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Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning
Abstract
Simon Blackburn puts forward a compelling original philosophy of human motivation and morality. He maintains that we cannot get clear about ethics until we get clear about human nature. So these are the sorts of questions he addresses: Why do we behave as we do? Can we improve? Is our ethics at war with our passions, or is it an upshot of those passions? Blackburn seeks the answers in an exploration of guilt, shame, disgust, and other moral emotions; he draws also on game theory and cognitive science in his account of the structures of human motivation. Many philosophers have wanted a naturalistic ethics--a theory that integrates our understanding of human morality with the rest of our understanding of the world we live in. What is special about Blackburn's naturalistic ethics is that it does not debunk the ethical by reducing it to the non-ethical. At the same time he banishes the spectres of scepticism and relativism that have haunted recent moral philosophy. Ruling Passions sets ethics in the context of human nature: it offers a solution to the puzzle of how ethics can maintain its authority even though it is rooted in the very emotions and motivations that it exists to control.
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From Virtue Ethics and Moral Psychology: The Situationism Debate (2009) · cites this paper as [5]
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Metadata
- Authors
- Blackburn, S.
- Corresponding author
- Blackburn, Simon
- Publisher
- Oxford University PressOxford
- Published
- 1998-09-24
- OpenAlex
- W4388223145
- Cited by
- 1,217
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 42 · 2025: 74 · 2024: 86 · 2023: 35 · 2022: 25 · 2021: 36 · 2020: 55 · 2019: 62 · 2018: 47 · 2017: 81 · 2016: 27 · 2015: 24 · 2014: 54 · 2013: 51 · 2012: 58
- FWCI
- 26.84
- Type
- book
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Philosophy › Philosophical Ethics and Theory
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Emotions and Moral Behavior
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment
- Keywords
- Simon Blackburn, ethical naturalism, moral emotions, guilt, shame, disgust, motives, human nature, moral skepticism, moral relativism, emotions and morality, game theory, cognitive science
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