The Moral Life
Also by Nafsika Athanassoulis MORALITY, MORAL LUCK AND RESPONSIBILITY: FORTUNE S WEB PHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTIONS ON MEDICAL ETHICS (editor) Also by Samantha Vice ETHICS IN FILM (co-editor with Ward E. Jones)
The Moral Life Essays in Honour of John Cottingham Edited by Nafsika Athanassoulis Keele University, UK and Samantha Vice Rhodes University, South Africa
Editorial matter and selection Nafsika Athanassoulis and Samantha Vice 2008 Chapters their individual authors 2008 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2008 978-0-230-52756-0 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-35825-0 ISBN 978-0-230-58315-3 (ebook) DOI 10.1057/9780230583153 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The moral life : essays in honour of John Cottingham / edited by Nafsika Athanassoulis and Samantha Vice. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Cottingham, John, 1943 2. Ethics. 3. Religious ethics. I. Cottingham, John, 1943 II. Athanassoulis, Nafsika, 1973 III. Vice, Samantha, 1973 BJ604.C683M67 2008 170 dc22 2008011739 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08
Contents Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction 1 Nafsika Athanassoulis and Samantha Vice Part I Partiality, Spirituality and Character 1 The Insignificance of the Self: Partiality and Spirituality 9 Samantha Vice 2 Contempt and Integrity 31 Maximilian de Gaynesford 3 Self-Love, Love of Neighbour, and Impartiality 58 David S. Oderberg Part II The Emotions and the Good Life 4 Akrasia and the Emotions 87 Nafsika Athanassoulis 5 The Inner Life of the Dear Self 111 Seiriol Morgan 6 What Reason Can t Do 139 Michael Lacewing Part III The Meaning of Life 7 Meaning, Morality, and Religion 167 Roger Crisp 8 The Meaning of Life: Subjectivism, Objectivism, and Divine Support 184 Brad Hooker 9 God, Morality and the Meaning of Life 201 Thaddeus Metz Part IV Replies and Reflections 10 The Self, the Good Life and the Transcendent 231 John Cottingham Index 275 v vi ix
Notes on Contributors Nafsika Athanassoulis is Lecturer in Ethics at Keele University. Her work focuses on normative theories and in particular virtue ethics. She is the author of Morality, Moral Luck and Responsibility: Fortune s Web (Palgrave, 2005) and editor of Philosophical Reflections on Medical Ethics (Palgrave, 2005). John Cottingham is a well-known authority on the philosophy of Descartes and seventeenth-century rationalism, and has written numerous books and articles on the history of philosophy, with special reference to the early-modern period. He has also published extensively in the field of moral philosophy and philosophy of religion, with special reference to the theory of the good life and the relation between philosophy and spirituality. He is currently Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading, where he holds an Established Chair of Philosophy. He is also an Honorary Fellow of St John s College, Oxford. He has held the Radcliffe Research Fellowship in Philosophy and has served as Chairman of the British Society for the History of Philosophy, as President of the Mind Association, and as President of the Aristotelian Society. He is (since 1993) Editor of RATIO, the international journal of analytic philosophy. In 2002 4 he was Stanton Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge University, and in 2008 he was elected President of the British Society for the Philosophy of Religion. John Cottingham is co-translator of the standard three-volume Cambridge edition of The Philosophical Writings of Descartes (Cambridge, 1985 91). His other books include Descartes (Blackwell, 1986), The Rationalists (Oxford University Press, 1988), Reason, Will and Sensation (OUP, 1994), Western Philosophy: an anthology (Blackwell, 1996, augmented 2nd edn 2007), Descartes's Philosophy of Mind (Orion, 1997), Philosophy and the good life: reason and the Passions in Greek, Cartesian and psychoanalytic ethics (Cambridge, 1998), On the Meaning of Life (Routledge, 2003), and The Spiritual Dimension (Cambridge, 2005). He is editor of The Cambridge Companion to Descartes (1992) and the Oxford Readings volume on Descartes (1998), and is general editor of the Oxford Philosophical Texts series. Roger Crisp is Uehiro Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at St Anne s College, Oxford. He is the author of Mill on Utilitarianism (1998) and vi
Notes on Contributors vii Reasons and the Good (2000), and has translated Aristotle s Nicomachean Ethics for Cambridge University Press. Maximilian de Gaynesford is Reader in Philosophy at the University of Reading. He was formerly Fellow and Tutor at Lincoln College Oxford, Humboldt Research Fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin, and Associate Professor at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. He is the author of I: The Meaning of the First Person Term (OUP, 2006), Hilary Putnam (McGill-Queen s, 2006) and John McDowell (Polity, 2004) as well as of papers on the philosophy of mind and language, epistemology, metaphysics and moral psychology. Brad Hooker has been at the University of Reading since 1993. His book Ideal Code, Real World was published by Oxford University Press in 2000. Michael Lacewing is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Heythrop College, University of London, and researches in the philosophy of psychoanalysis. He has published in Ratio, Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology and Philosophical Psychology. Thaddeus Metz s research focuses on the meaning of life and on respectbased approaches to ethics, politics and law. His work has appeared in journals such as Ethics, Philosophy and Public Affairs, The Journal of Political Philosophy, Law and Philosophy, The Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, APQ and Religious Studies. Metz is Professor of Philosophy and Directror of the Wits Centre for Ethics at the University of the Witwatersrand. Seiriol Morgan is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Bristol. He works primarily in moral philosophy, and has interests in metaethics, moral theory and various areas of applied ethics, particularly sexual morality. He has published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Philosophical Review, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice and the Journal of Applied Philosophy. David S. Oderberg is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading, England. Among other books, he is the author of Moral Theory: A Non-Consequentialist Approach (Blackwell, 2000) and Applied Ethics: A Non-Consequentialist Approach (Blackwell, 2000), as well as co-editor, with Jacqueline A. Laing, of Human Lives: Critical Essays on Non- Consequentialist Bioethics (Macmillan/St. Martin s Press, 1997) and, with Timothy Chappell, of Human Values: New Essays on Ethics and Natural Law (Palgrave, 2004). His latest book, Real Essentialism, appeared with Routledge in 2007.
viii Notes on Contributors Samantha Vice is Lecturer in Philosophy at Rhodes University, South Africa. She is co-editor, with Ward E. Jones, of Ethics in Film, forthcoming for Oxford University Press, and has published papers on the self, goodness, self-judgement and the work of Iris Murdoch.
Acknowledgements We are very grateful to all the authors in this volume who so enthusiastically responded to our call for contributions in honour of John Cottingham. We are particularly grateful to Brad Hooker, the source, it seems, of all good ideas, for suggesting this project in the first place, and of course to John Cottingham, whose work has provided the inspiration for everything that followed. A big thank you is also due to both our families for their love and support while we worked on this project. ix