The Moral Powers: A Study of Human Nature

A milestone in the study of value in human life and thought, written by one of the world’s preeminent living philosophers The Moral Powers: A Study of Human Nature is a philosophical investigation of the moral potentialities and sensibilities of human beings, of the meaning of human life, and of the place of death in life. It is an essay in philosophical anthropology: the study of the conceptual framework in terms of which we think about, speak about, and investigate homo sapiens as a social and cultural animal. This volume examines the diversity of values in human life and the place of moral value within the varieties of values. Its subject is the nature of good and evil and our propensity to virtue and vice. Acting as the culmination of five decades of reflection on the philosophy of mind, epistemology, ethics, and human nature, this volume: Concludes Hacker’s acclaimed Human Nature tetralogy: Human Nature: The Categorial Framework, The Intellectual Powers: A Study of Human Nature, and The Passions: A Study of Human Nature Discusses traditional ideas about ethical value and addresses misconceptions held by philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive neuroscientists The Moral Powers: A Study of Human Nature is required reading philosophers of mind, ethicists, psychologists, cognitive neuroscientists, and any general reader wanting to understand the nature of value and the place of ethics in human lives.

Table of Contents:
Prolegomenon xi 1. Philosophical anthropology and the investigation of value xi 2. The sinopia for a fresco xvi Acknowledgements xxiv Part I Of Good and Evil 1 Chapter 1 The Roots of Value and the Nature of Morality 3 1. The place of values in a world of facts 3 2. Varieties of goodness 8 3. The framework of moral goodness 17 4. Morality 24 5. Individual critical morality 30 Chapter 2 The Roots of Morality and the Nature of Moral Goodness 33 1. Moral goodness 33 2. The roots of moral value 38 3. Respect 46 4. The relative permanence of the virtues 58 5. Constants in human nature 61 Chapter 3 The Roots of Evil 65 1. The horror! 65 2. The grammar of evil: preliminary clarification 76 3. Philosophical problems: does evil exist? 83 4. Philosophical problems: can evil be explained? 89 Chapter 4 Explanations of Evil 101 1. The variety of explanations 101 2. Reasons and motives for doing evil 103 3. Can evil be a motive? 115 4. Knowledge of good and evil 121 5. Experimental psychology: Milgram’s and Browning’s explanations of evil‐doing 125 Chapter 5 Evil and the Death of the Soul 129 1. Body, mind, and soul 129 2. The death of the soul 138 3. Forgiveness and self‐forgiveness 143 4. Evil and the unforgivable 148 5. From soul to soul: trisecting an angle with compass and rule 152 Part II Of Freedom and Responsibility 155 Chapter 6 Fatalism and Determinism 157 1. Of fate and fortune 157 2. Fatalism 162 3. Nomological determinism 169 4. Flaws in reductive determinism 173 5. The random and the determined 177 Chapter 7 Neuroscientific Determinism, Freedom, and Responsibility 179 1. Neuroscientific determinism 179 2. Explanations of human behaviour: a recapitulation 182 3. Neuroscientific explanation and its limits 188 4. How possible, not why necessary 192 5. Varieties of responsibility 196 6. Elaboration 201 7. Irresistible impulse and temptation 203 Part III Of Pleasure and Happiness 207 Chapter 8 Pleasure and Enjoyment 209 1. Varieties of hedonism 209 2. Pleasure, enjoyment, and being pleased 212 3. Pleasure, pain, and the pleasures of sensation 219 4. Enjoyment and the pleasures of activities 224 5. Pleasure, desire, and satisfaction 229 6. Comparability and quantification 231 7. First‐person judgements of pleasure 235 8. The hedonic life 237 Chapter 9 Happiness 243 1. The linguistic terrain 243 2. A distinct idea of happiness 246 3. A clear idea of happiness 250 4. Preconditions of happiness 263 5. The epistemology of happiness 266 6. Two philosophical traditions 269 7. Happiness and morality 276 Chapter 10 The Science of Happiness 281 1. From eighteenth‐century crudity and back again 281 2. How happiness is understood by happiness scientists 286 3. Psychological and epistemological presuppositions of the science of happiness 290 4. Measuring happiness 294 5. Some results of the science of happiness 298 Part IV Of Meaning and Death 305 Chapter 11 The Need for Meaning 307 1. Meaning 307 2. The primacy of loss of meaning and the sense of meaninglessness 313 3. The roots of meaninglessness 316 4. Does life have a meaning? 326 5. Finding meaning in human life 329 Chapter 12 The Place of Death in Human Life 334 1. What is death? 334 2. An afterlife 338 3. The valuelessness of life 341 4. The value of life 344 5. Living for ever 349 6. Thanatophobia – the fear of death 353 Appendices Appendix 1: On Animal Beliefs and Animal Morality 361 1. Animal morality 361 2. Animal thinking, animal thoughts, and animal memory 364 3. Counter‐arguments and their rebuttal 367 4. Animal knowledge of other animals’ minds 378 5. Animal emotions 384 Appendix 2: Diabology: Satan, Lucifer, and the Devil in Western Thought 390 Appendix 3: Hannah Arendt and the Banality of Evil 398 Appendix 4: The Pictorial Representation of Pleasure in Western Art 407 Index 412

About the Author :
P.M.S. Hacker is the leading authority on the philosophy of Wittgenstein. He has also written extensively on philosophy of neuroscience and philosophy of language. He is Emeritus Research Fellow at St John’s College, Oxford and holds an Honorary Professorship at University College London’s Institute of Neurology. He has held both British Academy and Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowships and visiting chairs in North America. He is author of more than twenty books and over 160 papers, including the preceding three volumes in the Human Nature tetralogy: Human Nature (2007), The Intellectual Powers (2013), and The Passions (2018).