A Critique of Freedom and Equality

This book is about the grounds of ethical life, or the nature and basis of our ethical obligations.

John Charvet (Author)

9780521112260, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 28 May 2009

216 pages
21.6 x 14 x 1.2 cm, 0.28 kg

This book is about the grounds of ethical life, or the nature and basis of our ethical obligations. It contains an original account of these grounds and shows how this understanding requires specific forms of social and political life. Charvet considers the ideas of the freedom and equality of men in the many forms they have taken and shows that there is a radical incoherence underlying them which consists in the failure to integrate in a coherent way the particular and the moral or communal dimensions of individual life. These two dimensions are separated and opposed to each other. In the final section of the book Charvet develops an original account of the grounds of ethical life which satisfactorily integrates these particular and communal elements of individuality. It is designed to show how the moral claims of individuals are grounded in their associated wills in a community and yet how such a conception preserves the separate individuality of the community's members.

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I: 1. The equal value of individuals as self-determining beings
2. A preliminary notice of the difficulties
3. Authenticity
4. Egoism
5. The principle of equal value in some contemporary literature
6. The motivational structure of morality
7. Hobbesian egoism
8. Benevolence and sympathy
9. Rousseau
10. Rationalism and Kant
11. Self-interest, morality and the divided self
12. Utilitarianism
13. Subordinate ordering principles
14. The liberal theory of equal freedom
15. Egalitarianism
16. The Rawlsian combination
Part II. 17. Hegel
18. Marx
Part III: 19. The relativity of value
20. The fundamental moral attitude
21. The possibility of morality
22. The moral attitude and the rights of individuals
23. The right to particular satisfaction or welfare
24. The standpoint of the whole
25. Ethical criticism
26. Subjectivity and objectivity in morals
27. The unity of the human race
Index.

Subject Areas: Social & political philosophy [HPS]