Moral Disquiet and Human Life

Monique Canto-Sperber is a philosopher and the director of the Ecole normale superieure in Paris. She is the author of many books on philosophy and classics, and is the editor of Le Dictionnaire d'ethique et de philosophie morale.

• Acknowledgments ix Part One: Moral Disquiet Chapter 1: Ethics and the Challenge to Moral Philosophy 3 Critique of "Ethical Ideology": Truth and Falsehoods 10 Moral Philosophy and Ethics 17 Myths of Our Time: Moral Grandstanding and Ethical Self-Indulgence 20 Morals and Religion: The Misconception That Atheism Is a Prerequisite for Moral Deliberation 24 Ethics, Meaning, and the Sacred: Unlikely Consolations 32 The Myth of Modernity 38 Mauled Individualism 44 "All Books Are Open in Front of Me" 47 Chapter 2: Goals of Ethical Reflection 53 Moral Disquiet 55 A New Morality? Reflections on Responsibility 57 Law versus Morality: The Issue of Abortion 63 Description and Dissociation in Ethical Reflection: The Concept of Person 66 Practical Rationality and Moral Decisions 70 The Normative Character of Human Acts and Practices 72 Pluralism and Objectivity: The Debate on Human Cloning 74 Justification and Moral Theories 77 Ethical Reflection and Freethinking 79 Confusing Ethics and Democracy 81 Ethics without Solace 83 Chapter 3: French Moral Philosophy and Its Past Misfortunes 86 A Philosophical Revival: French Moral Philosophy in the Early 1900s 86 The International Congress in Philosophy, August 1900 89 French Moral Philosophy in the First Half of the Twentieth-Century: A Dwindling Discipline 91 The 1960s: Moral Philosophy's Rebirth in Great Britain, Germany, and the United States 97 The 1960s: French Moral Philosophy, Stranded between Suspicion and Neglect 101 What Caused These Developments? 104 The First Signs of Moral Philosophy's Revival in the 1980s 111 Part Two: Human Life Chapter 4: The Absurd and the Meaning of Life 121 The Meaning of Life: A Meaningless Question? 121 Philosophers' Answer to the Existential Question 123 The Impossibility of a Final Justification 125 Immortality and the Vanity of Human Life 127 The Meaning of Life in a Naturalistic World 130 The Existential Question and the Feeling of Absurdity 131 Reflecting on Human Life and Confronting the Absurd 134 Chapter 5: The Invariants of Human Life 139 "Most Living" through Reflection 139 Existential Justifications and Self-Reflection 143 The Personal Perspective 146 Events in Human Life 153 The Boredom of Living Forever 157 Living Life Forward and Understanding It Backward 160 Chapter 6: The Good in Human Life 167 Morals and Existential Justifications 167 Happiness and the Subjectivity of Human Good 170 Objective Human Goods 172 Human Goods 173 Good Life and "Human Flourishing" 174 The Good in Human Life: Formal Good and Philosophy 176 Notes 181 Index 213

"[A]n extremely rich and wide-ranging work, written by one of the foremost contemporary moral philosophers in France... Without at all sacrificing rigor, [Monique Canto-Sperber] demonstrates in a most resounding way that philosophy at its very best is plentiful in its resources to speak quite illuminatingly to the circumstances of life that agonize us so."--Laurence Thomas, Ethics "Canto-Sperber not only holds up the history of moral philosophy as relevant and insightful, but she retells the grand story in her own fashion. Anglophones will find her narrative of the Ancients, her homage to the pre-Moderns (like Anselm), her 'inside story' approach to the existentialists, and her comparisons of French philosophers to non-French thinkers, both entertaining and revealing. But her incisive critique of the Enlightenment project of secularization, written in a dramatic and ever-surprising style of prose, is what makes this work unique and provocative."--Albert D. Spalding, Philosophy in Review