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篇名 另一種道德哲學:「道德形式」的評估
卷期 15
並列篇名 Another Kind of Moral Philosophy: Evaluating "Forms of Morality"
作者 吳瑞媛
頁次 173-206
出刊日期 199706

中文摘要

英文摘要

Preoccupied with providing reasonable norms for human interaction and their rationale, traditional moral philosophy assumes a rather naive view of moral psychology: "conscience" is often taken to be the ultimate psychic agent, expected to carry the weight of moral demands (whatever they turn out to be). However, "conscience" is not as benign as they thought it was, as we can see from psychoanalytic phenomena of "moral pathology, " such as "pale criminality" and "moral masochism." Sufferers of moral pathology are induced to act against morality not because of a lack of moral conscience, but in virtue of their overly heightened sense of what the authoritative morality demands: they commit moral wrongs to seek punishment, (partly) because for pale criminals it can purge the pre-existing sense of guilt that a highly sensitive conscience created in the first place, and for moral masochists it is associated with fulfillment of some earlier passive sexual desires. The traditional norm-oriented approach to moral philosophy cannot take account of phenomena of moral pathology because it tends to idealize morality, paying no attention to the developmental hazards the inner authoritative moral agent might bring. In view of these limits of the traditional norm-oriented approach, I introduce a "psychology-oriented" approach, in which conscience, being restored to its Proper developmental history of the individual (conscience as the superego) is no longer regarded as "the" inner agent of morality, but only as one possible "form of morality" among many. This "psychology-oriented" approach not only leads, us to realize the fact that morality (what ever its content) does, and needs to, take a particular form, but also enables to reflect upon the possibility of a more benign form of morality than the authoritative one, e.g., in the form of "an ego ideal." Its task of evaluating forms of morality is analogous to that of diagnosing tumors as benign or malign in medicine, it may not offer us an offhand prescription about what to act, but it tells us the appropriate psychological conditions for a healthy moral life, something we need to know for any congenial moral order.

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