By J. David Velleman
This e-book brings jointly essays on own identification, autonomy, and ethical feelings by means of the celebrated thinker J. David Velleman. even though all the essays used to be written as an self sustaining piece, they're unified via an encompassing thesis, that there's no unmarried entity denoted by way of ''the self,'' in addition to by way of issues from Kantian ethics, psychoanalytic concept, social psychology, and Velleman's paintings within the philosophy of motion. of the essays have been chosen by means of the editors of Philosophers' Annual as being one of the ten top papers of their yr of book.
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Additional resources for Self to Self: Selected Essays
Sample text
In accepting an incipient cold as a reason to skip swimming, you would have regarded it as something that would count as a reason for anyone to skip swimming, in circumstances like yours. What you were seeking may thus have been considerations that could count as reasons not only for you, whenever they were true of you, but for other agents as well. There is one important difference between practical and arithmetic reasoning, however. When you searched for reasons not to exercise this morning, no considerations just struck you as the ones that would strike any practical reasoner, in the way that 4 strikes you as being the answer that would strike any reasoner adding 2 and 2.
We began with the idea that moral requirements must be inescapable, which led to the idea that they must be intrinsically authoritative, in the sense of having authority over us simply by virtue of what they require. We then found a requirement that came as close as possible to having such authority – the requirement to act for reasons, which cannot coherently be questioned and must be presupposed by all other practical requirements. Next we saw how the requirement to act for reasons is experienced in ordinary life, when one looks for an exemption from some regular regimen or policy.
Kant offered an explanation for this oddity. His explanation was that acting for reasons is essential to being a person, something to which you unavoidably aspire. In order to be a person, you must have an approach to the world that is sufficiently coherent and constant to qualify as a single, continuing point-of-view. And part of what gives you a single, continuing point-of-view is your acceptance of particular considerations as having the force of reasons whenever they are true. We might be tempted to make this point by saying that you are a unified, persisting person and hence that you do approach practical questions from a point-of view framed by constant reasons.