Ethics without moralism : an essay on agency, reason, and responsibility
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- In this dissertation I appeal to a substantive moral ideal of autonomy to defend "constitutivism in ethics", i.e. the view that there are constitutive standards of action which inform the range of morally legitimate answers to the question of how one should live. I first argue that a minimally satisfactory theory of action must recognize the exercise of practical rationality to be constitutive of the exercise of agency, at least for agents who are persons. It follows that there are constitutive standards of action, namely the standards of practical rationality. From here I contextualize contemporary constitutivism within a larger philosophical tradition. According to what I call "the generalized guise of the good thesis", the exercise of person-guided agency constitutively involves the exercise of practical reason. Although it is articulated using different concepts than the previously-established claim - talk of "practical rationality" concerns foremost the guidance of action, but talk of "practical reason" concerns its justification -, to endorse the generalized guise of the good thesis is to hold the distinction to be shallow: both pick out what is fundamentally the same agential capacity, necessarily exercised whenever a person exercises her agency. Finally I argue that the antithesis of constitutivism, a view I call "separatism about agency and practical reason", embroils one in a dubious form of moralism quite at odds with the ideal of autonomy. In particular I argue that the separatist does not do enough to relate her agent-directed moral judgments to the agent's own practical rationality; in this way she repeats the mistake embedded within more concrete forms of moralizing, only at a higher level of abstraction.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2024; ©2024 |
| Publication date | 2024; 2024 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Woodworth, Steven Joseph |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Lawlor, Krista |
| Degree supervisor | Schapiro, Tamar |
| Thesis advisor | Lawlor, Krista |
| Thesis advisor | Schapiro, Tamar |
| Thesis advisor | Bratman, Michael |
| Thesis advisor | Dannenberg, Jorah, 1979- |
| Thesis advisor | Hills, David James, 1947- |
| Degree committee member | Bratman, Michael |
| Degree committee member | Dannenberg, Jorah, 1979- |
| Degree committee member | Hills, David James, 1947- |
| Associated with | Stanford University, School of Humanities and Sciences |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Philosophy |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Steven Joseph Woodworth. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Philosophy. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2024. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/wt864wc8943 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2024 by Steven Joseph Woodworth
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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