Understanding Moral Obligation - Stern, Robert

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Résumé :
Analyses the accounts of moral obligation offered by Kant, Hegel and Kierkegaard, thereby challenging current histories of modern ethics.

Biographie:
he concludes by arguing that the choice between them remains open....

Sommaire:
In many histories of modern ethics, Kant is supposed to have ushered in an anti-realist or constructivist turn by holding that unless we ourselves 'author' or lay down moral norms and values for ourselves, our autonomy as agents will be threatened. In this book, Robert Stern challenges the cogency of this 'argument from autonomy', and claims that Kant never subscribed to it. Rather, it is not value realism but the apparent obligatoriness of morality that really poses a challenge to our autonomy: how can this be accounted for without taking away our freedom? The debate the book focuses on therefore concerns whether this obligatoriness should be located in ourselves (Kant), in others (Hegel) or in God (Kierkegaard). Stern traces the historical dialectic that drove the development of these respective theories, and clearly and sympathetically considers their merits and disadvantages...

...In this thought-provoking book on Kant's ethics and its 19th-century legacy, Stem (Univ, of Sheffield, UK) challenges a prominent interpretation of Kant that makes the autonomy of the moral subject the starting point for his determination of moral value... Stem's account is richly rewarding in its textual commentary, historical contextualizing, and engagement with contemporary scholarship. It will be valuable for students of Kant or 19th-century ethics... Highly recommended... --D.C. Kolb, St. Meinrad Archabbey Library, CHOICE ... This is a splendidly clear and scholarly account of some central questions of ethics in Kant, Schiller, Hegel and Kierkegaard, showing the related ways in which they are treated by the four thinkers, and why they remain live today... Stern's book has two foci: (1) the idea of moral obligation as command, by God, self or society, (2) the nature of moral motivation and what makes a person righteous, virtuous or admirable in the highest degree, or what kind of life one is called to. His discussion of how Kant, Schiller, Hegel and Kierkegaard treat these deeply serious ethical themes is the most unaffectedly lucid and thoughtful that I have read for a long time. --John Skorupski, Philosophy Quarterly This book is a valuable contribution both to our understanding of late modern philosophy and to the contemporary debate about the status of moral obligations. Stern shows how valuable historical understanding can be to a contemporary problem (in this case in metaethics), and at the same time shows how the evaluation of philosophical positions and arguments provides an essential help in interpreting the history of philosophy, in this case the history of ethics among German and German-influenced thinkers of the nineteenth and late eighteenth centuries... --C. Stephen Evans, Baylor University, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews