Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The turn to reason: how human beings got ethical
- 2 Demarcation: what does “ethical” mean?
- 3 Motivation: why be moral?
- 4 Deliberation: the question of reason
- 5 Introducing subjectivism and objectivism
- 6 Five arguments for ethical subjectivism
- 7 The content of ethics: expressivism, error theory, objectivism again
- 8 Virtue ethics
- 9 Utilitarianism
- 10 Kantianism and contractarianism
- 11 Theory and insight in ethics
- Further reading
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Deliberation: the question of reason
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The turn to reason: how human beings got ethical
- 2 Demarcation: what does “ethical” mean?
- 3 Motivation: why be moral?
- 4 Deliberation: the question of reason
- 5 Introducing subjectivism and objectivism
- 6 Five arguments for ethical subjectivism
- 7 The content of ethics: expressivism, error theory, objectivism again
- 8 Virtue ethics
- 9 Utilitarianism
- 10 Kantianism and contractarianism
- 11 Theory and insight in ethics
- Further reading
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
… Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomèd mine –
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade.
(John Keats, “Lamia”, II)To give a reason of anything is to breed a doubt of it.
(William Hazlitt, On the Difference Between Writing and Speaking, 1824)How rational is it rational to be?
In Chapter 1 I defined ethics as the use of reason to try to give an answer to the question “How should life be lived?”. I said that this definition usefully steers us towards at least four important questions about ethics. The third of these questions is the main topic of this chapter: whether it is right to try to use reason to determine how life should be lived. After all, as we saw in Chapter 1, the turn to reason was originally devised for dealing with problems such as “How can I warm my cave?”, or “How can we irrigate these fields?”. The problem set by the question “How should life be lived?” is a very different sort of problem from those specific technical problems. So it will undoubtedly need a very different sort of solution, and a very different application of the turn to reason.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Ethics and ExperienceLife Beyond Moral Theory, pp. 20 - 36Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2009