The Matter of Evil: From Speculative Realism to Ethical Pessimism
Drew M. Dalton, "The Matter of Evil: From Speculative Realism to Ethical Pessimism"
English | ISBN: 0810146401 | 2023 | 344 pages | PDF | 2 MB
English | ISBN: 0810146401 | 2023 | 344 pages | PDF | 2 MB
A provocative and entirely new account of ethical reasoning that reconceives the traditional understanding of ethical action negatively
In this radical reconsideration of ethical reasoning in contemporary European philosophy, Drew M. Dalton makes the case for an absolutely grounded account of ethical normativity developed from a scientifically informed and purely materialistic metaphysics. Expanding on speculative realist arguments, Dalton argues that the limits placed on the nature of ethical judgments by Kant’s critique can be overcome through a moral evaluation of the laws of nature—specifically, the entropic principle that undergirds the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology. In order to extract a moral meaning from this simple material fact, Dalton scrutinizes the presumptions of classical accounts and traditional understandings of good and evil within the history of Western philosophy and ultimately asserts that ethical normativity can be reestablished absolutely without reverting to dogmatism.
By overturning our assumptions about the nature and value of reality,
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