Ethics

Can reading Schopenhauer cure sex/lust addiction? If it can, do philosophers think that normative ethics ought to be therapeutic?

Comments

A confession: I've never read more than a few words of Schopenhauer. However, as I hope will be clear, that doesn't really matter for the question you've asked. Whether or not reading Schopenhauer can cure sex addiction is something we could only find out by experimental means, and philosophers—even those intimately acquainted with Schopenhauer's writings—have no special insight into how the experiments would turn out.

But let's suppose reading Schopenhauer really had this benefit. I take your question to be whether normative ethics should strive to have a therapeutic effect on the reader, helping him or her overcome vices and moral defects. I'd suggest that even though this might be a fortunate side-effect, it wouldn't be a criticism of the enterprise if things didn't work this way. What's needed to change people's dispositions and motivations might be quite different from getting clear on the question of how they ought to behave and what those dispositions and motivations ought to be. Normative ethics concerns itself with the latter sorts of questions rather than the former. Coming up with sound answers to normative questions seems like a good thing even if more is needed to get people to act accordingly.

there is some potentially relevant empirical material here:

http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/

in the section:

The Relationship Between Moral Reflection and Moral Behavior:

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