The Sources of Moral Agency: Essays in Moral Psychology and Freudian Theory

The essays in this collection are concerned with the psychology of moral agency. They focus on moral feelings and moral motivation, and seek to understand the operations and origins of these phenomena as rooted in the natural desires and emotions of human beings. An important feature of the essays, and one that distinguishes the book from most philosophical work in moral psychology, is the attention to the writings of Freud. Many of the essays draw on Freud’s ideas about conscience and morality, while several explore the depths and limits of Freud’s theories. An underlying theme of the volume is a critique of influential rationalist accounts of moral agency. John Deigh shows that one can subject the principles of morality to rational inquiry without thereby holding that reason alone can originate action.

• Unusual and accessible approach to important issues in moral psychology • Focus on Freud will increase readership

1. Morality and personal relations; 2. On the right to be punished: some doubts; 3. Love, guilt, and the sense of justice; 4. Remarks on some difficulties in Freud’s theory of moral development; 5. Freud’s later theory of civilisation: changes and implications; 6. Freud, naturalism, and modern moral philosophy; 7. Reason and motivation; 8. Empathy and universalisability; 9. Sidgwick on ethical judgment; 10. Reason and ethics in Hobbes’s Leviathan; 11. Shame and self-esteem: a critique.