McInerny revisits the basics of Thomas's teachings and offers a brief, intelligible, and persuasive summary.

This remarkable book is the most comprehensive study ever written of the history of moral philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its aim is to set Kant's still influential ethics in its historical context by showing in detail what the central questions in moral philosophy were for him and how he arrived at his own distinctive ethical views. The book is organised into four main sections, each exploring moral philosophy by discussing the work of many influential (...) philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In an epilogue the author discusses Kant's view of his own historicity, and of the aims of moral philosophy. In its range, in its analyses of many philosophers not discussed elsewhere, and in revealing the subtle interweaving of religious and political thought with moral philosophy, this is an unprecedented account of the evolution of Kant's ethics. (shrink)

Moral Dilemmas is the second volume of collected essays by the eminent moral philosopher Philippa Foot, gathering the best of her work from the late 1970s to the 1990s. It fills the gap between her famous 1978 collection Virtues and Vice (now reissued) and her acclaimed monograph Natural Goodness, published in 2001. In this new collection, Professor Foot develops further her critique of the dominant ethical theories of the last fifty years, and discusses such topics as the nature (...) of moral judgement, practical rationality, and the conflict of virtue with desire and self-interest. Moral Dilemmas, alongside her other two books, completes the summation of her distinctive and lasting contribution to twentieth-century moral philosophy. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Vicarious responsibility is a notoriously puzzling notion in normative reasoning. In this article we will explore two fundamental issues, which we will call the “explication problem” and the “justification problem”. The former issue concerns how vicarious responsibility can plausibly be defined in terms of other normative concepts. The latter issue concerns how ascriptions of vicarious responsibility can be justified. We will address these two problems by combining ideas taken from legal theory and moral philosophy. Our analysis will emphasise the (...) importance of the voluntary involvement of the normative parties considered liable in a relation with other normative parties who causally contributed to a prohibited state-of-affairs. (shrink)

The article analyses the reception of Hume’s moral philosophy in the lectures and manuscripts of Edmund Husserl and in the published lectures of Franz Brentano, on which Husserl originally based his views. I first present the reasons that led Brentano to appreciate Hume’s sentimentalist background in moral philosophy and to criticize Hume’s relativism. I then show how Husserl, following the critique of psychologism in his Logical Investigations, builds on this starting point and attempts to show a possible contradictory (...) nature of Hume’s moral relativism. Finally, I consider whether Hume’s doctrine contains phenomenological insights that Husserl overlooks. (shrink)

With this work J. B. Schneewind has provided the most comprehensive history of modern moral philosophy available in English. Beginning with the moral theology of the Reformation and ending with Kant, Schneewind’s book offers a panorama of moral philosophy that includes the early modern natural lawyers and their metaphysical critics, the British sentimentalists and their rationalist opponents, and a whole series of eighteenth-century attempts to develop a secular moral philosophy grounded in autonomous human reason and will. (...) Despite its broader multinational scope and its focus on ethics rather than epistemology, Schneewind’s book seems destined to replace Beck’s Early German Philosophy: Kant and his Predecessors, as culminating and summating the work of the next generation of scholars working within the historiographical canons of American Kantianism. (shrink)

Within the otherwise lively debate on neuroethics, little attention has been devoted to the peculiar methodological issues and challenges it faces. My aim is to track down its methodological specificities. Firstly, I will investigate to which traditional debates neuroethics bears similarity and to what extent it actually represents a novelty in ethical thinking. While the ethics of neuroscience is akin to bioethics, the neuroscience of ethics seems akin to moral psychology. And yet they differ as far as the level (...) of explanation of human moral behavior and reasoning is concerned. Thus, while the neuroscience of ethics and moral psychology share a family resemblance, they cannot be reduced to one another. Secondly, I will explore three different philosophical temperaments towards the role empirical findings can and should have in normative ethics and in metaethics. Prudential reasons would recommend openness to new sources of evidence without risking either reductionism nor neglect. -/- I metodi della neuroetica: la neuroscienza dell’etica è davvero una nuova sfida per la filosofia morale? Riassunto: Nonostante il dibattito in ambito neuroetico sia molto vivace, poca attenzione è stata dedicata alla questione relativa al suo metodo specifico e ai problemi a cui va incontro. Il mio scopo è quello di identificare le specificità metodologiche di questa disciplina. Anzitutto cercherò di determinare a quali dibattiti tradizionali la neuroetica può essere avvicinata e in che misura invece questa costituisce una novità all’interno del pensiero etico. Mentre l’etica della neuroscienza ha delle affinità con la bioetica, la neuroscienza dell’etica appare maggiormente simile alla psicologia morale, sebbene tali discipline siano diverse fra loro per via del livello a cui spigano il comportamento morale umano e il ragionamento. Pertanto, nonostante la neuroscienza dell’etica e la psicologia morale rivelino una certa somiglianza di famiglia, non è possibile ridurre l’una all’altra. In secondo luogo esplorerò tre diversi atteggiamenti filosofici rispetto al ruolo che i risultati empirici giocano o dovrebbero giocare rispetto all’etica normativa e alla metaetica. Ragioni di prudenza suggeriscono di rimanere aperti verso nuove fonti di evidenza evitando tanto il riduzionismo quanto la trascuratezza. (shrink)

In this article, I attempt to bridge the gap between partiality and impartiality in moral philosophy from an oft-neglected African perspective. I draw a solution for this moral-theoretical impasse between partialists and impartialists from Kwasi Wiredu's, one of the most influential African philosophers, distinction between an ethic and ethics. I show how an ethic accommodates partiality and ethics impartiality. Wiredu's insight is that partialism is not concerned with strict moral issues. -/- .

The Revisions series marks an attempt to recover what is viable in the traditions of which we ought to be the heirs without ignoring what it was that made those traditions vulnerable to modernity.

In contemporary discussions on practical ethics, the concepts of autonomy and dignity have frequently been opposed. This tendency has been particularly visible in controversies regarding cloning, abortion, organ sales, and euthanasia. Freedom of research and freedom of choice, as instances of professional and personal autonomy, have been cited in arguments favouring these practices, while the dignity and sanctity of human life have been evoked in arguments against them. In the moral theory of Immanuel Kant, however, the concepts of autonomy (...) and dignity seem to coexist in mutual harmony. Respect for the freely chosen moral law and respect for the absolute value of humanity coincide, and give rise to a unified understanding of our duties toward ourselves and others. My question in this paper is, was Kant on to something here? Can autonomy and dignity, in the sense in which they are used in current debates, be brought together, and can the arguments be settled in a way that would satisfy both (or all) disagreeing parties? My answer to the question is, yes and no. Kant was definitely on to something in that he recognized two competing views in modern moral philosophy, and tried to consolidate them in an attempt to create a universal model of ethics. But in the end, he failed to fuse the two views together on equal terms. Instead, he sacrificed the modern idea of the self-governance of individuals on the altar of the premodern notion of the absolute inner worth of humanity. (shrink)

It would be unkind but not inaccurate to say that most experimental philosophy is just psychology with worse methods and better theories. In Experimental Ethics: Towards an Empirical Moral Philosophy, Christoph Luetge, Hannes Rusch, and Matthias Uhl set out to make this comparison less invidious and more flattering. Their book has 16 chapters, organized into five sections and bookended by the editors’ own introduction and prospectus. Contributors hail from four countries (Germany, USA, Spain, and the United Kingdom) and five (...) disciplines (philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, economics, and sociology). While the chapters are of mixed quality and originality, there are several fine contributions to the field. These especially include Stephan Wolf and Alexander Lenger’s sophisticated attempt to operationalize the Rawlsian notion of a veil of ignorance, Nina Strohminger et al.’s survey of the methods available to experimental ethicists for studying implicit morality, Fernando Aguiar et al.’s exploration of the possibility of operationalizing reflective equilibrium in the lab, and Nikil Mukerji’s careful defusing of three debunking arguments about the reliability of philosophical intuitions. (shrink)

This paper investigates consistency in applied moral philosophy with regard to the recent controversy over Makah whaling in the state of Washington. The first part presents both sides of the controversy. The second part examines the meaning of 'tradition' and distinguishes between 'new' and 'old' traditions. The third part explores what might constitute moral consistency for the Makah and what might constitute moral consistency for the larger community.

Brent Adkins traces the history of ethics and morality by examining six thinkers: Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant, Mill, Nietzsche and Levinas. The book is divided into 3 sections - Ethics, Morality and Beyond. Two thinkers are paired in each section to show you how the important questions of moral philosophy have been answered so that you might better answer them for yourself. You'll learn what the philosophers actually said about how to live the best kind of life and, more importantly, (...) why. (shrink)

This essay employs Jean‐Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) as a vehicle to explore love in eighteenth‐century French moral philosophy and theological ethics. The relation between love of self and love of God was understood variously and produced contrasting models of the relation between the public and the private. Rousseau, perhaps more than any other figure in the eighteenth century, wrestled with the complex, competing traditions of love, and in doing so he probed and articulated the tension between and the harmony of (...) life alone and life together. Using as ideal types a set of historical models of private and public vice and virtue, the author describes Rousseau's three contradictory proposals for dealing with the corruption of social institutions and the human heart and discloses their underlying cohesion. (shrink)

Although Frederick Denison Maurice is best known today for his contributions to the theological debates of the nineteenth century, his life’s work was very much that of a professional philosopher. His appointment to the Knightbridge Professorship at Cambridge in 1866 was noteworthy because of his involvement in the controversial Christian Socialist movement and because of his previous dismissal from King’s College, London, for his unorthodox theological opinions. But there was never any question—even among the opponents of his nomination—about his competence (...) as a philosopher. He was considered a capable successor to William Whewell; and was himself soon followed by Henry Sidgwick in this important post. Maurice’s two volume history, Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, which was considered his major work by many of his contemporaries, was the product of over thirty years of continuous teaching and research. His philosophical thought, therefore, deserves consideration on its own merits. (shrink)

Ethical particularists allege that there are, on account of epistemological limitations, no such things as general moral principles. This paper defends the existence of general moral principles by adapting and appropriating Polanyi’s epistemology of science to this problem in moral philosophy.