By Maxine Sheets-Johnstone

This publication argues the case for a foundationalist ethics centrally in line with an empirical knowing of human nature. For Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, “an ethics formulated at the foundations of something except human nature, therefore on whatever except an identity of pan-cultural human realities, lacks strong empirical moorings. It simply loses itself in remoted hypotheticals, reductionist situations, or theoretical abstractions—in the prisoner’s predicament, egocentric genes, devoted mind modules, evolutionary altruism, or mental egoism, for example—or it simply turns into itself a moral method over and above the ethics it formulates,” equivalent to the deontological ethics of Kantian specific imperatives, the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill, or the ethics of care.

Taking her cue from Hume, particularly his Treatise on Human Nature, the place he grounds “the judgment of right and wrong” in human nature noticeable as regularly in pressure among the animal instincts of egocentric acquisitiveness and sympathy for others, Sheets-Johnstone pursues her phenomenological research of the average foundation of human morality through directing her cognizance, first partially I, to what's frequently thought of the darkish aspect of human nature, after which, partly II, to the confident facet. the stress among the 2 demands an interdisciplinary healing answer, which she deals within the Epilogue by way of arguing for the worth of an ethical schooling that enlightens people approximately their very own human nature, highlighting either the socialization of worry and the significance of play and creativity.