Ontic Ethics

Ontic Ethics: Exploring the Influence of Caring on Being claims that to care more and better is to exist more and better. Much has been written about how character affects action, but this book describes how actions and passions affect character ontologically. H. G. Wright identifies an independent, not culturally relative, source for the ethics of care in an ontology of the self. Ethical and aesthetic flourishing is therefore at once ontological flourishing of the largest, truest self. The book includes many illustrations of how behavior and attitudes have consequences not only for who, but for how much we are. It refines the concept of flourishing, originating with Aristotle, and shows how values that encourage flourishing of the world as it relates to any person, reflexively enhance the flourishing of that person, hence offering a bridge across the fact/value chasm and a cure for ethical relativism. Wright engages classical and modern philosophers writing about the nature of a self to provide a platform from which further advances can be made on several problems in general philosophy that relate to the ontology of a self. These include the use of the term “existence,” a bundle theory showing a way substance can be made up of attributes, an exploration of unity in a self, an evaluation of necessary constituents of selfhood, a theory of how persons are constituted in space and time, a portrayal of how existential intensity relates to the exercise of power, and a proposal about how free acts and stances can be connected to character. In the final chapters the author outlines applications of an ontology of care to problems of partiality, specialization, limitation, age and death. All these issues explicate the connection between ontological and ethical flourishing of the self/world combination. The insights in Ontic Ethics will be of interest not only to philosophers working in ethics and metaphysics, but also to scholars working in economics, theology, sociology, and evolutionary theory.