Abstract

The author’s view, set out in Chapter One, is that “a decent person is simply a person under certain constraints”, not only the constraints of principle but motivational constraints as well. This book is about the motivational constraints, those of self-respect and those of others’ needs. It also considers how we can recover these constraints after periods of insensibility, the roles of forgiveness in recovering and maintaining these constraints, concerns for future people, and how our motivational constraints sometimes fail us, giving rise to the question of how to respond to that fact.