In this seminar, students will explore the systematic philosophical problem surrounding moral motivation and cultivate their own informed stance toward it. The problem is this: Moral expectations and ideals must be in some sense realistic or realizable; otherwise, they threaten to become irrelevant to ordinary lives. Yet morality always implicitly challenges our actual inclinations and habits. Taking morality seriously means holding myself and others to normative ideals and constraints even when we do NOT in any sense "feel like it." So, how can it be realistic to expect or demand that people do what they are, in fact, not motivated to do? Is it helpful--or misguided--to insist that morality has something like reason on its side? |