Descartes’s Moral Perfectionism

Frans Svensson is Senior Lecturer in philosophy at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. His work has appeared in journals such as History of Philosophy Quarterly, Journal of Ethics, and Utilitas. He is the co-editor, with Martina Reuter, of Mind, Body, and Morality: New Perspectives on Descartes and Spinoza (Routledge, 2019).

“Frans Svensson’s Descartes’s Moral Perfectionism provides a thorough and sustained account of Descartes’s moral theory, contending that Descartes is not a virtue theorist or an Epicurean hedonist, as other commentators contend, but is a moral perfectionist. The book is well-researched, interesting, and provides a novel perspective on Descartes’s ethics and value theory.”Patrick Brissey, University of South Carolina, USA“Descartes’s Moral Perfectionism is an important contribution to the study of Descartes’s ethics. It will be at the center of future discussions not only of Descartes’s moral thinking but of its unity and of the relation between his ethics and his metaphysics.”Jorge Secada, University of Virginia, USA“Frans Svensson’s Descartes’s Moral Perfectionism is a welcome addition to a topic that deserves greater attention. The book makes significant contributions to our understanding of Descartes’s ethics, which should be of interest to Descartes scholars of all stripes . . . While the book engages with the scholarly literature, it is also sufficiently accessible, direct, and brief to serve as an introduction to Descartes’s ethics for the uninitiated.”Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

• Introduction 1. Good and evil 2. Descartes’s conception of virtue 3. Descartes’s moral perfectionism 4. Happiness 5. Cartesian generosity 6. Cartesian generosity, the highest and most perfect morality, and the morale par provision