David Bourget (Western Ontario)
David Chalmers (ANU, NYU)
Rafael De Clercq
Jack Alan Reynolds
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Harvard University Press (2002)
Is unethical conduct necessarily irrational? Answering this question requires giving an account of practical reason, of practical good, and of the source or point of wrongdoing. By the time most contemporary philosophers have done the first two, they have lost sight of the third, chalking up bad action to rashness, weakness of will, or ignorance. In this book, Candace Vogler does all three, taking as her guides scholars who contemplated why some people perform evil deeds. In doing so, she sets out to at once engage and redirect contemporary debates about ethics, practical reason, and normativity. Staged as a limited defense of a standard view of practical reason (an ancestor of contemporary instrumentalist views), Vogler's essay develops Aquinas's remark about three ways an action might be desirable into an exhaustive system for categorizing reasons for acting. Drawing on Elizabeth Anscombe's pioneering work on intention, Vogler argues that one sort (means/end or calculative reasons for acting) sets the terms for all sound work on practical rationality. She takes up Aquinas's work on evil throughout, arguing that he provides us with a systematic theory of immorality that takes seriously the goods at issue in wrongdoing and the reasons for unethical conduct. Vogler argues that, shorn of its theological context, this theory leaves us with no systematic, uncontroversial way of arguing that wrongdoing is necessarily contrary to reason.
|Keywords||practical rationality irrational|
|Categories||categorize this paper)|
|Buy the book||$6.05 used (91% off) $18.99 new (25% off) $22.50 direct from Amazon (10% off) Amazon page|
|Call number||BJ1031.V64 2002|
|ISBN(s)||0674030729 0674007417 9780674007413 9780674030725|
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Citations of this work BETA
Kieran Setiya (2011). Reasons and Causes. European Journal of Philosophy 19 (1):129-157.
Jeremy Schwartz (2010). Do Hypothetical Imperatives Require Categorical Imperatives? European Journal of Philosophy 18 (1):84-107.
Chrisoula Andreou (2005). Incommensurable Alternatives and Rational Choice. Ratio 18 (3):249–261.
Christopher Freiman (2010). Why Be Immoral? Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 13 (2):191 - 205.
Elijah Millgram (2011). Practical Reasoning for Serial Hyperspecializers. Philosophical Explorations 12 (3):261-278.
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