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Chapter 3 - Moral Inescapability: Moral Agency and Metaethics

from Part I - Self, Despair, and Wholeheartedness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2022

Roe Fremstedal
Affiliation:
Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim
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Summary

Chapter 3 connects Kierkegaardian critiques of amoralism to discussions of wantonness and Humeanism in action theory. By discussing the cultivation of love (and higher-order motives), it is argued that practical rational agency requires moral normativity. The chapter then presents and discusses Kierkegaard’s strong views about the inescapability of morality, interpreting it as a form of constitutivism concerning moral normativity, which tries to derive practical normativity from practical agency itself. However, Kierkegaard seems to combine such constitutivism with the theological view that moral obligations depend on us belonging to God as his creation. Still, he is not a divine command theorist who sees divine commands as necessary and sufficient for moral obligations. Rather, he sketches a form of moral realism and criticizes subjectivism in ethics.

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Kierkegaard on Self, Ethics, and Religion
Purity or Despair
, pp. 54 - 72
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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