Abstract
It is an obvious truth about a person’s moral obligations (his over-all obligations, not his prima facie ones) that his fulfilling them is of overriding importance to him, not in the sense that he believes that it is of overriding importance, but in the sense that his well-being will in fact be significantly affected by his fulfilling or not fulfilling those obligations, whether or not he believes this to be so. Plato tried to account for this by claiming that the nature of the human soul is such that a person’s wrongdoing inexorably harms him, regardless of whether he is punished by others. I shall return to Plato’s theory later in the chapter. Much more recently, Kurt Baier has offered us this explanation of the overriding importance of our avoiding wrongdoing.
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Bibliography
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© 1984 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Dore, C. (1984). A Moral Argument. In: Theism. Philosophical Studies Series in Philosophy, vol 30. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-6300-9_4
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