Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Sources
- Abbreviations
- Dedication
- 1 Morality and personal relations
- 2 On the right to be punished: Some doubts
- 3 Love, guilt, and the sense of justice
- 4 Remarks on some difficulties in Freud's theory of moral development
- 5 Freud's later theory of civilization: Changes and implications
- 6 Freud, naturalism, and modern moral philosophy
- 7 Reason and motivation
- 8 Empathy and universalizability
- 9 Sidgwick on ethical judgment
- 10 Reason and ethics in Hobbes's Leviathan
- 11 Shame and self-esteem: A critique
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Sources
- Abbreviations
- Dedication
- 1 Morality and personal relations
- 2 On the right to be punished: Some doubts
- 3 Love, guilt, and the sense of justice
- 4 Remarks on some difficulties in Freud's theory of moral development
- 5 Freud's later theory of civilization: Changes and implications
- 6 Freud, naturalism, and modern moral philosophy
- 7 Reason and motivation
- 8 Empathy and universalizability
- 9 Sidgwick on ethical judgment
- 10 Reason and ethics in Hobbes's Leviathan
- 11 Shame and self-esteem: A critique
- Index
Summary
The essays collected here concern the psychology of moral agency. They focus largely on the origins and operations of moral feeling and moral motivation. These phenomena have always seemed to me to be more puzzling than moral thoughts. A study of the latter, unless it is via metaethics a study of the former, tends to concentrate on their content, and for anyone who disbelieves in innate moral ideas there is no great mystery to the explanation of this content. It is found in the moral instruction people begin to receive as children and so in the norms by which a society organizes its life. By contrast, the peculiar feelings that surround those thoughts and the motivation to act in keeping with the norms they reflect do not have a similar explanation. Feelings and motivation cannot be implanted in a person's mind in the same way as ideas and beliefs can. At the same time, moral feelings and moral motivation are signs of acculturation. Susceptibility to them is one of the chief ways in which we distinguish the psychology of men and women from that of beasts and babies. It is one of the chief ways in which we define ourselves as moral agents in contradistinction to the utterly animal and the very young.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Sources of Moral AgencyEssays in Moral Psychology and Freudian Theory, pp. vii - xiiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996