) discourages the view that there are substantial issues at stake. Prominent among the latter are expressive and projective theories, but also a relaxed pluralism that (.

This debate has centered on realism, or the view that what we say is validated by the way things stand in the world, and a variety of oppositions to it.

This volume collects some influential essays in which Simon Blackburn, one of our leading philosophers, explores one of the most profound and fertile of philosophical problems: the way in which our judgments relate to the world. Ruling Passions sets ethics in the context of human nature: it offers a solution to the puzzle of how ethics can maintain its authority even though it is rooted in the very emotions and motivations that it exists to control. At the same time he banishes the spectres of scepticism and relativism that have haunted recent moral philosophy. What is special about Blackburn's naturalistic ethics is that it does not debunk the ethical by reducing it to the non-ethical. Many philosophers have wanted a naturalistic ethics a theory that integrates our understanding of human morality with the rest of our understanding of the world we live in. ) also on game theory and cognitive science in his account of the structures of human motivation. So these are the sorts of questions he addresses: Why do we behave as we do? Can we improve? Is our ethics at war with our passions, or is it an upshot of those passions? Blackburn seeks the answers in an exploration of guilt, shame, disgust, and other moral emotions he draws (.

He maintains that we cannot get clear about ethics until we get clear about human nature. Simon Blackburn puts forward a compelling original philosophy of human motivation and morality.

Simon blackburn philosophy