Realist Ethics

Realist Ethics
Author: Valerie Morkevičius
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2018-02
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 110841589X

Appealing to just war thinkers, international relations scholars, policymakers, and the public, this book claims that the historical Christian, Islamic, and Hindu just war traditions reflect political concerns with domestic and international order. This underlying realism serves to counterbalance the overly optimistic approach of contemporary liberal just war approaches.

Ethical Realism

Ethical Realism
Author: Anatol Lieven
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2009-03-12
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0307495337

America today faces a world more complicated than ever before, but our politicians have failed to envision a foreign policy that addresses our greatest threats. Ethical Realism shows how the United States can successfully combine genuine morality with tough and practical common sense. By outlining core principles and a set of concrete proposals for tackling the terrorist threat and contend with Iran, Russia, the Middle East, and China, Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman show us how to strengthen our security, pursue our national interests, and restore American leadership in the world.

Moral Realism

Moral Realism
Author: Kevin DeLapp
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2013-04-11
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 144116118X

An accessible and original overview of contemporary debates in moral realism and relativism.

Moral Realism

Moral Realism
Author: Russ Shafer-Landau
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2003-06-19
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0199259755

Moral Realism is a systematic defence of the idea that there are objective moral standards. In the tradition of Plato and G. E. Moore, Russ Shafer-Landau argues that there are moral principles that are true independently of what anyone, anywhere, happens to think of them. These principles are a fundamental aspect of reality, just as much as those that govern mathematics or the natural world. They may be true regardless of our ability to grasp them, and their truth is not a matter of their being ratified from any ideal standpoint, nor of being the object of actual or hypothetical consensus, nor of being an expression of our rational nature. Shafer-Landau accepts Plato's and Moore's contention that moral truths are sui generis. He rejects the currently popular efforts to conceive of ethics as a kind of science, and insists that moral truths and properties occupy a distinctive area in our ontology. Unlike scientific truths, the fundamental moral principles are knowable a priori. And unlike mathematical truths, they are essentially normative: intrinsically action-guiding, and supplying a justification for all who follow their counsel. Moral Realism is the first comprehensive treatise defending non-naturalistic moral realism in over a generation. It ranges over all of the central issues in contemporary metaethics, and will be an important source of discussion for philosophers and their students interested in issues concerning the foundations of ethics.

Realist Ethics

Realist Ethics
Author: Valerie Morkevičius
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2018-01-25
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1108245994

Just war thinking and realism are commonly presumed to be in opposition. If realists are seen as war-mongering pragmatists, just war thinkers are seen as naïve at best and pacifistic at worst. Just war thought is imagined as speaking truth to power - forcing realist decision-makers to abide by moral limits governing the ends and means of the use of force. Realist Ethics argues that this oversimplification is not only wrong, but dangerous. Casting just war thought to be the alternative to realism makes just war thinking out to be what it is not - and cannot be: a mechanism for avoiding war. A careful examination of the evolution of just war thinking in the Christian, Islamic, and Hindu traditions shows that it is no stranger to pragmatic politics. From its origins, just war thought has not aimed to curtail violence, but rather to shape the morally imaginable uses of force, deeming some of them necessary and even obligatory. Morkevičius proposes here a radical recasting of the relationship between just war thinking and realism.

Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics

Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics
Author: David Owen Brink
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 394
Release: 1989-02-24
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780521359375

A systematic analysis considers the objectivity of ethics, the relationship between the moral point of view and a scientific or naturalist worldview and its role in a person's rational lifespan.

Explaining Morality

Explaining Morality
Author: Steve Ash
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 175
Release: 2022-03-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000568377

Adopting a critical realist approach to morality, this book considers morality as an aspect of social reality, enquiring into the nature of moral agency and asking whether we can legitimately argue for a specific moral position and whether moral positions can be understood to apply universally. Drawing on the thought of Bhaskar, Collier and Sayer, it explores a series of ontological questions about morality, shedding light on the ways in which critical realism can be used to address them, ultimately responding to the question of whether critical realism and the moral theories that have been produced through its use can provide an explanation of morality as a feature of reality. Through a synthesis of realist thought, the author develops a comprehensive theoretical understanding of morality that can be tested for its explanatory power through subsequent practical research. As such, it will appeal to scholars of philosophy and social science with interests in critical realism, ontology and meta-ethics.

Aristotle's Moral Realism Reconsidered

Aristotle's Moral Realism Reconsidered
Author: Pavlos Kontos
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2013-03
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1136649883

This book elaborates a moral realism of phenomenological inspiration by introducing the idea that moral experience, primordially, constitutes a perceptual grasp of actions and of their solid traces in the world. The main thesis is that, before any reference to values or to criteria about good and evil—that is, before any reference to specific ethical outlooks—one should explain the very materiality of what necessarily constitutes the ‘moral world’. These claims are substantiated by means of a text- centered interpretation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in dialogue with contemporary moral realism. The book concludes with a critique of Heidegger’s, Gadamer’s and Arendt’s approaches to Aristotle’s ethics.

Taking Morality Seriously

Taking Morality Seriously
Author: David Enoch
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2011-07-28
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 019161856X

In Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism David Enoch develops, argues for, and defends a strongly realist and objectivist view of ethics and normativity more broadly. This view—according to which there are perfectly objective, universal, moral and other normative truths that are not in any way reducible to other, natural truths—is familiar, but this book is the first in-detail development of the positive motivations for the view into reasonably precise arguments. And when the book turns defensive—defending Robust Realism against traditional objections—it mobilizes the original positive arguments for the view to help with fending off the objections. The main underlying motivation for Robust Realism developed in the book is that no other metaethical view can vindicate our taking morality seriously. The positive arguments developed here—the argument from the deliberative indispensability of normative truths, and the argument from the moral implications of metaethical objectivity (or its absence)—are thus arguments for Robust Realism that are sensitive to the underlying, pre-theoretical motivations for the view.