Principles and Persons

Principles and Persons PDF Author: Jeff McMahan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019264629X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description
Derek Parfit, who died in 2017, is widely believed to have been the most significant moral philosopher in well over a century. The twenty-one new essays in this book have all been inspired by his work. They address issues with which he was concerned in his writing, particularly in his seminal contribution to moral philosophy, Reasons and Persons (OUP, 1984). Rather than simply commenting on his work, these essays attempt to make further progress with issues, both moral and prudential, that Parfit believed matter to our lives: issues concerned with how we ought to live, and what we have most reason to do. Topics covered in the book include the nature of personal identity, the basis of self-interested concern about the future, the rationality of our attitudes toward time, what it is for a life to go well or badly, how to evaluate moral theories, the nature of reasons for action, the aggregation of value, how benefits and harms should be distributed among people, and what degree of sacrifice morality requires us to make for the sake of others. These include some of the most important questions of normative ethical theory, as well as fundamental questions about the metaphysics of personhood and personal identity, and the ways in which the answers to these questions bear on what it is rational and moral for us to do.

Principles and Persons

Principles and Persons PDF Author: Jeff McMahan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019264629X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 512

Get Book

Book Description
Derek Parfit, who died in 2017, is widely believed to have been the most significant moral philosopher in well over a century. The twenty-one new essays in this book have all been inspired by his work. They address issues with which he was concerned in his writing, particularly in his seminal contribution to moral philosophy, Reasons and Persons (OUP, 1984). Rather than simply commenting on his work, these essays attempt to make further progress with issues, both moral and prudential, that Parfit believed matter to our lives: issues concerned with how we ought to live, and what we have most reason to do. Topics covered in the book include the nature of personal identity, the basis of self-interested concern about the future, the rationality of our attitudes toward time, what it is for a life to go well or badly, how to evaluate moral theories, the nature of reasons for action, the aggregation of value, how benefits and harms should be distributed among people, and what degree of sacrifice morality requires us to make for the sake of others. These include some of the most important questions of normative ethical theory, as well as fundamental questions about the metaphysics of personhood and personal identity, and the ways in which the answers to these questions bear on what it is rational and moral for us to do.

Principles and Persons

Principles and Persons PDF Author: Jeff McMahan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780192646286
Category : Ethics
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


Principles and Persons

Principles and Persons PDF Author: Frederick Olafson
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 9781421430546
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
He demonstrates that a broad parallelism exists between developments in ethical theory among Continental philosophers of the phenomenological persuasion and the more analytically inclined philosophers of the English-speaking world.

Principles and Persons

Principles and Persons PDF Author: Frederick Olafson
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421430940
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Originally published in 1967. Many critics have claimed that existentialism has not produced any ethics, as distinct from the moralistic assertions of its individual proponents. Challenging this view, Professor Olafson demonstrates that Sartre, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty indeed worked out a powerful ethical theory and that their positions must be understood as deriving from a voluntarist concept of moral autonomy that can be traced beyond Nietzsche and Kant to certain tendencies in late-medieval thought. He demonstrates that a broad parallelism exists between developments in ethical theory among Continental philosophers of the phenomenological persuasion and the more analytically inclined philosophers of the English-speaking world.

Ethics and Existence

Ethics and Existence PDF Author: Jeff McMahan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192894250
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 590

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Book Description
Derek Parfit, who died in 2017, is widely believed to have been the best moral philosopher in well over a century. The twenty new essays in this book were written in his honour and have all been inspired by his work--in particular, his work in an area of moral philosophy known as 'population ethics', which is concerned with moral issues raised by causing people to exist. Until Parfit began writing about these issues in the 1970s, there was almost no discussion of them in the entire history of philosophy. But his monumental book Reasons and Persons (OUP, 1984) revealed that population ethics abounds in deep and intractable problems and paradoxes that not only challenge all the major moral theories but also threaten to undermine many important common-sense moral beliefs. It is no exaggeration to say that there is a broad range of practical moral issues that cannot be adequately understood until fundamental problems in population ethics are resolved. These issues include abortion, prenatal injury, preconception and prenatal screening for disability, genetic enhancement and eugenics generally, meat eating, climate change, reparations for historical injustice, the threat of human extinction, and even proportionality in war. Although the essays in this book address foundational problems in population ethics that were discovered and first discussed by Parfit, they are not, for the most part, commentaries on his work but instead build on that work in advancing our understanding of the problems themselves. The contributors include many of the most important and influential writers in this burgeoning area of philosophy.

The Ethics of Legal Coercion

The Ethics of Legal Coercion PDF Author: J.D. Hodson
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400972571
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
Are all of the commonly accepted aims of the use of law justifiable? Which kinds of behavior are justifiably prohibited, which kinds justifiably required? What uses of law are not defensible? How can the legitimacy or the ille gitimacy of various uses of law be explained or accounted for? These are questions the answering of which involves one in many issues of moral principle, for the answers require that one adopt positions - even if only implicitly - on further questions of what kinds of actions or policies are morally or ethically acceptable. The present work, aimed at questions of these kinds, is thus a study in the ethical evaluation of major uses of legal coercion. It is an attempt to provide a framework within which many questions about the proper uses of law may be fruitfully discussed. The framework, if successful, can be used by anyone asking questions about the defensibility of particular or general uses of law, whether from the perspective of someone considering whether to bring about some new legal provision, from the perspective of someone concerned to evaluate an eXisting provision, or from that of someone concerned more abstractly with questions about the appropriate substance of an ideal legal system. In addressing these and associated issues, I shall be exploring the extent to which an ethics based on respect for persons and their autonomy can handle satisfactorily the problems arising here.

The Principles of Ethics

The Principles of Ethics PDF Author: Herbert Spencer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ethics
Languages : en
Pages : 594

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Book Description


The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy

The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy PDF Author: William Paley
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ethics
Languages : en
Pages : 540

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Book Description


A Theory of Justice

A Theory of Justice PDF Author: John RAWLS
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674042603
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 624

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Book Description
Though the revised edition of A Theory of Justice, published in 1999, is the definitive statement of Rawls's view, so much of the extensive literature on Rawls's theory refers to the first edition. This reissue makes the first edition once again available for scholars and serious students of Rawls's work.

The Principles of Morals and Legislation

The Principles of Morals and Legislation PDF Author: Jeremy Bentham
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Civil law
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
Discusses morals' functions and natures that affect the legislation in general. Bases the discussions on pain and pleasure as basic principle of law embodiment. Mentions of the circumstance influencing sensibility, general human actions, intentionality, conciousness, motives, human dispositions, consequencess of mischievous act, case of punishment, and offences' division.