Just Curious

The origin of obligation, duty and morality

I have been doing less outside readings lately, since the workload at the law school has increased considerably since September, and I gotta hit the books real hard for the coming January finals...

Nevertheless, I managed to finish Immanuel Kant's "Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals," (a smallish book very very hard to read) and a chapter from Soren Kierkegaard's "Training in Christianity." I kinda' read them against both my tort law professor Jon Hanson's article on Critical Realism and situationism, the Gospel of St. John, Marx' philosophical manuscripts from 1844 and fragments from the various Confucian classics I read in high school. The reading on Kant also shed light on "Contract as Promise" by Charles Fried, a book I read earlier.

This really has become interesting, since I think by now I have finally got a vague sense of the a priori foundation of morality, as well as the source of authority of moral imperatives or commands, as well as its interplay with the Marxian notion of the human individual as a collection of social relations. I think I should sum this up some time after next week, after the end of this semester, when I will have time to do my own stuff...

posted by James Chang @ 11:07 PM