Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity[1] is a work of philosophy by Charles Taylor, published in 1989 by Harvard University Press.

Utilitarians and followers of Kant provide an answer to these questions in terms of how we calculate the outcome of our acts and (for Kantians) the motives behind our actions.

Taylor argues that qualitative distinctions about the constitution and value of moral goods are intrinsic to human existence.

The reductive naturalist may object that these frameworks are simply interpretations or re-interpretations of contemporary understandings of the natural world and man's place in it.

It is not simply an ad hominem argument that the reductive naturalist cannot avoid making qualitative distinctions among moral goods.

Taylor argues that the qualitative distinctions we make are intrinsic to the way we conduct our lives, they constitute an orientation towards the world.

And yet, the projectionist will argue, there is no resolution to the conflict, because there are no universal criteria for resolving the subjective beliefs of different cultural communities.

Our best account of the human form of life must determine the properties and entities that are "real, objective or part of the furniture of things".

Such an investigation would demand a breadth of scope involving social, economic, political, structural, and philosophical change (to name but a few aspects) that would not be possible within his work.

These conditions involved the changing cultural, economic, political, religious, social, and scientific practices of society.

A man evaluated the goods available to him in terms of the glory they would bring him in battle and the heroic deeds he would be able to recount.

Despite the differences between Plato and Aristotle, both philosophers saw wisdom and reasoning as a vision of meaningful order whether it be cosmically or socially constituted.

Rather than understanding the goods of life in terms of a vision of order in the world, Augustine had brought the focus to the light within, an immaterial, yet intelligible soul that was either condemned or saved.

Augustine's theories, which were central doctrines throughout Christian civilization for a millennium, were, nonetheless, far removed from the more radical inwardness of enlightenment philosophers such as René Descartes and John Locke.

In Descartes' philosophy, the vision of a God given meaningful order involving a spiritual essence or expressive dimension within the world was altogether absent.

Following Descartes, Taylor notes, Locke's understanding of the mind also involved a radical disengagement from the world.

However, unlike Descartes, whose understanding of the mental depended on an inward reasoning that was autonomous from the surrounding world, Locke rejected the possibility of innate ideas.

"[7] Taylor argues that as the scientific revolution exemplified in the work of Nicolaus Copernicus and Sir Isaac Newton took hold in Western civilization, a shift occurred in the hierarchical evaluations placed on many life goods.

Moreover, there had been a philosophical shift towards an empirical approach to human understanding that had emerged with the scientific revolution and had been articulated by Locke (and Francis Bacon before him).

The daily life of family and production, along with the value of being a father, a carpenter, or a farmer, was held as a moral good.

Taylor argues that within a deist order, the road to salvation was no longer determined simply by a person's position in the world and his or her actions, but also the manner in which one lives one's life—"worshipfully" according to Protestants or "rationally" according to Locke.

Rousseau, however, articulated a view in which the natural inclinations of the self were hidden deep within, barely apprehendable, and corrupted by the beliefs and reason of society.

Following Rousseau, to understand the self was not simply to describe what was evident in a reflexive analysis of the mind, but a task of discovering and bringing to light what was hidden within.

Following the expressivist turn, Taylor notes, "The moral or spiritual order of things must come to us indexed to a personal vision" (p. 428).

Taylor broadly divides the sources for contemporary Western qualitative evaluations of moral value into three broad strands; (1) the theistic grounding as articulated by Augustine; (2) the naturalism of disengaged reason that is typically associated with the scientific outlook; and (3) the romantic expressivism articulated by Rousseau.

The moral frameworks within which we make strong evaluations as to the value of life goods appear irredeemably fractured along these three strands.

There is broad agreement in modern culture about moral standards: "the demand for universal justice and beneficence ... the claims of equality ... freedom and self-rule ... and ... the avoidance of death and suffering.

Taylor explains how these sources are threefold: theism, "a naturalism of disengaged reason", extending to scientism, and Romanticism or its modernist successors.

Opponents of technology often forget how it was disengaged reason that proposed freedom, individual rights, and the affirmation of ordinary life.

"[10] Against all this blindness and "partisan narrowness" Taylor sees hope "implicit in Judaeo-Christian theism ... and ... its central promise of a divine affirmation of the human".