Praise and Blame: Moral Realism and Its Applications

Description

How should a prize be awarded after a horse race? Should it go to the best rider, the best person or the one who finishes first? To what extent are bystanders blameworthy when they do nothing to prevent harm? Are there any objective standards of moral responsibility with which to address such perennial questions? In this text, Daniel Robinson takes on the task of setting forth the contours of praise and blame. He does so by mounting a provocative defense of a radical theory of moral realism and offering a critical appraisal of prevailing alternatives such as determinism and behaviourism and of their conceptual shortcomings. The version of moral realism that arises from Robinson's inquiry - an inquiry steeped in Aristotelian ethics but deeply informed by modern scientific knowledge of human cognition - is independent of cognition and emotion. At the same time, Robinson explores how such human attributes succeed or fail in comprehending real moral properties. Through analyses of constitutional and moral luck, of biosocial and genetic versions of psychological determinism and of relativistic-anthropological accounts of variations in moral precepts, he concludes that none of these conc

Daniel N. Robinson is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus, Georgetown University. He is Faculty Fellow in Philosophy at Oxford University where he has lectured annually since 1991. He is the author or editor of numerous books including "Wild Beasts and Idle Humors: The Insanity Defense from Antiquity to the Present" and "Aristotle's Psychology".

"The richness of this work cannot be comprehended in one reading. Whether the reader agrees or not with the author, one has much to learn from the profundity of Robinson's insight into the framing of moral judgment. The reader comes away feeling that this book is a prolegomenon to an expanded version of one or more themes treated within these pages."--Jude P. Dougherty, Review of Metaphysics