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Assessing Peter Singer’s Argument for Utilitarianism: Drawing a Lesson from Rousseau and Kant

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Notes

  1. See Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 14.

  2. Ibid., p. 10.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Ibid.

  5. Ibid., pp. 10–11.

  6. Ibid., p. 12.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Ibid., pp. 12–13.

  9. Ibid., p. 13.

  10. Ibid., p. 14.

  11. Ibid., p. 13.

  12. See Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana, 1985), ch. 10.

  13. Singer, op. cit., p. 218.

  14. Ibid., p. 219.

  15. Ibid., pp. 218–219.

  16. See Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969).

  17. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality, trans. Maurice Cranston (London: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 78.

  18. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991), ch. 13.

  19. See Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 197–207.

  20. See Hobbes, op. cit., p. 149.

  21. Ibid., p. 145.

  22. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston (London: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 49.

  23. Ibid., p. 65.

  24. Ibid., p. 50.

  25. Ibid., p. 60.

  26. Ibid., p. 61.

  27. Ibid., pp. 64–65.

  28. Ibid., p. 65.

  29. See ibid., p. 82.

  30. See Roger J. Sullivan, An Introduction to Kant’s Ethics (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1994), ch. 1.

  31. See Immanuel Kant, “Remarks in the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime,” in Patrick Frierson and Paul Guyer, eds., Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Other Writings (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 86, 95–96.

  32. Ibid., p. 75.

  33. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 31.

  34. Rousseau, op. cit., p. 65.

  35. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, p. 38.

  36. Ibid., p. 44.

  37. See ibid., p. 41n.

  38. Ibid., p. 41.

  39. See Rousseau, The Social Contract, p. 62.

  40. See David Gauthier, Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).

  41. Francis Hutcheson, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense, ed. Aaron Garrett (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002), p. vi.

  42. See Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

  43. See Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, trans. Martin Ferguson Smith (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing), bk. 5.

  44. See Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); see also Singer A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution and Co-operation (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999).

  45. See Sean B. Carroll, Endless Forms Most Beautiful (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2006).

  46. Singer, The Expanding Circle, p. 3.

  47. Ibid., p. 5.

  48. Ibid., p. 149.

  49. See ibid., pp. 100–111.

  50. Ibid., p. 88.

  51. I would like to thank two referees and Thomas Magnell, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Value Inquiry, for their very helpful comments and suggestions on a draft of this article.

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Buckle, S. Assessing Peter Singer’s Argument for Utilitarianism: Drawing a Lesson from Rousseau and Kant. J Value Inquiry 45, 215–227 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-011-9279-8

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