Descartes's Moral Theory

Book excerpt: John Marshall invites us to reconsider Rene Descartes as an ethicist. Through an examination of his statements about morality found in such writings as the Discourse on the Method, the Passions of the Soul, and various correspondence, Marshall shows how Descartes confirmed and elaborated his earlier "provisional morality" in his later works. Marshall demonstrates that Descartes left a fully developed conception of moral virtue and happiness along with other accounts of values and norms, and he expands on these accounts to describe Cartesian moral theory as a whole.