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This book outlines and circumvents two serious problems that appear
to attach to Kant's moral philosophy, or more precisely to the
model of rational agency that underlies that moral philosophy: the
problem of experiential incongruence and the problem of misdirected
moral attention. The book's central contention is that both these
problems can be sidestepped. In order to demonstrate this, it
argues for an entirely novel reading of Kant's views on action and
moral motivation. In addressing the two main problems in Kant's
moral philosophy, the book explains how the first problem arises
because the central elements of Kant's theory of action seem not to
square with our lived experience of agency, and moral agency in
particular. For example, the idea that moral deliberation
invariably takes the form of testing personal policies against the
Categorical Imperative seems at odds with the phenomenology of such
reasoning, as does the claim that all our actions proceed from
explicitly adopted general policies, or maxims. It then goes on to
discuss the second problem showing how it is a result of Kant's
apparent claim that when an agent acts from duty, her reason for
doing so is that her maxim is lawlike. This seems to put the moral
agent's attention in the wrong place: on the nature of her own
maxims, rather than on the world of other people and morally
salient situations. The book shows how its proposed novel reading
of Kant's views ultimately paints an unfamiliar but appealing
picture of the Kantian good-willed agent as much more embedded in
and engaged with the world than has traditionally been supposed.
Recent research in neurochemistry has shown there to be a number of
chemical compounds that are implicated in the patterns of lust,
attraction, and attachment that undergird romantic love. For
example, there is evidence that the phenomenon of attachment is
associated with the action of oxytocin and vasopressin. There is
therefore some reason to suppose that patterns of lust, attraction,
and attachment could be regulated via manipulation of these
substances in the brain: in other words, by their use as 'love
drugs'. A growing bioethical literature asks searching questions
about this prospect, and especially about the use of such drugs to
enhance or reignite attachment in flagging relationships. This
Element examines some of the central arguments on the topic, and
sounds a note of caution. It urges that there are reasons to think
the states of attachment produced or facilitated by the use of such
drugs would not be desirable.
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