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Why It Is Good to Be Good - Ethics, Kohut's Self Psychology, and Modern Society (Paperback)
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Why It Is Good to Be Good - Ethics, Kohut's Self Psychology, and Modern Society (Paperback)
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In Why It Is Good to be Good, John H. Riker argues that modernity,
by undermining traditional religious and metaphysical grounds for
moral belief, has left itself no way to explain why it is
personally good to be a morally good person. Furthermore,
modernity's regnant concept of the self as an independent agent
organized around the optimal satisfaction of desires and involved
in an intense economic competition with others intensifies the
likelihood that modern persons will see morality as a set of
limiting constraints that stand in the way of personal advantage
and will tend to cheat when they believe there is little likelihood
of getting caught. This cheating has begun to severely undermine
modernity's economic and social institutions. Riker proposes that
Heinz Kohut's psychoanalytic understanding of the self can provide
modernity with a naturalistic ground for saying why it is good to
be good. Kohut sees the self as a dynamic, unconscious structure
which, when coherent and actively engaged with the world, provides
the basis for a heightened sense of lively flourishing. The key to
the self's development and sustained coherence is the presence of
empathically responsive others-persons Kohut terms selfobjects.
Riker argues that the best way to sustain vitalized selfobject
relations in adulthood is by becoming an ethical human being. It is
persons who develop the Aristotelian moral virtues-empathy for
others, a sense of fairness, and a resolute integrity-who are best
able to engage in the reciprocal selfobject relations that are
necessary to maintain self-cohesion and who are most likely to
extend empathic ethical concern to those beyond their selfobject
matrixes. Riker also explores how Kohut's concept of the self
incorporates a number of the most important insights about the self
in the history of philosophy, constructs an original
meta-psychology that differentiates the ego from the self,
re-envisions ethical life on the basis of a psychoanalytically
informed view of human nature, explores how persons might be able
to nourish their selves in an age that neglects and destabilizes
person's selves, and concludes with suggestions for how modernity
must change if it is going to support selves and provide a
compelling ground for moral life.
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