Moral Psychology and Human Agency: Philosophical Essays on the Science of Ethics

These ten original essays examine the moral and philosophical implications of developments in the science of ethics, the growing movement that seeks to use recent empirical findings to answer long-standing ethical questions. Efforts to make moral psychology a thoroughly empirical discipline have divided philosophers along methodological fault lines, isolating discussions that will profit more from intellectual exchange. This volume takes an even-handed approach, including essays from advocates of empirical ethics as well as those who are sceptical of some of its central claims. Some of these essays make novel use of empirical findings to develop philosophical research programs regarding such crucial moral phenomena as desire, emotion, and memory. Others bring new critical scrutiny to bear on some of the most influential proposals of the empirical ethics movement, including the claim that evolution undermines moral realism, the effort to recruit a dual-process model of the mind to support consequentialism against other moral theories, and the claim that ordinary evaluative judgments are seldom if ever sensitive to reasons, because moral reasoning is merely the post hoc rationalization of unthinking emotional response.

Table of Contents:
1: Justin D'Arms and Daniel Jacobson: Introduction 2: Guy Kahane: Intuitive and Counterintuitive Morality 3: Brendan Dill and Stephen Darwall: Moral Psychology as Accountability 4: David Shoemaker: Remnants of Character 5: Heidi Maibom: Knowing What We Are Doing 6: Julia Driver: Meta-Cognition, Mind-Reading, and Humean Moral Agency 7: Shaun Nichols: The Episodic Sense of Self 8: Andrea Scarantino: The Motivational Theory of Emotions 9: Timothy Schroeder and Nomy Arpaly: The Reward Theory of Desire in Moral Psychology 10: Selim Berker: Does Evolutionary Psychology Show That Normativity Is Mind-Dependent? 11: Justin D'Arms and Daniel Jacobson: Sentimentalism and Scientism Index

About the Author :
Justin D'Arms and Daniel Jacobson are Professors of Philosophy at Ohio State University and the University of Michigan, respectively. They have co-authored ten papers on issues surrounding morality and the emotions, and the sentimentalist tradition in ethics. Their work has been published in a variety of distinguished journals and edited volumes, supported by numerous major grants, and presented in lectures throughout the world.

Review :
[T]he essays confirm that there clearly is great potential in combining rigorous philosophical analysis with empirical work on moral psychology