The essays collected in this volume all explore the problem of the relation between moral philosophy and modernity. Charles Larmore addresses this problem by attempting to define the way distinctive forms of modern experience should orientate our moral thinking. Charles Larmore wonders whether the dominant forms of modern philosophy have not become blind to important dimensions of the moral life. The book argues against recent attempts to return to the virtue-centered perspective of ancient Greek ethics. As well as exploring the (...) differences between ancient and modern ethics, the author examines such topics as the roles of reason and history in our moral understanding, the inadequacy of philsophical naturalism, and the foundations of modern liberalism. There are also extended discussions of a number of leading contemporary philosophers: Rawls, Habermas, Williams and Rorty. (shrink)

Larmore aims to recover three forms of moral complexity that have often been neglected by moral and political philosophers. First, he argues that virtue is not simply the conscientious adherence to principle. Rather, the exercise of virtue apply. He argues - and this is the second pattern of complexity - that recognizing the value of constitutive ties with shared forms of life does not undermine the liberal ideal of political neutrality toward differing ideals of the good life. Finally Larmore agrues (...) for what he calls the heterogeneity of morality. Moral thinking need not be exclusively deontological or consequentialist, and we should recognize that the ultimate sources of moral value are diverse. The arguments presented here do not attack the possibility of moral theory. But in addressing some of the central issues of moral and political thinking today thay attempt to restore to that thinking greater flexibility and a necessary sensitivity to our common experience. (shrink)

A new understanding of political philosophy from one of its leading thinkers What is political philosophy? What are its fundamental problems? And how should it be distinguished from moral philosophy? In this book, Charles Larmore redefines the distinctive aims of political philosophy, reformulating in this light the basis of a liberal understanding of politics. Because political life is characterized by deep and enduring conflict between rival interests and differing moral ideals, the core problems of political philosophy are the regulation of (...) conflict and the conditions under which the members of society may thus be made subject to political authority. We cannot assume that reason will lead to unanimity about these matters because individuals hold different moral convictions. Larmore therefore analyzes the concept of reasonable disagreement and investigates the ways we can adjudicate conflicts among people who reasonably disagree about the nature of the human good and the proper basis of political society. Challenging both the classical liberalism of Locke, Kant, and Mill, and more recent theories of political realism proposed by Bernard Williams and others, Larmore argues for a version of political liberalism that is centered on political legitimacy rather than on social justice, and that aims to be well suited to our times rather than universally valid. Forceful and thorough yet concise, What Is Political Philosophy? proposes a new definition of political philosophy and demonstrates the profound implications of that definition. The result is a compelling and distinctive intervention from a major political philosopher. (shrink)

What is political philosophy’s relation to moral philosophy? Does it simply form part of moral philosophy, focusing on the proper application of certain moral truths to political reality? Or must it instead form a more autonomous discipline, drawing its bearings from the specifically political problem of determining the bounds of legitimate coercion? In this essay I work out an answer to these questions by examining both some of the classical views on the nature of political philosophy and, more particularly, some (...) recently published writings by Bernard Williams and G.A. Cohen. (shrink)

The business of laws is not to provide for the truth of opinions, but for the safety and security of the commonwealth, and of every particular man's goods and person. John Locke.

In The Autonomy of Morality Charles Larmore challenges two ideas that have shaped the modern mind. The world, he argues, is not a realm of value-neutral fact, nor does human freedom consist in imposing principles of our own devising on an alien reality. Rather, reason consists in being responsive to reasons for thought and action that arise from the world itself. Larmore shows that the moral good has an authority that speaks for itself. Only in this light does the true (...) basis of a liberal political order come into view, as well as the role of unexpected goods in the makeup of a life lived well. (shrink)

Political liberalism seeks to define the principles of political association in terms that are independent, not only of religious convictions and substantive notions of the human good, but also of the individualist ideals, encouraging a self-critical attitude toward the conception of the good one espouses, to which the classical liberalism of Locke, Kant, and Mill typically appealed. This chapter explores the basic problem of political life to which political liberalism aims to provide a solution, the means—among which the moral assumptions, (...) particularly a principle of equal respect for persons—by which it seeks to solve this problem, and the ends it can reasonably hope to achieve by the solution it develops. (shrink)

Liberalism is a distinctively modern political conception. Only in modern times do we find, as the object of both systematic reflection and widespread allegiance and institutionalization, the idea that the principles of political association, being coercive, should be justifiable to all whom they are to bind. And so only here do we find the idea that these principles should rest, so far as possible, on a core, minimal morality which reasonable people can share, given their expectably divergent religious convictions and (...) conceptions of the meaning of life. No longer does it seem evident—as it did, let us say, before the seventeenth century—that the aim of political association must be to bring man into harmony with God's purposes or to serve some comprehensive vision of the good life. The causes of this transformation are various, and not all of them lie at the level of moral principle. But a change in moral consciousness has certainly been one of the factors involved. As Hegel observed, modern culture is inherently a reflective one: notions of principle are essential to our self-understanding and thus to the stability of the social forms in which we participate. Modern culture has no room for a dichotomy between “in principle” and “in practice.” It is worth determining, then, what new moral conceptions have been responsible for the emergence of modern liberalism. Not only will we thereby better understand how we have become who we are, we will also have a surer grasp of the principles that sustain our political life. (shrink)

In this carefully crafted volume, Michael Kort describes the wartime circumstances and thinking that form the context for the decision to use these weapons, surveys the major debates related to that decision, and provides a comprehensive ...

Editors provide a substantive introduction to the history and theories of perfectionism and neutrality, expertly contextualizing the essays and making the collection accessible.

In this book, Charles Larmore develops an account of morality, freedom, and reason that rejects the naturalistic metaphysics shaping much of modern thought. Reason, Larmore argues, is responsiveness to reasons, and reasons themselves are essentially normative in character, consisting in the way that physical and psychological facts - facts about the world of nature - count in favor of possibilities of thought and action that we can take up. Moral judgments are true or false in virtue of the moral reasons (...) there are. We need therefore a more comprehensive metaphysics that recognizes a normative dimension to reality as well. Though taking its point of departure in the analysis of moral judgment, this book branches widely into related topics such as freedom and the causal order of the world, textual interpretation, the nature of the self, self-knowledge, and the concept of duties to ourselves. (shrink)

When philosophers undertake to say what it is that makes life worth living, they generally display a procrustean habit of thought which the practice of philosophy itself does much to encourage. As a result, they arrive at an image of the human good that is far more controversial than they suspect. The canonical view among philosophers ancient and modern has been, in essence, that the life lived well is the life lived in accord with a rational plan. To me this (...) conception of the human good seems manifestly wrong. The idea that life should be the object of a plan is false to the human condition. It misses the important truth which Proust, by contrast, discerned and made into one of the organizing themes of his great meditation on disappointment and revelation, A la recherche du temps perdu : The happiness that life affords is less often the good we have reason to pursue than the good that befalls us unexpectedly. (shrink)

Freedom has a number of different senses. One of them is the absence of domination, which neo-republican thinkers have helped us to understand better. This notion of freedom does not, however, provide an alternative to political liberalism, since its proper articulation depends on distinctly liberal principles.

ALTHOUGH I shall be attempting to examine the function of judgment, or what Aristotle called φρόνησις, in moral deliberation, I shall begin by discussing some previous opinions about what kind of importance examples have in moral experience. This strategy is only apparently circuitous. The role which one assigns to examples is symptomatic of the conception one has of judgment in moral decision-making, because the use of examples forms one way in which judgment is exercised. Indirectly, then, I shall be trying (...) to rehabilitate the significance of examples in moral deliberation. But the chief aim of this paper will be to determine both what is the function of judgment in moral deliberation and how we are to understand the activity of exercising it. (shrink)

As several historical examples are adduced to show, different theories of self-knowledge take shape in response to different conceptions of the sort of beings we are. This leads to the question of what underlying notion of the self motivates, in particular, the dominant modern idea that self-knowledge consists primarily in grasping whatever beliefs, desires, thoughts, and feelings make up our mental life. The answer is that the self-constitutive relation to itself has been conceived as one of an intimate, pre-reflective acquaintance (...) with our own minds and that only so can we be understood as being responsible for whatever we think or do. Against this view it is then argued that all our self-knowledge really rests on reflection of an essentially third-person kind, since the self's constitutive relation to itself consists instead in our guiding ourselves by what we take to be reasons in all that we think and do and in thereby counting as responsible for our thought and action, whatever may be the extent of our knowledge of our own minds. This alternative account implies, contrary to the modern view and in company with certain ancient views, that self-knowledge can prove to be the most difficult kind of knowledge to acquire. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: The Skeptic's Undoing Cartesian Certainty.

What are the principles of association that citizens devoted to different ethical and religious ideals or peoples living under different regimes can find reason to acknowledge together? Defining the common ground which reasonable people can share, despite their profound disagreements, has been the distinctive concern of John Rawls’ political philosophy since A Theory of Justice. Rawls’ second book, Political Liberalism, recast his theory of justice as fairness in a form no longer tied to a Kantian view of the moral life (...) as a whole. “Political liberalism” revolves around the idea of “public reason”, the shared point of view which free and equal citizens assume when, abstracting from their opposing comprehensive doctrines, they decide constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice in the light of a principle of reciprocity. “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” originally published in 1997, forms the second part of the present volume. This essay offers perhaps Rawls’ final statement of his ideal of a just society. Yet its role in this book is to provide the background for an account of the just coexistence of diverse societies. “The Law of Peoples” was the title of the Oxford Amnesty Lecture that Rawls delivered in 1993. Refined and expanded, the theory he then proposed is given here its first full-scale exposition, and my remarks focus on this part of his book. (shrink)

Our capacity for impersonal reflection, for looking at our own perspective from without, as part of a world that exists independently of us, is our most distinctive trait as human beings. It finds its most striking expression in our moral thinking. For we are moral beings insofar as we stand back from our individual concerns and see in the good of others, in and of itself, a reason for action on our part. It is not, to be sure, in morality (...) alone that we exercise this power of impersonal reflection. We do so too, whenever we set about weighing the evidence for some belief without regard for what we would like to be true or for what common opinion would say. Yet nowhere does this self-transcendence show forth more vividly than when we turn our attention from our own happiness to that of another, taking the same immediate interest in that person's goodas we naturally harbor for our own. In this essay, I explore the way that the moral point of view is shaped by the nature of impersonal reflection and thus constitutes a signal expression of our humanity. (shrink)

What is the nature of the fundamental relation we have to ourselves that makes each of us a self? To answer this question, Charles Larmore develops a systematic theory of the self, challenging the widespread view that the self’s defining relation to itself is to have an immediate knowledge of its own thoughts. On the contrary, Larmore maintains, our essential relation to ourselves is practical, as is clear when we consider the nature of belief and desire. For to believe or (...) desire something consists in committing ourselves to thinking and acting in accord with the presumed truth of our belief or the presumed value of what we desire. Larmore develops this conception with frequent reference to such classic authors as Montaigne, Stendhal, and Proust and by comparing it to other views of the self in contemporary philosophy. He also discusses the important ethical consequences of his theory of the self, arguing that it allows us to better grasp what it means to be ourselves and why self-understanding often involves self-creation. Winner of the Académie Française’s Grand Prix de Philosophie, _The Practices of the Self_ is that rare kind of lucid yet rigorous work that transcends disciplinary boundaries. (shrink)

The interview with Charles Larmore kicks off the conversation with an analysis of the ‘three major points of disagreement vexing the concept of toleration’ and their centrality for discussions over issues associated with toleration (including the critique of it). Interestingly enough, he returns to these points of disagreement in several of the other questions in this interview. His reply to the final question on the need to study toleration today is particularly revealing. As he emphasizes, ‘[t]o my mind, the principal (...) reason for studying toleration today is that we thereby acquire a clearer understanding of the nature of liberalism’. (shrink)

Nel suo libro Le jardin imparfait Tzvetan Todorov difende una visione dell’umanesimo modesta e plurale. Ai detrattori, in particolare francesi, degli ideali umanistici egli rimprovera una concezione della modernità troppo semplicistica e incapace di comprendere quanto l’enfasi sull’individuo e sulla sua volontà sia bilanciata in essa da un’analoga enfasi sulla socievolezza umana e sulla natura relazionale dell’identità personale. L’umanesimo moderno, a ben vedere, non è una religione, non aspira cioè a porre l’uomo al posto di Dio. Il suo obiettivo è (...) piuttosto preservare la dignità umana senza l’illusione di poter appagare completamente il nostro bisogno di senso.In his book Le jardin imparfait, Tzvetan Todorov argues for a view both modest and plural of humanism. He reproaches the detractors of the humanist ideals, especially the french ones, for entertaining a too simplistic idea of modernity and for not understanding how the emphasis upon the individual is counterbalanced, here, by an analogous emphasis upon human sociability and the social nature of personal identity. Indeed, modern humanism is not a religion, it does not aim at substituting God with man. Its goal is rather to safeguard human dignity without dreaming of fulfilling all our demands of meaning. (shrink)

Professeur à l'Université Columbia de New-York pendant 20 ans, puis à celle de Brown (Providence), Charles Larmore a développé dans son ouvrage Les pratiques du moi (2004) une réflexion sur la subjectivité qui a profondément marqué l'histoire de la philosophie analytique. Il est l'une des voix les plus originales et les plus radicales de la théorie morale contemporaine, et propose ici la synthèse de son itinéraire intellectuel."--Page 4 of cover.