The Bounds of Choice: Unchosen Virtues, Unchosen Commitments

by Talbot Brewer

Overview

Presents a sustained and original challenge to the orthodox understanding of the relationship between morality and voluntary choice. The two main theses of the book are that we can be morally responsible for aspects of our character that we have not chosen or otherwise authored, and that we can enter into interpersonal commitments to which we have not voluntarily consented.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781135707491
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	10/08/2013
Series:	Studies in Ethics
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	252
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Talbot Brewer is in the philosophy department at the University of Virginia.

Table of Contents

Preface; Acknowledgments; A Difficulty with Kant's Account of Desire; Introduction; I. Kant on Moral Worth an dGoodness of Will; II. Difficulties with Kant's Notion of Moral Worth; III. Moral Worth and Virtue; IV. Specifying Our Reservatio about Kant's Cases; V. Recasting the Groundwork Cases; VI. Kant's Second Critique Thought Experiment; VII. Conclusion; Kantian Virtue, Affects and Rules; Introduction; I. Kantian Virtue and Joyfulness in Dutiful Action; II. Emprical and Intelligible Virtue; III. Affects and Perceptual Salience; IV. The Value of Moral Sensibility; V. The Place of Rules in Moral Sensibility; VI. Two Kinds of Illusions; VII. Desires as Consequences of Past Choices; VIII. Kant's Reductio of Voluntarist Accounts of Responsibility?; Two Conceptions of Commitment; Introduction: Undertaking commitments; I. The Words that Commit Us; II. The Peculiar Case of Consent; III. Commissive Force and Descriptive Truth; IV. Commitments and Social Groups; V. Two Kinds of Social Groups; VI. INternalist Commitment, Integrity and Authority; Special Non-PRomissory Obligations; Introduction; I. Walzer on Obligations and Commitments; II. Internalist and Externalist Commitments; III. Walzer and INternalist Commitments; IV. The Conditions of Ultimate Obligation; V. An Analysis of Special Non-Promissory Obligations; VI. The Radicalism of Internalist Obligations--Ibsen's Nora; Bibliography; Index