Choice and Action

Moral valuing has long posed a special challenge to philosophers because it purports to establish objectively sustainable claims -- despite their apparent grounding in merely human sentiment. In a series of sometimes personal and, at other times, fairly technical philosophical essays, novelist Stuart W. Mirsky here considers the implications of a sentiment-based moral faculty in light of our modern tendency to embrace relativism and moral nihilism -- a tendency which must finally undermine the role we expect our moral judgments to play. Exploring how we value things in general, to place moral claims in a broader context, Mirsky painstakingly develops a picture that lays bare the cognitive dimension of moral claims. In so doing, he manages to rediscover and re-emphasize the essential role of the subject, the aware self, in our moral calculus.