The Virtues of Limits Hardcover by David McPherson

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Hardcover

[208 Pages]

PUB:February 15, 2022

$76.96

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Author: McPherson David

Package Dimensions: 0x0x788

Number Of Pages: 208

Release Date: 15-02-2022

Details: Product Description
Human beings seek to transcend limits. This is part of our potential greatness, since it is how we can realize what is best in our humanity. However, the limit-transcending feature of human life is also part of our potential downfall, as it can lead to dehumanization and failure to attain
important human goods and to prevent human evils. Exploring the place of limits within a well-lived human life this work develops and defends an original account of
limiting virtues, which are concerned with recognizing proper limits in human life. The limiting virtues that are the focus are
humility, reverence, moderation, contentment, neighborliness, and loyalty, and they are explored in relation to four kinds of limits: existential limits, moral limits, political limits, and economic limits. These virtues have been underexplored in discussions about virtue ethics, and when they have
been explored it has not been with regard to the general issue of the place of limits within a well-lived human life. The account of the limiting virtues provided here, however, is intended as a counter to other prominent approaches to ethics: namely, autonomy-centered approaches and
consequentialist (or maximizing) approaches. This account is also used to address a number of important contemporary issues such as genetic engineering, distributive justice, cosmopolitanism vs. patriotism, and the ethical status of growth-based economics.

Review
“David McPherson enables us to see the deep human need for limits, and how it runs through our life. This is a book of great importance in the face of contemporary understandings of ethics and the great challenges that human beings confront.” — Cora Diamond, Kenan Professor of Philosophy Emerita,
University of Virginia

“If philosophy is about how one should live one’s life, McPherson’s The Virtues of Limits is exemplary. It shows how human flourishing, individual and collective, depends on accepting our limits, and on cultivating the virtues associated with this attitude, such as humility, reverence,
neighbourliness, and loyalty. McPherson writes without jargon or undue technicality, while at the same time arguing with due academic rigour, and with a fair-minded engagement with those contemporary philosophers who follow in Nietzsche’s footsteps in wishing to remove limits from our striving,
whether those limits be genetic, individual, political, or economic. This book is of great appeal in showing the life-affirming but often unremarked and under-stated appeal of a life lived within its proper limits.” — Anthony O’Hear, Professor of Philosophy, University of Buckingham, and former
Director, Royal Institute of Philosophy

“This fluent and ambitious study articulates an integrated vision of the good life that ranges over both the individual and the socio-political dimensions of morality. Its unifying idea, that of ‘limiting virtues’, yields a species of virtue theory that is genuinely original both as regards the
specific virtues that are highlighted, and as regards the rationale for their selection and their role in securing human flourishing.” — John Cottingham, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, University of Reading, and Honorary Fellow, St John’s College, Oxford University

“In The Virtues of Limits, David McPherson offers us an historically rich and philosophically robust defence of the idea that humans flourish only when and insofar as they recognize and abide by certain well-founded constraints. What is particularly valuable about his treatment is that it
demonstrates how the importance of such constraints is evidenced across different domains: existential, moral, political, and economic. The cogency of this demonstration is matched only by its timeliness, given that our time is one that finds constraints as such increasingly hard to rationalize.” —
Tom Angier, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Cape Town

About the Author
David McPherson,
Associate Pr

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