Normativity and the Will Selected Essays on Moral Psychology and Practical Reason

by Wallace, R. Jay

• ISBN13: 9780199287499
• ISBN10: 019928749X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-05-11
• Publisher: Clarendon Press

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Reason, Desire, and the Will

How to Argue about Practical Reason

Three Conceptions of Rational Agency

Explanation, Deliberation, and Reasons

Normativity and the Will

Normativity, Commitment, and Instrumental Reason

Responsibility, Identification, and Emotion

Reason and Responsibility

Moral Responsibility and the Practical Point of View

Addiction as Defect of the Will: Some Philosophical Reflections

Caring, Reflexivity, and the Structure of Volition

Ressentiment, Value, and Self-Vindication: Making Sense of Nietzsche's Slave Revolt

Morality and Other Normative Domains

Virtue, Reason, and Principle

Scanlon's Contractualism

The Rightness of Acts and the Goodness of Lives

Moral Reasons and Moral Fetishes: Rationalists and Anti-Rationalists on Moral Motivation

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