The Role of Feeling in Moral Thought
Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh (
1999)
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Abstract
This dissertation is concerned with how feelings figure in the moral life. Within contemporary ethics, attempts to characterize how they do so typically take for granted a set of constraints on ways in which they can inform moral thought---constraints determined by: a traditional philosophical conception of objectivity on which a property, in order to be objective in the familiar sense of being qualified to figure as the subject-matter of a judgment to which no decisive objections can be raised, must be such that an adequate understanding of what it is for an object to possess it can be developed apart from any reference to affective responses the object elicits and a corresponding conception of rationality on which it must be possible to grasp the connections constitutive of a rational line of thought independently of the possession of any particular affective endowments. Each of the three chapters of the dissertation critically examines these twin conceptions of objectivity and rationality by first discussing how they shape the way in which certain central questions in contemporary ethics are formulated and by then arguing that adequate answers to the relevant questions need to be sought in a problem-space structured by revised conceptions of objectivity and rationality. The larger aim of the dissertation is to motivate the kinds of revisions that are called for and, in doing so, to describe a philosophically unorthodox vision of the role of feelings in the moral life which suitably revised conceptions of objectivity and rationality make available to us