Normativity and the Will: Selected Essays on Moral Psychology and Practical Reason

by R. Jay Wallace

Overview

Normativity and the Will collects fourteen important papers on moral psychology and practical reason by R. Jay Wallace, one of the leading philosophers currently working in these areas. The papers explore the interpenetration of normative and psychological issues in a series of debates that lie at the heart of moral philosophy. Themes that are addressed include reason, desire, and the will; responsibility, identification, and emotion; and the relation between morality and other normative domains. Wallace's treatments of these topics are at once sophisticated and engaging. Taken together, they constitute an advertisement for a distinctive way of pursuing issues in moral psychology and the theory of practical reason, and they articulate and defend a unified framework for thinking about those issues. The volume also features a helpful new introduction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199287499
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	05/11/2006
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	356
Product dimensions:	9.18(w) x 6.30(h) x 0.78(d)

About the Author

University of California, Berkeley

Table of Contents

I. Reason, Desire, and the Will1. How to Argue about Practical Reason2. Three Conceptions of Rational Agency3. Explanation, Deliberation, and Reasons4. Normativity and the Will5. Normativity, Commitment, and Instrumental ReasonII. Responsibility, Identification, and Emotion6. Reason and Responsibility7. Moral Responsibility and the Practical Point of View8. Addiction as Defect of the Will: Some Philosophical Reflections9. Caring, Reflexivity, and the Structure of Volition10. Ressentiment, Value, and Self-Vindication: Making Sense of Nietzsche's Slave RevoltIII. Morality and Other Normative Domains11. Virtue, Reason, and Principle12. Scanlon's Contractualism13. The Rightness of Acts and the Goodness of Lives14. Moral Reasons and Moral Fetishes: Rationalists and Anti-Rationalists on Moral Motivation

Editorial Reviews

"[An] excellent collection of essays.... Wallace's new collection contributes as much to ethical theory as to theories of motivation, responsibility, and autonomy. His discussions in Part III shed much light on some of the most important accounts of practical rationality in recent decades.... This is one of the best works of moral philosophy in the new century; it will be recognized as indispensable reading for any of these philosophical areas."—Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

From the Publisher