Robert Cummings Neville - The Puritan Smile: A Look Toward Moral Reflection
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The Puritan Smile : A Look Toward Moral Reflection
author
:
Neville, Robert C.
publisher
:
State University of New York Press
isbn10 | asin
:
0887065422
print isbn13
:
9780887065422
ebook isbn13
:
9780585057637
language
:
English
subject
Ethics.
publication date
:
1987
lcc
:
BJ1012.N48 1987eb
ddc
:
170
subject
:
Ethics.
Page iii
The Puritan Smile
A Look Toward Moral Reflection
Robert Cummings Neville
State University of New York Press
Page iv
Cover designed by Beth Neville; photographs by Naomi Neville; cover model, Leonora Neville
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
1987 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
For information, address State University of New York Press, State University Plaza, Albany, N. Y., 12246
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Neville, Robert C. The Puritan smile.
Includes index. 1. Ethics. I. Title BJ1012.N48198717086-30162 ISBN 0-88706-542-2 ISBN 0-88706-543-0 (pbk.)
Page v
Contents
Preface
vii
Chapter 1. Metaphysics and Irony: New Twists on Moral Reflection
1
Chapter 2. Modeling the Moral Life
23
Chapter 3. Social Obligation, Personal Responsibility, and Moral Identity
45
Chapter 4. The Metaphysics of Chaos, Totalization, and Normative Description
65
Chapter 5. Suffering, Experience, and Politics
81
Chapter 6. Moral Discernment and the Reality of Value
97
Chapter 7. Moral Science in a Normative Cosmos
116
Chapter 8. Authority
136
Chapter 9. Freedom and Privacy
158
Chapter 10. Responsibilities in Conflict
181
Chapter 11. A Taste of Death
205
Notes
221
Index
239
Page vi
Dedicated to Daniel Callahan and Willard Gaylin
Page vii
Preface
Moral reflection has so many important and valid dimensions that an author is well advised to discover a few kindred ones and pursue them for what they are worth. I confess to being a slow learner in this regard. The need for moral reflection derives from the objective conditions of society, not from the philosophical talents at hand. Either the objective need calls forth the necessary dimensions of reflection or society is ill-served. What more seductive call can turn a philosopher's head than a clear and insistent social need? In our time, that call is often for the clarification of immediate and bluntly defined cases of moral confusion. The clarification depends upon theoretical categories of analysis, and it expresses some particular sense of the function of reflection in addressing morals; these in turn are conditional upon, and sources of, very basic metaphysical ideas. If only that continuity were as simple to work through as it is to state.
This book began as an effort to put in systematic book form certain ideas I had developed in connection with definite practical problems; for instance, the moral limits of psychosurgery on involuntarily detained persons, the political regulation of drugs and other behavior control technologies, the sale of blood for profit, and the sterilization of the mildly mentally retarded. The common themes for what I had to say about these topics, however, were properly located in political and social theory. Indeed, my contributions to political and social theory stem from an axiological approach to morals and from a normative approach to reality. The special quality of these approaches is not anything particularly novel but rather a
Page viii
regrouping of ideas developed in several historical traditions of moral reflection. Unfortunately, those traditions have been historically incompatible and can be made compatible only by being shown to rest within an integrating metaphysical context. Metaphysics is the novel part of moral reflection kindred to my talents. So in this book, finally, there is hardly anything left of the specific practical problems, and the topic is the conflict and reconciliation of fundamental traditions or approaches to moral reflection, especially those of Liberalism, Puritanism, and Confucianism. The thematic way of handling that conflict and reconciliation is by an inventive metaphysics that allows me to keep the parts I want of each, integrating them together, while abandoning what is dangerous or unduly limited in each.
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1987