[eBook Code] The Moral Powers (eBook Code, 1st)

Prolegomenon

1. Philosophical anthropology and the investigation of value

2. The sinopia for a fresco

Acknowledgement

Part I Of good and evil

Chapter 1 The roots of value and the nature of morality

1. The place of value in a world of facts

2. Varieties of goodness

3. The framework of moral goodness

4. Morality

Chapter 2 The roots of morality and the nature of moral goodness

1. Moral goodness

2. The roots of moral value

3. Respect

4. The relative permanence of the virtues

5. Constants in human nature

Chapter 3 The roots of evil

1. The horror!

2. The grammar of evil: preliminary clarification

3. Philosophical problems: does evil exist?

4. Philosophical problems: can evil be explained?

Chapter 4 Explanations of evil

1. The variety of explanations

2. Reasons and motives for doing evil

3. Can evil be a motive?

4. Knowledge of good and evil

5. Experimental psychology: Milgram’s and Browning’s explanations of evil-doing

Chapter 5 Evil and the death of the soul

1. Body, mind and soul

2. The death of the soul

3. Forgiveness and self-forgiveness

4. Evil and the unforgivable

5. From soul to soul – trisecting an angle with compass and rule

Part II Of freedom and responsibility

Chapter 6 Fatalism and determinism

1. Of fate and fortune

2. Fatalism

3. Nomological determinism

4. Flaws in reductive determinism

5. The random and the determined

Chapter 7 Neuroscientific determinism, freedom and responsibility

1. Neuroscientific determinism

2. Explanations of human behaviour: a recapitulation

3. Neuroscientific explanation and its limits

4. How possible, not why necessary

5. Varieties of responsibility

6. Elaboration

7. Irresistible impulse and temptation

Part III Of pleasure and happiness

Chapter 8 Pleasure and enjoyment

1. Varieties of hedonism

2. Pleasure, enjoyment and being pleased

3. Pleasure, pain and the pleasures of sensation

4. Enjoyment and the pleasure of activities

5. Pleasure, desire, and satisfaction

6. Comparability and quantification

7. First-person judgements of pleasure

8. The hedonic life

Chapter 9 Happiness

1. Preliminaries

2. The field of happiness

3. Happiness: analysis

4. Preconditions of happiness

5. The epistemology of happiness

6. Two philosophical traditions

7. Happiness and morality

Chapter 10 The science of happiness

1. From eighteenth-century crudity and back again

2. How happiness is understood by happiness scientists

3. Psychological and epistemological presuppositions of the science of happiness

4. Measuring happiness

5. Some results of the science of happiness

Part IV Of meaning and death

Chapter 11 The need for meaning

1. Meaning

2. The primacy of loss of meaning and the sense of meaninglessness

3. The roots of meaninglessness

4. Does life have a meaning?

5. Finding meaning in human life

Chapter 12 The place of death in life

1. What is death?

2. An afterlife

3. The valuelessness of life

4. The value of life

5. Living forever

6. Thanataphobia – the fear of death

Appendices

Appendix 1 On animal beliefs and animal morality

1. Animal morality

2. Animal thinking, animal thoughts, and animal memory

3. Counter-arguments and their rebuttal

4. Animal knowledge of other animals’ minds

5. Animal emotions

Appendix 2 Diabology: Satan, Lucifer and the devil in western thought

Appendix 3 Hannah Arendt and the banality of evil

Appendix 4 The representation of pleasure in post-medieval western art

Index