Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
Everyone has an interest in reasoning practically about ends. To fail to recognize its possibility is to miss the full potential for evaluating human pursuits and achieving practical wisdom, yet living wisely and discerning the true complexity of value should concern everyone. Both the centrality of the topic of deliberation about ends and the reasons why its potential rationality is not generally recognized have affected how this book has been written. Because of the broad human importance of the topic, I have aimed to write an accessible book. This may mean that in some places – in particular the long examples of Chapter X – the exposition moves too slowly for professional philosophers. In contrast, a few sections of the book establish preliminaries or address details that will mainly interest philosophers and may be skipped by others: §§5, 6, and 12. More generally, since the obstacles to recognizing the potential rationality of deliberation about ends are philosophical inventions, and since common sense already provides some evidence on its own that we do deliberate rationally about ends, only readers with some interest in philosophy are likely to be motivated to follow my arguments through to the end. They will include those readers who have sufficient philosophical curiosity about how the constructive argument against my opponents will go or about the precise shape the theory of deliberation about ends will take. They will also include readers who at the outset feel to some degree the force of the philosophically originated doubts (described in §2) about the possibility of rational deliberation of ends.
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- Practical Reasoning about Final Ends , pp. xi - xivPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994