BLACKBURN:RULING PASSIONS PAPER: A Theory of Practical Reasoning

by Simon Blackburn

Simon Blackburn puts forward a compelling and original philosophy of human motivation and morality. Why do we behave as we do? Can we improve? Is our ethics at war with our passions, or is it an upshot of those passions? Blackburn seeks the answers to such questions in an exploration of the nature of moral emotions and the structures of human motivation. He develops a naturalistic ethics, which integrates our understanding of ethics with the rest of our understanding of the world we live in. His theory does not debunk the ethical by reducing it to the non-ethical, and it banishes the spectres of scepticism and relativism that have haunted recent moral philosophy. Ruling Passions reveals how ethics can maintain its authority even though it is rooted in the very emotions and motivations that it exists to control.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

347 pages, Paperback

First published September 24, 1998

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Simon Blackburn FBA is an English academic philosopher known for his work in metaethics, where he defends quasi-realism, and in the philosophy of language; more recently, he has gained a large general audience from his efforts to popularise philosophy.

He retired as the professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge in 2011, but remains a distinguished research professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, teaching every fall semester. He is also a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a member of the professoriate of New College of the Humanities. He was previously a Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford and has also taught full-time at the University of North Carolina as an Edna J. Koury Professor. He is a former president of the Aristotelian Society, having served the 2009–2010 term. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2002 and a Foreign Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2008.

Reviews

[Richard Newton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I find Blackburn at times a thoroughly frustrating writer in that he writes with a style that seems apparently very clear, and yet often it is not.

This is also an odd book in many ways. Blackburn is most well know for quasi-realism in ethics. At the end of this book is a good annex q&a style about quasi realism which is quite detailed. And yet much of the rest of the book is not really a positive statement of Blackburn’s views but more a critique of opposing views. It’s clearer what he disagrees with than what he thinks. Apart from the annex, you could read this book without getting a clear understanding of quasi-realism, and then comes the annex which is helpful but only if you know what quasi-realism is.

Nevertheless, there is much to like and learn from this book and from someone who has spent a long time thinking deeply about ethical issues. You do not have to agree with Blackburn to find value in his words.

[Willa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I debated whether to give this one 4 or 5 stars. Frankly, I more or less agree with everything Blackburn says, he makes a persuasive case for it, and I highly recommend the book to anyone interested in meta-ethics and in particular a defense of expressivism (in the quasi-realism flavor). The only things that held me back from the fifth star was a sense of uneasiness with the way "truth" is used, a concern which he admittedly addresses ad nauseam both here and, more fully, in his book by that title. I suppose I would prefer a different term, but I'm not sure what. In any event, do read this book if the subject matter intrigues you, for Blackburn is, as ever, lucid and engaging.

[Dawith · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think he raises some convincing thoughts about ethics. I hadn't had extensive reading in ethics other than Mill's utilitarianism before this book, and reading Ruling Passions really helped understanding a lot of issues and theories constructed by more recent philosophers as well as the older ones like Hume (he discusses Hume a lot and I began to appreciate Humean moral psychology a lot more). I think his spiral staircase analogy for different degrees of attitudes sounded very reasonable, and was quite inspired by some of the more practical take on ethics because I wasn't really thinking about that before.

That being said, his writings is not the clearest to read, especially from chapter 3 and onwards. During the in-class discussions, I realized a lot of his arguments became obscured to me or went right over my head, and I am going to blame his writing because in this book, information is organized in a somewhat categorical way from time to time and it can sometimes be hard to follow why he is telling me about certain things. Overall I felt like he wrote this without considering too much how a reader's thought will progress as one reads this book.

[Jonathan Norton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Blackburns's survey of conceptual in philosophical ethics, from the late 90s. Much of this is focussed on meta-ethical questions and debating the problems of scepticism and relativism. But he does also remember that 1st order ethics is what most people are interested in, and he sketches a model of the place of the virtues in desirable behaviour, that fits his overall Humean view of human nature. Along the way game theory and economics and the pretensions of anyone who imagines they have supplanted ethics with a more rigirous "scientific" alternative are undermined.

Overall the readership for this book would have to have had at least 1 year of undergrad study, unless your happy to skip the meta technicalities altogether. Blackburn seems to suggest it can be read that way, but I think his later, shorter books were meant to be the better attempt at dealing with a wider audience.

[Isabella · Rating 4 out of 5]

If Korsgaard made me a Kantian, Blackburn has successfully turned me into a Humean.

[Lane Wilkinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Don't let Blackburn's stilted prose get in the way of a brilliant defense of moral expressivism.

[Jenny Maria]

I am just looking for the structures of truth and what happens when super improved attitudes meet?