From Enlightenment to Receptivity: Rethinking Our Values

262 Pages·2013·1.536 MB·English

by  Michael Slote

FROM ENLIGHTENMENT TO RECEPTIVITY
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FROM ENLIGHTENMENT
TO RECEPTIVITY
Rethinking Our Values
Michael Slote
1
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Slote, Michael A. From enlightenment to receptivity:
rethinking our values / Michael Slote.
p. cm.
ISBN 978–0–19–997070–4 (alk. paper) 1. Caring. 2. Empathy.
3. Ethics. I. Title.
BJ1475.S595 2013
170—dc23 2012029228

ISBN 978–0–19–997070–4
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
In memory of my mother and father
Tisha Kunst Slote
and
Edwin Michael Slote
Th is sharp distinction of virtue and morality as co-ordinate and
independent forms of goodness will explain a fact which other-
wise it is diffi cult to account for. If we turn from books on Moral
Philosophy to any vivid account of human life and action such as
we fi nd in Shakespeare, nothing strikes us more than the compar-
ative remoteness of the discussions of Moral Philosophy from the
facts of actual life.
H. A. Prichard in “Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?”
CONTENTS
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
P ART I
BEYOND ENLIGHTENMENT
Introduction to Part I 27
1. Empathy and Objectivity 33
2. Epistemology and Emotion 65
3. Caring and Enlightenment 94
4. How Important Is Morality? 122
5. The Impossibility of Perfection 137
6. A New Picture 152
vii
CONTENTS
PART II
RECEPTIVITY
Introduction to Part II 167
7. Receptivity to Life 169
8. Green Thinking 181
9. From Enlightenment to Receptivity 194
10. The Virtue of Receptivity 210
Conclusion 224
Index 241

viii
PREFACE
I think this book began when the Japanese philosopher Seisuke
Hayakawa came to visit me, some years back, in Miami. He said he
wanted to have talks with me because I had stressed the receptivity
of empathy in my book Th e Ethics of Care and Empathy and because
he himself thought receptivity was a more important ingredient in
human action than anyone had suspected. In a way, this already
meant that receptivity was or might be more important than I
myself had realized at the time I wrote the just-mentioned book,
but that thought lay dormant or merely potential within me for a
number of years—until I started seeing new and interesting exam-
ples of the importance of receptivity. By that time, I was engaged
in criticizing Enlightenment rationalism from a care-ethical
standpoint, but I then started to see ways in which Enlightenment
thought—both in its ethical and in its epistemological aspects—
showed a defi cient respect for what I was now starting to consider
to be the virtue of receptivity. And I then also saw that receptiv-
ity has been underappreciated in other ways that don’t necessar-
ily intersect with Enlightenment thinking. Th is book was off and
running.
ix