A Humane Case for Moral Intuition

Front Cover
Rodopi, 1993 - Philosophy - 376 pages
The book contends that contrary to accepted interpretation, moral intuition, rather than any other form of reasoning, least of all formal logic, is the moral method found in the ethics of Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant and Dewey - the first four chapters of the book. These four thinkers represent a dialectical selection of ethical relativism and absolutism as well as a chronological succession from ancient to contemporary thought. The fifth and concluding chapter is a major presentation of the author's thesis on moral intuition as the exact antidote against the dilemma ethics approach, which is widely used today with rapidly diminishing effect and interest. This chapter is a detailed illustration of how moral intuition works out concretely in the lived world. It stresses the unity of moral experience even as this is clouded over by our relatively fewer, but overdramatized, confrontations on some moral issues.

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Contents

Preface
3
Authors Foreword
9
Prudential Intuition 1 Preliminary Remarks
29
Aristotle
37
The Life of Reason
43
Friends as Other Selves
62
The Goods of Fortune
73
Restatement of Problem and Solution
75
Language and Natural Law
99
Three Levels of Natural Law
106
Subsidiarity
117
Intuition of the Moral Will
135
The Three Postulates
184
FIVE Intuition and the Unity of Moral Experience
249
Notes
343
Index
367

Spectrum of Intuition Natural Law and Subsidiarity 1 Preliminary Remarks
77
Natural Law
83

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