Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy

Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy
Author: Bernard Williams
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2011-04
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 113680725X

Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy is widely held to be his most important book and is a classic of contemporary philosophy It is assigned on many reading lists on courses on moral philosophy and ethics Ranks alongside Routledge Classics such as Alasdair MacIntyre’s Short History of Ethics and Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good. Our edition includes a very useful commentary by Adrian Moore at the end of the book New foreword by Jonathan Lear

Ethics Beyond the Limits

Ethics Beyond the Limits
Author: Sophie Grace Chappell
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2020-06-30
Genre: Ethics
ISBN: 9780367582098

Bernard Williams' Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy is widely regarded as one of the most important works of moral philosophy in the last fifty years. In this outstanding collection of new essays, fourteen internationally-recognised philosophers examine the enduring contribution that Williams's book continues to make to ethics. Required

Kant and Applied Ethics

Kant and Applied Ethics
Author: Matthew C. Altman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2011-08-26
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1118114132

Kant and Applied Ethics makes an important contribution to Kant scholarship, illuminating the vital moral parameters of key ethical debates. Offers a critical analysis of Kant’s ethics, interrogating the theoretical bases of his theory and evaluating their strengths and weaknesses Examines the controversies surrounding the most important ethical discussions taking place today, including abortion, the death penalty, and same-sex marriage Joins innovative thinkers in contemporary Kantian scholarship, including Christine Korsgaard, Allen Wood, and Barbara Herman, in taking Kant’s philosophy in new and interesting directions Clarifies Kant's legacy for applied ethics, helping us to understand how these debates have been structured historically and providing us with the philosophical tools to address them

Luck, Value, and Commitment

Luck, Value, and Commitment
Author: Ulrike Heuer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2012-06-28
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 019163154X

Luck, Value, and Commitment comprises eleven new essays which engage with, or take their point of departure from, the influential work in moral and political philosophy of Bernard Williams (1929-2003). Various themes of Williams's work are explored and taken in new directions. In their essays, Brad Hooker, Philip Pettit, and Susan Wolf are all concerned with Williams's work on the viability or wisdom of systematic moral theory, and his criticism, in particular, of moral theory's preoccupation with impartiality. David Enoch, Joseph Raz, and R. Jay Wallace address Williams's work on moral luck, and his insistence that moral appraisals bear a disquieting sensitivity to various kinds of luck. Wallace makes further connections between moral luck and the 'non-identity problem' in reproductive ethics. Michael Smith and Ulrike Heuer investigate Williams's defence of 'internalism' about reasons for action, which makes our reasons for action a function of our desires, projects, and psychological dispositions. Smith attempts to plug a gap in Williams's theory which is created by Williams's deference to imagination, while Heuer connects these issues to Williams's accommodation of 'thick' ethical concepts as a source of knowledge and action-guidingness. John Broome examines Williams's less-known work on the other central normative concept, 'ought'. Jonathan Dancy takes a look at Williams's work on moral epistemology and intuitionism, comparing and contrasting his work with that of John McDowell, and Gerald Lang explores Williams's work on equality, discrimination, and interspecies relations in order to reach the conclusion, similar to Williams's, that 'speciesism' is very unlike racism or sexism.

Shame and Necessity

Shame and Necessity
Author: Bernard Williams
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2008-04-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0520256433

Often, we tend to suppose that the ancient Greeks had primitive ideas of the self, of responsibility, freedom and shame, and that now humanity has advanced from these. Williams's book questions this picture of history and posits that we are not very different from the Greeks in our conceptions of ethical life.

What Can Philosophy Contribute To Ethics?

What Can Philosophy Contribute To Ethics?
Author: James Griffin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 162
Release: 2015-10-29
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0191065447

Ethics appears early in the life of a culture. It is not the creation of philosophers. Many philosophers today think that their job is to take the ethics of their society in hand, analyse it into parts, purge the bad ideas, and organize the good into a systematic moral theory. The philosophers' ethics that results is likely to be very different from the culture's raw ethics and, they think, being better, should replace it. But few of us, even among philosophers, settle real-life moral questions by consulting the Categorical Imperative or the Principle of Utility, largely because, if we do, we often do not trust the outcome or cannot even reliably enough decide what it is. By contrast, James Griffin explores the question what philosophers can reasonably expect to contribute to normative ethics or to the ethics of a culture. Griffin argues that moral philosophers must tailor their work to what ordinary humans' motivational capabilities, and he offers a new account of moral deliberation.

What Money Can't Buy

What Money Can't Buy
Author: Michael J. Sandel
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2012-04-24
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1429942584

In What Money Can't Buy, renowned political philosopher Michael J. Sandel rethinks the role that markets and money should play in our society. Should we pay children to read books or to get good grades? Should we put a price on human life to decide how much pollution to allow? Is it ethical to pay people to test risky new drugs or to donate their organs? What about hiring mercenaries to fight our wars, outsourcing inmates to for-profit prisons, auctioning admission to elite universities, or selling citizenship to immigrants willing to pay? In his New York Times bestseller What Money Can't Buy, Michael J. Sandel takes up one of the biggest ethical questions of our time: Isn't there something wrong with a world in which everything is for sale? If so, how can we prevent market values from reaching into spheres of life where they don't belong? What are the moral limits of markets? Over recent decades, market values have crowded out nonmarket norms in almost every aspect of life. Without quite realizing it, Sandel argues, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. In Justice, an international bestseller, Sandel showed himself to be a master at illuminating, with clarity and verve, the hard moral questions we confront in our everyday lives. Now, in What Money Can't Buy, he provokes a debate that's been missing in our market-driven age: What is the proper role of markets in a democratic society, and how can we protect the moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy?

Normative Ethics

Normative Ethics
Author: Shelly Kagan
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2018-02-12
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0429967209

Providing a thorough introduction to current philosophical views on morality, Normative Ethics examines an acts rightness or wrongness in terms of such factors as consequences, harm, and consent. Shelly Kagan offers a division between moral factors and theoretical foundations that reflects the actual working practices of contemporary moral philosophers.Intended for upper-level or graduate students of philosophy, this book should also appeal to the general reader looking for a clearly written overview of the basic principles of moral philosophy. }Providing a thorough introduction to current philosophical views on morality, Normative Ethics examines an acts rightness or wrongness in light of such factors as consequences, harm, and consent. Shelly Kagan offers a division between moral factors and theoretical foundations that reflects the actual working practices of contemporary moral philosophers. The first half of the book presents a systematic survey of the basic normative factors, focusing on controversial questions concerning the precise content of each factor, its scope and significance, and its relationship to other factors. The second half of the book then examines the competing theories about the foundations of normative ethics, theories that attempt to explain why the basic normative factors have the moral significance that they do.Intended for upper-level or graduate students of philosophy, this book should also appeal to the general reader looking for a clearly written overview of the basic principles of moral philosophy.

The Incorporeal

The Incorporeal
Author: Elizabeth Grosz
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 455
Release: 2017-03-14
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0231543670

Philosophy has inherited a powerful impulse to embrace either dualism or a reductive monism—either a radical separation of mind and body or the reduction of mind to body. But from its origins in the writings of the Stoics, the first thoroughgoing materialists, another view has acknowledged that no forms of materialism can be completely self-inclusive—space, time, the void, and sense are the incorporeal conditions of all that is corporeal or material. In The Incorporeal Elizabeth Grosz argues that the ideal is inherent in the material and the material in the ideal, and, by tracing its development over time, she makes the case that this same idea reasserts itself in different intellectual contexts. Grosz shows that not only are idealism and materialism inextricably linked but that this "belonging together" of the entirety of ideality and the entirety of materiality is not mediated or created by human consciousness. Instead, it is an ontological condition for the development of human consciousness. Grosz draws from Spinoza's material and ideal concept of substance, Nietzsche's amor fati, Deleuze and Guattari's plane of immanence, Simondon's preindividual, and Raymond Ruyer's self-survey or autoaffection to show that the world preexists the evolution of the human and that its material and incorporeal forces are the conditions for all forms of life, human and nonhuman alike. A masterwork by an eminent theoretician, The Incorporeal offers profound new insight into the mind-body problem

Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline

Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline
Author: Bernard Williams
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2006
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780691124261

This is a collection of essays in metaphysics, ethics and related branches of philosophy by Bernard Williams, one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century. Most essays were previously unpublished or relatively unaccessible. All of them are written with his distinctive rigour, imagination and depth.