Moral Perfectionism

Descartes is not ordinarily understood as an ethical philosopher. He is notorious for various epistemological and metaphysical positions, and with the a prior cosmology to which they led him. But ethics? ... his views on the subject barely rate a mention in the textbooks.

This may change, and a new book may be a harbinger of that change, Descartes' Moral Perfectionism by Frans Svenson seeks to tease a full ethical theory out of Descartes scattered remarks on the subject, some in letters rather than in his books.

Svenson, who works at the University of Gothenburg, says that for Descartes the central ethical question is: why ought we be virtuous? The answer is: because by doing so we promote our degree of perfection.

What does it mean to be virtuous? that is, to be morally more perfect? It means to attend to certain facts about one's self and the world in which one lives and, in that context, to be generous. Generosity is THE key virtue, the key human bridge to perfection, on Svenson's take on Descartes.

I recall that standard courses on ethics offer three tents into which a particular theorist must fit: virtue theory (paradigmatically Aristotle is the tent pole here); duty-based theories (think of Kant); consequentialism (Bentham). On Svenson's reading Descartes is in Aristotle's tent, but the stress on generosity-as-perfection gives him a bit of a dissident position therein.

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