Abstract
This paper reinterprets the concept of the moral self in F.H. Bradley’s Ethical Studies. Firstly, I dismiss the naturalistic reading of the moral self as a set of appropriate desires and beliefs or as a combination of character traits and habits. Then, I distinguish between the moral self as a principle of universalisability and the moral life of the self. I argue that the moral life of the self is essentially a project of attaining the moral ideal; that is to say, its comprehension and concretisation, on the one hand, and its realisation, on the other. I further suggest that the successful realisation of this project by an agent consists in acting in accordance with the coherent set of her reasonable commitments.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Timo Airaksinen, James Allard, James Connelly, David Crossley, William Mander and Peter Nicholson for comments on earlier versions of this paper. I also want to thank Pierfrancesco Basile and Monika Betzler for sharing important reading materials with me. An important part of my work on this paper was supported by the Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation (Finland).
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Babushkina, D. (2016). F.H. Bradley’s Conception of the Moral Self: A New Reading. In: Mander, W., Panagakou, S. (eds) British Idealism and the Concept of the Self. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46671-6_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46671-6_4
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