Moral Psychology Today

This book brings together in one volume some of the very latest developments in moral psychology that were presented at a major American conference in 2004. Moral psychology is a broad area at the intersection of moral philosophy and philosophy of mind and action. Essays in this collection deal with most of the central issues in moral psychology that are of interest to a large number of philosophers today, including important questions in normative ethical theory, meta-ethics, and applied ethics. Each essay has been provided with its own list of references, and all essays are carefully introduced by the editor and organized thematically. Many of the ideas are introduced here in published form for the first time by an international cast of established and up-and-coming philosophers. Because of its breadth and topicality, this book will benefit professional philosophers grappling with the important questions that are addressed here, and also philosophy students approaching moral psychology for the first time in a graduate or upper undergraduate class who need an up-to-date and wide-ranging approach to the subject. This is a book that will make an invaluable contribution to philosophical debate for many years to come.

Résumé
Moral Psychology Today David K. Chan Philosophers working in the ?eld of moral psychology concern themselves with issuesandquestionsthat straddleacrossmorethanonesub-disciplinein philosophy. The answers that they propose and the theories that they propound have impli- tions for moral philosophy,the philosophyof mind, epistemology and metaphysics. Philosophers with an interest in the 'will' or the motivational psychology of human action dividebetween those investigatingpsychologicalandbehavioralconceptsfor their own sake, and those working on action theory for the sake of answering larger questions, especially ethical ones. The essays in this volume, all of which were presented at a conference on Values, Rational Choice, and the Will, belong largely in the latter category of research. The essays here contribute to debates and discussions on a wide range of topics that are of current interest in moral psychology. These essays demonstrate both the breadth of the ?eld of moral psychology and the importance of the questions - vestigated. Arti?cial boundaries between sub-disciplines of philosophy are crossed in putting these essays together in the same anthology. There are essays here in meta-ethics and in normative ethics. There are essays in ethical theory and in - plied ethics. There are essays that draw on discoveries in empirical psychology.

Contenu
Meta-ethics of Values.- Moral Realism, Meta-Ethical Pyrrhonism and Naturalism.- Buck-passing Personal Values.- Reason and Choice.- Volitions, Comparative Value Judgments, and Choice.- The Insignificance of Choice.- Desire and Intention.- The Indeterminacy of Desire and Practical Reason.- The Myth of Objectively Alien Desires.- On the Intelligibility of Bad Acts.- After Anscombe.- Practical Reason.- The Limits of Teleology.- Motivation to the Means.- Thresholds, Vagueness and the Psychology of Small Improvements.- Freedom and Moral Agency.- Taking Liberty with Humean Necessity: Compatibilism and Contingency.- Rational Choice and Evolutionary Fit.