Abstract
The aim of this paper is to analyse the central argument of Cottingham’s Philosophy and the Good Life, and to strengthen and develop it against misinterpretation and objection. Cottingham’s argument is an objection to ‘ratiocentrism’, the view that the good life can be understood in terms of and attained by reason and strength of will. The objection begins from a proper understanding of akrasia, or weakness of will, but its focus, and the focus of this paper, is the relation between reason and the passions in the good life. Akrasia serves to illustrate ratiocentrism’s misunderstanding of this relation and of the nature of the passions themselves.
given the extent to which Freudian ideas have by now permeated our ways of thinking about human conduct, there is surely something remarkable about the almost wholesale disregard of those ideas by contemporary practitioners of philosophical ethics … so many contemporary moral philosophers … [are] still writing … as if humans were transparently self-aware creatures, and the task of ethics were simply that of intellectually analysing the structure of our goals, and rationally working out the best way to implement them.1
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Lacewing, M. (2008). What Reason Can’t Do. In: Athanassoulis, N., Vice, S. (eds) The Moral Life. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230583153_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230583153_7
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