of thinking come from, and what purpose does it serve? Is it to be explained by environmental pressures on our ancestors a million years ago, or is it a cultural invention of more recent origin? In The Evolution of Morality, Richard Joyce takes up these controversial questions, finding that the evidence supports an innate basis to human morality. As a moral philosopher, Joyce is interested in whether any implications follow from this hypothesis. Might the fact that the human brain has been biologically prepared by natural selection to engage in moral judgment serve in some sense to vindicate this way of thinking—staving off the threat of moral skepticism, or even undergirding some version of moral realism? Or if morality has an adaptive explanation in genetic terms—if it is, as Joyce writes, "just something that helped our ancestors make more babies"—might such an explanation actually undermine morality's central role in our lives? He carefully examines both the evolutionary "vindication of morality" and the evolutionary "debunking of morality," considering the skeptical view more seriously than have others who have treated the subject. Interdisciplinary and combining the latest results from the empirical sciences with philosophical discussion, The Evolution of Morality is one of the few books in this area written from the perspective of moral philosophy. Concise and without technical jargon, the arguments are rigorous but accessible to readers from different academic backgrounds. Joyce discusses complex issues in plain language while advocating subtle and sometimes radical views. The Evolution of Morality lays the philosophical foundations for further research into the biological understanding of human morality.

Download or read book How to be Good written by John Harris and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-07 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'How to be Good?' is the pre-eminent question for ethics, although one that philosophers and ethicists seldom address head on. Knowing how to be good, or perhaps (more modestly and more accurately) knowing how to go about trying to be good, and the ways in which it is pointless or self-defeating to try to be good, is of immense theoretical and practical importance. And what goes for trying to be good oneself, goes also for trying to provide others with ways of being good, and for trying to make them good whether they like it or not. This is what is meant by 'moral enhancement'. There are many proposed methodologies or technologies for moral enhancement. Some of them are ancient and/or familiar: we may attempt moral enhancement by setting a good example, by good parenting, by education or training, by peer pressure, by telling stories with a moral, in words or in pictures, and so on. We can imbibe substances with mood changing or motivational effects. We can also use medical, biological, or other scientific means; we can search for and deploy chemicals, or biological or molecular agents, which we believe will change people for the better; and we can modify the environment to make bad outcomes of all sorts less likely. We can experiment with political and social systems, institutions, and arrangements designed to make the world a better place or people better people. The question whether and to what extent moral enhancement is possible is the subject of this book.

Download or read book The Self Beyond Itself written by Heidi M. Ravven and published by New Press, The. This book was released on 2014-09-16 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Intertwines history, philosophy, and science . . . A powerful challenge to conventional notions of individual responsibility” (Publishers Weekly). Few concepts are more unshakable in our culture than free will, the idea that individuals are fundamentally in control of the decisions they make, good or bad. And yet the latest research about how the brain functions seems to point in the opposite direction . . . In a work of breathtaking intellectual sweep and erudition, Heidi M. Ravven offers a riveting and accessible review of cutting-edge neuroscientific research into the brain’s capacity for decision-making—from “mirror” neurons and “self-mapping” to surprising new understandings of group psychology. The Self Beyond Itself also introduces readers to a rich, alternative philosophical tradition of ethics, rooted in the writing of Baruch Spinoza, that finds uncanny confirmation in modern science. Illustrating the results of today’s research with real-life examples, taking readers from elementary school classrooms to Nazi concentration camps, Ravven demonstrates that it is possible to build a theory of ethics that doesn’t rely on free will yet still holds both individuals and groups responsible for the decisions that help create a good society. The Self Beyond Itself is that rare book that injects new ideas into an old debate—and “an important contribution to the development of our thinking about morality” (Washington Independent Review of Books). “An intellectual hand-grenade . . . A magisterial survey of how contemporary neuroscience supports a vision of human morality which puts it squarely on the same plane as other natural phenomena.” —William D. Casebeer, author of Natural Ethical Facts

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning written by Keith J. Holyoak and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2013-05-23 with total page 865 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning brings together the contributions of many of the leading researchers in thinking and reasoning to create the most comprehensive overview of research on thinking and reasoning that has ever been available.