Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment
by: Allan Gibbard

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 346 pages. This book examines some of the deepest questions in philosophy: What is involved in judging a belief, action, or feeling to be rational? What place does morality have in the kind of life it makes most sense to lead? How are to understand claims to objectivity in moral judgments and in judgments of rationality? When we find ourselves in fundamental disagreement with whole communities, how can we understand out disagreement and cope with it? To shed light on such issues, Alan Gibbard develops what he calls a "norm-expressionistic analysis" of rationality. He refines this analysis by drawing on evolutionary theory and experimental psychology, as well as on more traditional moral and political philosophy. What emerges is an interpretation of human normative life, with its quandaries and disputes over what is rational and irrational, morally right and morally wrong. Judgments of what it makes sense to do, to think, and to feel, Gibbard agrues, are central to shaping the way we live our lives. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.