Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 239-242
Author(s):  
Karen Stohr
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Moral Identity ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Normative Authority ◽  
Moral Improvement ◽  
Moral Ideals ◽  
Practical Project

This concluding chapter summarizes the main arguments of the book. In order for moral improvement to be a practical project, it must work from a psychologically plausible picture of human nature and it must rely on ideals that have normative authority and regulative efficacy for the person who is aiming to improve. The book argues that we should understand moral improvement as the cultivation of an aspirational moral identity. The cultivation of this identity takes place in social contexts that affect its trajectory. Moral improvement requires good moral neighborhoods, or normative structures that facilitate moral improvement by enabling us to enact fictive moral selves. In this way, moral neighborhoods help us close the gap between our moral ideals and the flawed reality in which we live.

The Gap

2019 ◽  
pp. 10-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Stohr
Keyword(s):  
Moral Identity ◽  
Moral Ideal ◽  
Moral Improvement ◽  
Realistic Picture ◽  
Moral Ideals ◽  
Practical Project ◽  
Self Knowledge

This chapter unpacks the idea that the project of moral improvement aims at narrowing the gap between our moral selves and our moral ideals. The shape of the gap depends on how we conceptualize our moral ideals and what we presuppose about our actual moral situation. For moral improvement to be a practical project, it must meet two requirements. First, it must operate with a psychologically realistic picture of actual human capacities for self-knowledge and reflection. Second, it must employ a moral ideal that is normatively authoritative and regulatively efficacious for the person undertaking the project. She must regard it as an ideal for herself and as having practical upshot for how she conducts her life. The chapter concludes with the claim that we should think of moral ideals in terms of aspirational moral identities and moral improvement as a project of articulating and inhabiting a moral identity.

Minding the Gap

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Stohr
Keyword(s):  
Moral Identity ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Moral Reality ◽  
Moral Improvement ◽  
Moral Ideals ◽  
Practical Project

The book is a philosophical exploration of the gap between our moral ideals and the imperfect moral reality in which we live, and the implications of that gap for the practical project of moral improvement. We are limited in our ability to recognize and be guided by moral ideals, owing to a variety of moral and epistemic shortcomings. In light of that, how can the practical project of moral improvement get off the ground? An account of moral improvement should begin from psychologically plausible starting points, and it should also rely on ideals that are both normatively authoritative and regulatively efficacious for the agent taking up the project. The book argues that moral improvement should be understood as the project of articulating and inhabiting an aspirational moral identity. That identity is cultivated through existing practical identities and standpoints, which are fundamentally social and which generate practical conflicts about how to live. The success of moral improvement depends on its taking place within what the book describes as good moral neighborhoods. Moral neighborhoods are collaborative normative spaces, constructed from networks of social practices and conventions, in which we can act as better versions of ourselves. The book draws on theatrical metaphors to describe how moral neighborhoods are created and maintained through moral stagecraft and mutual pretense. It concludes with a discussion of three social practices that contribute to good moral neighborhoods and so to moral improvement.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Karen Stohr
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Social Aspect ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Moral Improvement ◽  
Moral Ideals ◽  
Practical Project ◽  
The Social ◽  
Aims And Scope

This short introductory chapter sets out the aims and scope of the book as a whole, with the goal of orienting the reader. It explains the motivation for the project and the philosophical inspirations for the approach, as well as the limitations. The chapter begins by explaining the gap referenced in the title in terms of a gap between moral ideals and the reality of human beings and human life. Moral improvement is the practical project of trying to narrow that gap as far as possible. Understood as a practical project, it is fundamentally first-personal. It is also, however, fundamentally social. Moral improvement is something we do together. The social aspect of moral improvement consists in constructing joint normative spaces in which we can make ourselves better. The chapter concludes with brief summaries of individual chapters.

The Oxford Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Integrated Approach ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Current Status ◽  
Natural Environments ◽  
Compelling Evidence ◽  
Future Prospects ◽  
Ongoing Functioning

The second edition of The Oxford Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology captures the history, current status, and future prospects of personality and social psychology—presented not as a set of parallel accounts, but as an integrated perspective on the behavior of persons in social contexts. This handbook combines these two fields in a single integrated volume, offering a unique and generative agenda for psychology. It is dedicated to the proposition that personality and social psychology are best viewed in conjunction with one another and that the synergy to be gained from considering links between the two fields can do much to move both fields forward and to enrich our understanding of human nature. Such interdependence is particularly crucial if one wishes to address the ongoing functioning of persons in their natural environments, where splits between person and situation are not so easily fashioned. The chapters of the Handbook weave together work from personality and social psychology, not only in areas of long-standing concern, but also in newly emerging fields of inquiry, addressing both distinctive contributions and common ground. In so doing, they offer compelling evidence for the power and the potential of an integrated approach to personality and social psychology.

Hume's ‘Manifest Contradictions’

2016 ◽  
Vol 78 ◽  
pp. 147-160
Author(s):  
P. J. E. Kail
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
External World ◽  
Causal Inferences ◽  
Normative Authority ◽  
Distinct Existence ◽  
Consistent Application

AbstractThis paper examines Hume’s ‘Title Principle’ (TP) and its role in a response to one of the ‘manifest contradictions’ he identifies in the conclusion to Book I of A Treatise on Human Nature. This ‘contradiction’ is a tension between two ‘equally natural and necessary’ principles of the imagination, our causal inferences and our propensity to believe in the continued and distinct existence of objects. The problem is that the consistent application of causal reason undercuts any grounds with have for the belief in continued and distinct existence, and yet that belief is as ‘natural and necessary’ as our propensity to infer effects from causes. The TP appears to offer a way to resolve this ‘contradiction’. It statesWhere reason is lively, and mixes itself with some propensity, it ought to be assented to. Where it does not, it never can have any title to operate upon us.’ (T 1.4.7.11; SBN 270)In brief, if it can be shown that the causal inferences that undermine the belief in external world are not ‘lively’ nor mixed with some propensity’ then we have grounds for think that they have no normative authority (they have no ‘title to operate on us). This is in part a response to another ‘manifest contradiction’, namely the apparently self-undermining nature of reason. In this paper I examine the nature and grounds of the TP and its relation to these ‘manifest contradictions’.

Moral Aspirations

2019 ◽  
pp. 78-100
Author(s):  
Karen Stohr
Keyword(s):  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Moral Identity ◽  
Moral Improvement ◽  
David Velleman

This chapter takes up the question of what it means for a person’s moral identity to be aspirational and how we can go about cultivating aspirational moral identities that are conducive to moral improvement. It considers the role of conflict and crisis in precipitating critical reflection on existing moral identities. It also considers the ways in which a person can enhance her capacities for the requisite kind of reflection, with a particular focus on perspective shifts, imagination, and the use of exemplars. The chapter draws on work by Agnes Callard and David Velleman to argue that aspirational moral identities are cultivated proleptically through developing and enacting imaginative self-conceptions that reflect moral aspirations. These imaginative self-conceptions take the form of what the chapter describes as fictive moral selves.

The Leviathan’s Conscience: Hobbesian Human Nature and Moral Judgment

2017 ◽  
Vol 70 (4) ◽  
pp. 778-789 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Branstetter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
The State ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Practical Judgment ◽  
Moral Thought ◽  
Moral Improvement ◽  
Individual Judgment

Hannah Arendt claims that Thomas Hobbes was responsible for constituting modern people as apolitical subjects who can no longer make independent moral judgments. The refusal to think that Hobbes allegedly engendered was a major factor in twentieth-century totalitarianism’s worst crimes. In her view, Hobbes’s Leviathan established the architecture of the totalitarian state and initiated the cultivation of people so incapable of exercising moral judgment that they stood idly by and let such a state commit horrors in their name. I argue that Hobbes rejected the proto-totalitarian form of domination Arendt attributes to him and expressed hope about the human capacities for practical judgment and moral improvement. Instead of creating thoughtless subjects which authorize any crime the state might commit, he suggests that the Leviathan should cultivate the public’s capacity for reason and judgment to make violence unnecessary. Considering Hobbes’s accounts of reason and science in light of his materialism shows that the Leviathan requires the exercise of individual moral thought and judgment to function properly. I suggest that the primary duty of the Hobbesian sovereign might be understood primarily in terms of the cultivation of individual judgment and reason rather than its suppression.

Moral Identities

2019 ◽  
pp. 54-77
Author(s):  
Karen Stohr
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Moral Identity ◽  
Identity Crisis ◽  
Moral Ideal ◽  
Philosophical Concept ◽  
Normative Authority

This chapter is an exploration of moral identity, as both a psychological and a philosophical concept. It begins with the phenomenon of an identity crisis, employing Mr. Stevens, the butler from Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day, as an illustration. The chapter develops an account of moral identity that seeks to be consistent with psychological conceptions while also generating the normative authority and regulative efficacy necessary for moral identity to function as a moral ideal. The chapter argues that person’s moral identity is not separable from her other practical identities and standpoints, and that it derives its content from her efforts to work out how to live well within the normative structures of those other identities. It also argues that an individual’s moral identity is intertwined with her social context in ways that shape the content of that identity and her ability to live in accordance with it.

Contradictions

2020 ◽  
pp. 154-163
Author(s):  
Michael Moriarty
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
Moral Ideals ◽  
Beliefs And Values ◽  
Radical Scepticism

The conflict between the greatness and the wretchedness of human nature is considered on a more philosophical level. The Stoics do justice to our moral ideals but the Pyrrhonists (whom Pascal sees as implicitly putting humankind on a level with non-human animals) seem better to describe human beings in the mass. The quest for an essence of human nature is compromised by an awareness of the power of custom to determine our beliefs and values. Even our belief in fundamental principles may be based on custom. Yet radical scepticism is in practice unacceptable. The clash between dogmatism (the belief that we have knowledge) and scepticism is irreconcilable. Only the Christian doctrine of the Fall can enable us to get out of this impasse.

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