E-Books →Rethinking Self-Control

There is abundant evidence that self-control is beneficial both to those who have it and to the societies in which they live. This book shows that the neo-Aristotelian framework for understanding self-control-related traits, which has dominated both philosophy and the sciences, is psychologically unrealistic and should be replaced. The traditional conceptions of temperance and continence need to be revised so that they reflect actual human capacities. The author argues for an indirect harmony hypothesis, which claims that high trait self-control consists in having an excellent ability to use indirect strategies to achieve motivational harmony that would not otherwise be possible. He fruitfully combines work from ancient Greek philosophy, contemporary virtue ethics, philosophy of action, moral psychology, social psychology, and cognitive neuropsychology to develop a novel hypothesis about what constitutes human excellence with respect to self-control.
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