VELLEMAN ON LOVE AND IDEALS OF RATIONAL HUMANITY

Abstract

This collection of David Velleman's papers in ethics and moral psychology from 1996 to 2005 (plus two new papers and an introduction) is so rich in food for thought that any review of manageable length must leave a great deal out. Rather than leaving out a bit of everything, I shall depart from usual reviewing conventions and leave out almost all of some things for the sake of leaving in more of others. So of the collection's three main themes, one, Velleman's revisionist interpretation of Kant, I shall ignore altogether, and another, personal identity and its relations to narrative and motivation, I shall discuss only briefly, in so far as it bears on the third. This third theme, set out mainly in 'Love as a Moral Emotion', 'The Voice of Conscience' and 'A Rational Superego', is that it is possible to marry some Kantian thoughts about the role played in motivation by an ideal of oneself as a rational agent, some Freudian thoughts about internal agencies of self-regulation, and some still psychoanalytic but perhaps less Freudian thoughts about the part played by love and loving nurture in shaping the way these agencies take root and work within us. To make this attempted marriage succeed would be, in Velleman's words (p. 128), 'to humanize Kant's ideal of ourselves as rationally autonomous'.