Ethics and the Discovery of the Unconscious

John Hanwell Riker

1997-07 · State University of New York Press

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This book shows why the discovery of the unconscious by Nietzsche and Freud requires a reconception of the concepts of moral agency and responsibility and even of morality itself. It explicates how contemporary psychology has taken over the traditional task of ethics in elucidating a theory of human well-being, but criticizes this psychology for being unable to generate adequate notions of either responsibility or moral agency. Riker develops a new moral psychology in which the reality of unconscious functioning is included within a theory of responsibility, and the agent's primary ethic concern becomes knowing what her unconscious motivations are and integrating them into a morally and psychologically mature self.

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John Hanwell Riker is Professor of Philosophy at Colorado College. He is the author of Human Excellence and an Ecological Conception of the Psyche, also published by SUNY Press, and The Art of Ethical Thinking.