One of the most recurrent debates facing epistemology today is that of the possibility of imputing moral responsibility within a deterministic context that denies freedom of will (free will). In ...contemporary analytical philosophy, this challenge has been met with relative success by the theoretical approach of Harry Frankfurt. In this article, this perspective will be revisited in contrast to the positions that both Aristotle and late Stoicism hold in relation to the question of freedom of will and consequent moral responsibility. An intersection with this will allow us to build an updated critique of the hierarchy of desires that Frankfurt offers to resolve the dilemma of freedom, with or beyond, responsibility and the moral problems to which it gives rise.
Modern philosophy has been vexed by the question "Why should I be moral?" and by doubts about the rational authority of moral virtue. In Reasons without Rationalism, Kieran Setiya shows that these ...doubts rest on a mistake. The "should" of practical reason cannot be understood apart from the virtues of character, including such moral virtues as justice and benevolence, and the considerations to which the virtues make one sensitive thereby count as reasons to act. Proposing a new framework for debates about practical reason, Setiya argues that the only alternative to this "virtue theory" is a form of ethical rationalism in which reasons derive from the nature of intentional action. Despite its recent popularity, however, ethical rationalism is false. It wrongly assumes that we act "under the guise of the good," or it relies on dubious views about intention and motivation. It follows from the failure of rationalism that the virtue theory is true: we cannot be fully good without the perfection of practical reason, or have that perfection without being good.
The significance that people grant to their affiliations as members of nations, religions, classes, races, ethnicities and genders is evidence of the vital need for a cosmopolitan project that ...originates in the figure of Anyone - the universal and yet individual human being. Cosmopolitanism offers an alternative to multiculturalism, a different vision of identity, belonging, solidarity and justice, that avoids the seemingly intractable character of identity politics: it identifies samenesses of the human condition that underlie the surface differences of history, culture and society, nation, ethnicity, religion, class, race and gender. This book argues for the importance of cosmopolitanism as a theory of human being, as a methodology for social science and as a moral and political program.
