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- Simon Blackburn (1998/2000). Ruling Passions. Oxford University Press.Simon Blackburn puts forward a compelling and original philosophy of human motivation and morality. Why do we behave as we do? Can we improve? Is our ethics at war with our passions, or is it an upshot of those passions? Blackburn seeks the answers to such questions in an exploration of the nature of moral emotions and the structures of human motivation. He develops a naturalistic ethics, which integrates our understanding of ethics with the rest of our understanding of the world we live in. His theory does not debunk the ethical by reducing it to the non-ethical, and it banishes the spectres of scepticism and relativism that have haunted recent moral philosophy. Ruling Passions reveals how ethics can maintain its authority even though it is rooted in the very emotions and motivations that it exists to control.Reading list | Discuss | Edit | Categorize |My bibliography
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| | Other links: journals.cambridge.org dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Simon Blackburn attempts to answer these questions in the early part of his wonderful new book Ruling Passions (Blackburn 1998). Unsurprisingly, despite my admiration for his book, I think he fails to identify a special feature of desires and aversions that makes them especially suitable for expression in normative claims. For all that he says the desires and aversions he picks out are much like the addict’s desire to take drugs. There are revisions Blackburn could make which would make his account more plausible. However, if he were to make these revisions, then he might just as well abandon his non-cognitivism in favor of a version of non-cognitivism’s close cognitivist cousin: subjectivism.
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| | Other links: journals.cambridge.org dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Noncognitivism is the metaethical view according to which public moral judgements do not express beliefs, in spite of the fact that they are typically formed in the indicative mood. One form of noncognitivism — prescriptivism — holds that moral judgements are really commands.1 Another form, on which we will focus — expressivism — holds that moral judgements function to express desires, emotions, or pro-/con-attitudes (in Simon Blackburn’s words: ‘a stance, or conative state or pressure on choice and action’ [1993: 168]). Making a frequent appearance in the argumentative fray over noncognitivism is a thesis that is usually called ‘motivation internalism’.
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| | Other links: interscience.wiley.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... In Ruling Passions, Simon Blackburn contends that we should reject sensibility theory because it serves to support a conservative complacency. Blackburn's strategy is attractive in that it seeks to win this metaethical dispute – which ultimately stems from a deep disagreement over antireductionism – on the basis of an uncontroversial normative consideration. Therefore, Blackburn seems to offer an easy solution to an apparently intractable debate. We will show, however, that Blackburn's argument against sensibility theory does not succeed; it is no more supportive of conservative complacency than Blackburn's noncognitivism. A victory for noncognitivism cannot be so easily won.
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| | Other links: dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Ruling Passions is Simon Blackburn’s latest attempt to defend a theory of practical reason which he calls “expressivism”.2 In the first three chapters Blackburn outlines an account of how we should understand statements of right, good and virtue, as well as their negative counterparts (“the Ethical [or Moral] Proposition”, as he terms this amalgam). This he calls “quasi-realism”. I shall describe what this position entails in the first section. Secondly I shall consider the opposition to this view advanced by McDowell (1987), who in turn takes his inspiration from Wiggins (1976a, 1976b). Finally I shall assess Blackburn’s reply to McDowell and Wiggins (found in Chapter 4 of RP), and argue that it is inadequate.
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