This is philosophy bites with me, Nigel.
Warburton, and me, David Edmonds.
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Suppose I discover something about myself, about the kind of person that I am that I didn't know before.
I might, for example, go through life thinking I'm quite generous, but then find out that I give a much lower percentage of my income away to charity than average.
Is this new self knowledge relevant to the question of how I should live?
Regina Rinney is a philosopher, formerly at Oxford Uhero Centre and now at New York University.
Regina, Renee, welcome to philosophy Bites.
Thanks very much.
The topic we're going to focus on is the moral self and psychology.
Can we just begin with the moral self?
What is the moral self?
Sure.
So human beings or persons are distinct from lots of other creatures and objects in the world because we have a certain way of controlling ourselves.
Self control, I guess, is the key word here, right?
We're not like animals, we're not like chairs, we're not like rocks.
We're not just pushed on by forces of nature.
And so we can sort of determine what we do and morality that questions about what we ought to do arise from this fact that we can determine ourselves.