Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Preface
- 1 Personal identity and individuation
- 2 Bodily continuity and personal identity
- 3 Imagination and the self
- 4 The self and the future
- 5 Are persons bodies?
- 6 The Makropulos case: reflections on the tedium of immortality
- 7 Strawson on individuals
- 8 Knowledge and meaning in the philosophy of mind
- 9 Deciding to believe
- 10 Imperative inference
- 11 Ethical consistency
- 12 Consistency and realism
- 13 Morality and the emotions
- 14 The idea of equality
- 15 Egoism and altruism
- Bibliography
- Index of names
11 - Ethical consistency
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Preface
- 1 Personal identity and individuation
- 2 Bodily continuity and personal identity
- 3 Imagination and the self
- 4 The self and the future
- 5 Are persons bodies?
- 6 The Makropulos case: reflections on the tedium of immortality
- 7 Strawson on individuals
- 8 Knowledge and meaning in the philosophy of mind
- 9 Deciding to believe
- 10 Imperative inference
- 11 Ethical consistency
- 12 Consistency and realism
- 13 Morality and the emotions
- 14 The idea of equality
- 15 Egoism and altruism
- Bibliography
- Index of names
Summary
I shall not attempt any discussion of ethical consistency in general. I shall consider one question that is near the centre of that topic: the nature of moral conflict. I shall bring out some characteristics of moral conflict that have bearing, as I think, on logical or philosophical questions about the structure of moral thought and language. I shall centre my remarks about moral conflict on certain comparisons between this sort of conflict, conflicts of beliefs, and conflicts of desires; I shall start, in fact, by considering the latter two sorts of conflict, that of beliefs very briefly, that of desires at rather greater length, since it is both more pertinent and more complicated.
Some of what I have to say may seem too psychological. In one respect, I make no apology for this; in another, I do. I do not, in as much as I think that a neglect of moral psychology and in particular of the rôle of emotion in morality has distorted and made unrealistic a good deal of recent discussion; having disposed of emotivism as a theory of the moral judgement, philosophers have perhaps tended to put the emotions on one side as at most contingent, and therefore philosophically uninteresting, concomitants to other things which are regarded as alone essential. This must surely be wrong: to me, at least, the question of what emotions a man feels in various circumstances seems to have a good deal to do, for instance, with whether he is an admirable human being or not.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Problems of the SelfPhilosophical Papers 1956–1972, pp. 166 - 186Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1973
- 83
- Cited by