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For almost five million years, humans have been locked in a
relationship with morality, inventing and reinventing the concepts of
'Good' and 'Evil', and weaving them into our cities, laws and customs.
Morality is a concept that can feel joyless and claustrophobic,
associated with restraint and coercion, restriction and sacrifice,
inquisition, confession and a guilty conscience. For many, it is a
device used to shame us into compliance. This impression is not
necessarily incorrect, but it is most certainly incomplete.
Hanno Sauer traces humanity's fundamental moral transformations from
our earliest ancestors through to the present day, when it can often
seem that we have never disagreed more over what it means to be good,
and what it means to be right. But we can use our past as a basis for a
new understanding of our future. Our current political disagreements
may feel like the end of the world, but where will the evolution of
morality take us next?
This book develops a unified theory of moral progress. The author
argues that there are mechanisms in place that consistently drive
societies towards moral improvement and that a sophisticated,
naturalistically respectable form of teleology can be defended.
In recent research, dual-process theories of cognition have been
the primary model for explaining moral judgment and reasoning.
These theories understand moral thinking in terms of two separate
domains: one deliberate and analytic, the other quick and
instinctive. This book presents a new theory of the philosophy and
cognitive science of moral judgment. Hanno Sauer develops and
defends an account of "triple-process" moral psychology, arguing
that moral thinking and reasoning are only insufficiently
understood when described in terms of a quick but intuitive and a
slow but rational type of cognition. This approach severely
underestimates the importance and impact of dispositions to
initiate and engage in critical thinking - the cognitive resource
in charge of counteracting my-side bias, closed-mindedness,
dogmatism, and breakdowns of self-control. Moral cognition is
based, not on emotion and reason, but on an integrated network of
intuitive, algorithmic and reflective thinking. Moral Thinking,
Fast and Slow will be of great interest to philosophers and
students of ethics, philosophy of psychology and cognitive science.
In this crisply written book, Hanno Sauer offers the first
book-length treatment of debunking arguments in ethics, developing
an empirically informed and philosophically sophisticated account
of genealogical arguments and their significance for the
reliability of moral cognition. He breaks new ground by introducing
a series of novel distinctions into the current debate, which
allows him to develop a framework for assessing the prospects of
debunking or vindicating our moral intuitions. He also challenges
the justification of some of our moral judgments by showing that
they are based on epistemically defective processes. His book is an
original, cutting-edge contribution to the burgeoning field of
empirically informed metaethics, and will interest philosophers,
psychologists, and anyone interested in how - and whether - moral
judgment works.
In this crisply written book, Hanno Sauer offers the first
book-length treatment of debunking arguments in ethics, developing
an empirically informed and philosophically sophisticated account
of genealogical arguments and their significance for the
reliability of moral cognition. He breaks new ground by introducing
a series of novel distinctions into the current debate, which
allows him to develop a framework for assessing the prospects of
debunking or vindicating our moral intuitions. He also challenges
the justification of some of our moral judgments by showing that
they are based on epistemically defective processes. His book is an
original, cutting-edge contribution to the burgeoning field of
empirically informed metaethics, and will interest philosophers,
psychologists, and anyone interested in how - and whether - moral
judgment works.
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