The Moral Powers A Study of Human Nature

A milestone in the study of value in human life and thought, written by one of the world’s preeminent living philosophers

The Moral Powers: A Study of Human Nature is a philosophical investigation of the moral potentialities and sensibilities of human beings, of the meaning of human life, and of the place of death in life. It is an essay in philosophical anthropology: the study of the conceptual framework in terms of which we think about, speak about, and investigate homo sapiens as a social and cultural animal. This volume examines the diversity of values in human life and the place of moral value within the varieties of values. Its subject is the nature of good and evil and our propensity to virtue and vice. Acting as the culmination of five decades of reflection on the philosophy of mind, epistemology, ethics, and human nature, this volume:

• Concludes Hacker’s acclaimed Human Nature tetralogy: Human Nature: The Categorial Framework, The Intellectual Powers: A Study of Human Nature, and The Passions: A Study of Human Nature
• Discusses traditional ideas about ethical value and addresses misconceptions held by philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive neuroscientists

The Moral Powers: A Study of Human Nature is required reading philosophers of mind, ethicists, psychologists, cognitive neuroscientists, and any general reader wanting to understand the nature of value and the place of ethics in human lives.

P.M.S. Hacker is Emeritus Fellow and former Tutorial Fellow in philosophy at St John’s College, Oxford. He is an Honorary Professor of University College, London in the UCL Institute of Neurology at Queen’s Square. He has held British Academy and Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowships and visiting chairs in North America. He is the leading authority on the philosophy of Wittgenstein on whom he has written a dozen books. Together with M.R. Bennett he has written extensively on cognitive neuroscience. He is the author of 21 books and author of 165 papers.

Prolegomenon

1. Philosophical anthropology and the investigation of value

2. The sinopia for a fresco

Acknowledgement

Part I Of good and evil

Chapter 1 The roots of value and the nature of morality

1. The place of value in a world of facts

2. Varieties of goodness

3. The framework of moral goodness

4. Morality

Chapter 2 The roots of morality and the nature of moral goodness

1. Moral goodness

2. The roots of moral value

3. Respect

4. The relative permanence of the virtues

5. Constants in human nature

Chapter 3 The roots of evil

1. The horror!

2. The grammar of evil: preliminary clarification

3. Philosophical problems: does evil exist?

4. Philosophical problems: can evil be explained?

Chapter 4 Explanations of evil

1. The variety of explanations

2. Reasons and motives for doing evil

3. Can evil be a motive?

4. Knowledge of good and evil

5. Experimental psychology: Milgram’s and Browning’s explanations of evil-doing

Chapter 5 Evil and the death of the soul

1. Body, mind and soul

2. The death of the soul

3. Forgiveness and self-forgiveness

4. Evil and the unforgivable

5. From soul to soul – trisecting an angle with compass and rule

Part II Of freedom and responsibility

Chapter 6 Fatalism and determinism

1. Of fate and fortune

2. Fatalism

3. Nomological determinism

4. Flaws in reductive determinism

5. The random and the determined

Chapter 7 Neuroscientific determinism, freedom and responsibility

1. Neuroscientific determinism

2. Explanations of human behaviour: a recapitulation

3. Neuroscientific explanation and its limits

4. How possible, not why necessary

5. Varieties of responsibility

6. Elaboration

7. Irresistible impulse and temptation

Part III Of pleasure and happiness

Chapter 8 Pleasure and enjoyment

1. Varieties of hedonism

2. Pleasure, enjoyment and being pleased

3. Pleasure, pain and the pleasures of sensation

4. Enjoyment and the pleasure of activities

5. Pleasure, desire, and satisfaction

6. Comparability and quantification

7. First-person judgements of pleasure

8. The hedonic life

Chapter 9 Happiness

1. Preliminaries

2. The field of happiness

3. Happiness: analysis

4. Preconditions of happiness

5. The epistemology of happiness

6. Two philosophical traditions

7. Happiness and morality

Chapter 10 The science of happiness

1. From eighteenth-century crudity and back again

2. How happiness is understood by happiness scientists

3. Psychological and epistemological presuppositions of the science of happiness

4. Measuring happiness

5. Some results of the science of happiness

Part IV Of meaning and death

Chapter 11 The need for meaning

1. Meaning

2. The primacy of loss of meaning and the sense of meaninglessness

3. The roots of meaninglessness

4. Does life have a meaning?

5. Finding meaning in human life

Chapter 12 The place of death in life

1. What is death?

2. An afterlife

3. The valuelessness of life

4. The value of life

5. Living forever

6. Thanataphobia – the fear of death

Appendices

Appendix 1 On animal beliefs and animal morality

1. Animal morality

2. Animal thinking, animal thoughts, and animal memory

3. Counter-arguments and their rebuttal

4. Animal knowledge of other animals’ minds

5. Animal emotions

Appendix 2 Diabology: Satan, Lucifer and the devil in western thought

Appendix 3 Hannah Arendt and the banality of evil

Appendix 4 The representation of pleasure in post-medieval western art

Index

The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.