The author posits a philosophy of human motivation and morality in which he maintains that we cannot get clear about ethics until we get clear about human nature. He seeks the answers in an exploration of guilt, shame and other moral emotions, and draws on game theory and cognitive science

Simon Blackburn puts forward a compelling and original philosophy of human motivation and morality. Why do we behave as we do? Can we improve? Is our ethics at war with our passions, or is it an upshot of those passions? Blackburn seeks the answers to such questions in an exploration of the nature of moral emotions and the structures of human motivation. He develops a naturalistic ethics, which integrates our understanding of ethics with the rest of our understanding of the world we live in. His theory does not debunk the ethical by reducing it to the non-ethical, and it banishes the spectres of scepticism and relativism that have haunted recent moral philosophy. Ruling Passions reveals how ethics can maintain its authority even though it is rooted in the very emotions and motivations that it exists to control.

Ruling Passions gives us our humanity, providing some answers to those sceptics who find Kantian morality devoid of psychological realism