The Ethical Primate by Mary Midgley (9780415132244)

Description - The Ethical Primate by Mary Midgley

In her new book, Mary Midgley argues that the unrealistic isolation of mind from body in reductive scientific ideologies still causes us painful confusion. Such ideologies present crude pictures which are not good science, since they ignore the manifest importance of the higher human faculties. Neither inside nor outside of these crude pictures is there room for any realistic notion of the self. Why should these theories insist on only one kind of answer? There is not just a single kind of legitimate explanation. There are as many kinds as there are viewpoints from which questions arise - subjective as well as objective, practical as well as theoretical. Human morality necessarily arises out of human freedom: we are uniquely free beings in that we are aware of our conflicts of motive, but those conflicts and our abilities to resolve them are part of our natural inheritance. Though our selves are in many ways divided, we share the difficult project of wholeness with other organisms. What matters for our freedom is the recognition of our genuine agency, our slight but real power to grasp and arbitrate our inner conflicts.

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