Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- PART I MORAL AGENCY AND SCIENTIFIC NATURALISM
- PART II THE BIOLOGICAL BASES OF MORAL AGENCY
- PART III THE PSYCHOLOGICAL BASES OF MORAL AGENCY
- PART IV A SCIENTIFIC NATURALISTIC ACCOUNT OF MORAL AGENCY
- PART V INTEGRATING A PERSONALISTIC AND NATURALISTIC VIEW OF MORAL AGENCY
- 10 The manifest and scientific images of morality: How can we integrate our ordinary and scientifically based views of moral agency?
- References
- Index
10 - The manifest and scientific images of morality: How can we integrate our ordinary and scientifically based views of moral agency?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- PART I MORAL AGENCY AND SCIENTIFIC NATURALISM
- PART II THE BIOLOGICAL BASES OF MORAL AGENCY
- PART III THE PSYCHOLOGICAL BASES OF MORAL AGENCY
- PART IV A SCIENTIFIC NATURALISTIC ACCOUNT OF MORAL AGENCY
- PART V INTEGRATING A PERSONALISTIC AND NATURALISTIC VIEW OF MORAL AGENCY
- 10 The manifest and scientific images of morality: How can we integrate our ordinary and scientifically based views of moral agency?
- References
- Index
Summary
In Part IV, I presented an integrationist scientific naturalistic account of moral agency. In doing so, I provided support for the critical connection hypothesis and the metaethical connection hypothesis. In the preceding parts, I attempted to make the case for the explanatory connection hypothesis. At this point, then, I contend that a plausible case has been made for three of the four hypotheses that I set out to establish. I now turn to establishing the remaining integrationist hypothesis: the meaningfulness hypothesis.
Questions of meaningfulness are intimately connected with how one views one's life and the living of one's life. The particular challenge that this question poses for an integrationist is to show how a scientific naturalistic account of moral agency can make any meaningful connections with the life of ordinary moral agents. In Section 10.1, I begin to answer that question by making use of the notions of the scientific and manifest image of humans developed by Wilfrid Sellars (1963) and argue, as did Sellars, for a synoptic vision of the two in terms of the notion of the human person. This will return us in Section 10.2 to the reductionist predicament discussed in Chapter 7. Although I offer a tentative resolution of that predicament making use of a synoptic vision of human moral agents as persons, my resolution by no means settles all the issues that the predicament raises; nevertheless, it lends further confirmation to the integrationist's critical connection hypothesis and provides the entry way into an examination of the meaningfulness hypothesis and the integrationist's case for it in Section 10.3.
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- The Biology and Psychology of Moral Agency , pp. 255 - 274Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997