Wise Choices, Apt Feelings

Wise Choices, Apt Feelings PDF Author: Allan Gibbard
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0198249845
Category : Decision making
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
This treatise explores what is at issue in narrowly moral questions, and in questions of rational thought and conduct in general. It helps to explain why normative thought and talk so pervade human life, and why our highly social species might have evolved to be gripped by these questions. The author asks how, if his theory is right, we can interpret our normative puzzles, and thus proceed toward finding answers to them.

Wise Choices, Apt Feelings

Wise Choices, Apt Feelings PDF Author: Allan Gibbard
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0198249845
Category : Decision making
Languages : en
Pages : 362

Get Book

Book Description
This treatise explores what is at issue in narrowly moral questions, and in questions of rational thought and conduct in general. It helps to explain why normative thought and talk so pervade human life, and why our highly social species might have evolved to be gripped by these questions. The author asks how, if his theory is right, we can interpret our normative puzzles, and thus proceed toward finding answers to them.

Wise Choices, Apt Feelings

Wise Choices, Apt Feelings PDF Author: Allan Gibbard
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674953789
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
What is involved in judging a belief, action, or feeling to be rational? What place does morality have in the kind of life it makes most sense to lead? How are we to understand claims to objectivity in moral judgments and in judgments of rationality? Gibbard here develops what he calls a “norm-expressivistic analysis” of rationality.

Thinking How to Live

Thinking How to Live PDF Author: Allan GIBBARD
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674037588
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Philosophers have long suspected that thought and discourse about what we ought to do differ in some fundamental way from statements about what is. But the difference has proved elusive, in part because the two kinds of statement look alike. Focusing on judgments that express decisions--judgments about what is to be done, all things considered--Allan Gibbard offers a compelling argument for reconsidering, and reconfiguring, the distinctions between normative and descriptive discourse--between questions of "ought" and "is." Gibbard considers how our actions, and our realities, emerge from the thousands of questions and decisions we form for ourselves. The result is a book that investigates the very nature of the questions we ask ourselves when we ask how we should live, and that clarifies the concept of "ought" by understanding the patterns of normative concepts involved in beliefs and decisions. An original and elegant work of metaethics, this book brings a new clarity and rigor to the discussion of these tangled issues, and will significantly alter the long-standing debate over "objectivity" and "factuality" in ethics. Table of Contents: I. Preliminaries 1. Introduction: A Possibility Proof 2. Intuitionism as Template: Emending Moore II. The Thing to Do 3. Planning and Ruling Out: The "Frege-Geach" Problem 4. Judgment, Disagreement, Negation 5. Supervenience and Constitution 6. Character and Import III. Normative Concepts 7. Ordinary Oughts: Meaning and Motivation 8. Normative Kinds: Patterns of Engagement 9. What to Say about the Thing to Do: The Expressivistic Turn and What it Gains Us IV. Knowing What to Do 10. Explaining with Plans 11. Knowing What to Do 12. Ideal Response Concepts 13. Deep Vindication and Practical Confidence 14. Impasse and Dissent References Index This is a remarkable book. It takes up a central and much-discussed problem - the difference between normative thought (and discourse) and "descriptive" thought (and discourse). It develops a compelling response to that problem with ramifications for much else in philosophy. But perhaps most importantly, it brings new clarity and rigor to the discussion of these tangled issues. It will take some time to come to terms with the details of Gibbard's discussion. It is absolutely clear, however, that the book will reconfigure the debate over objectivity and "factuality" in ethics. --Gideon Rosen, Professor of Philosophy, Princeton University Gibbard,/author> writes elegantly, and the theory he develops is innovative, philosophically sophisticated, and challenging. Gibbard defends his theory vigorously and with admirable intellectual honesty. --David Copp, Professor of Philosophy, Bowling Green State University

The Methods of Ethics

The Methods of Ethics PDF Author: Henry Sidgwick
Publisher: Gale and the British Library
ISBN:
Category : Ethics
Languages : en
Pages : 508

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Book Description


The Evolution of Moral Progress

The Evolution of Moral Progress PDF Author: Allen Buchanan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190868430
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
In The Evolution of Moral Progress, Allen Buchanan and Russell Powell resurrect the project of explaining moral progress. They avoid the errors of earlier attempts by drawing on a wide range of disciplines including moral and political philosophy, evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, anthropology, history, and sociology. Their focus is on one especially important type of moral progress: gains in inclusivity. They develop a framework to explain progress in inclusivity to also illuminate moral regression--the return to exclusivist and "tribalistic" moral beliefs and attitudes. Buchanan and Powell argue those tribalistic moral responses are not hard-wired by evolution in human nature. Rather, human beings have an evolved "adaptively plastic" capacity for both inclusion and exclusion, depending on environmental conditions. Moral progress in the dimension of inclusivity is possible, but only to the extent that human beings can create environments conducive to extending moral standing to all human beings and even to some animals. Buchanan and Powell take biological evolution seriously, but with a critical eye, while simultaneously recognizing the crucial role of culture in creating environments in which moral progress can occur. The book avoids both biological and cultural determinism. Unlike earlier theories of moral progress, their theory provides a naturalistic account that is grounded in the best empirical work, and unlike earlier theories it does not present moral progress as inevitable or as occurring in definite stages; but rather it recognizes the highly contingent and fragile character of moral improvement.

Assessment Sensitivity

Assessment Sensitivity PDF Author: John Gordon MacFarlane
Publisher: Context & Content
ISBN: 0199682755
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
Explores how we might make sense of the idea that truth is relative and uses the idea to give satisfying accounts of parts of our thought and talk that resist traditional analysis.

Moral Relativism and Moral Objectivity

Moral Relativism and Moral Objectivity PDF Author: Gilbert Harman
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN: 9780631192114
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Do moral questions have objective answers? In this great debate, Gilbert Harman explains and argues for relativism, emotivism, and moral scepticism. In his view, moral disagreements are like disagreements about what to pay for a house; there are no correct answers ahead of time, except in relation to one or another moral framework. Independently, Judith Jarvis Thomson examines what she takes to be the case against moral objectivity, and rejects it; she argues that it is possible to find out the correct answers to some moral questions. In her view, some moral disagreements are like disagreements about whether the house has a ghost. Harman and Thomson then reply to each other. This important, lively accessible exchange will be invaluable to all students of moral theory and meta-ethics.

Animal Wise

Animal Wise PDF Author: Virginia Morell
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group (NY)
ISBN: 0307461440
Category : Animal behavior
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Explores the frontiers of research on animal cognition and emotion, offering a surprising examination into the hearts and minds of wild and domesticated animals.

Brute Rationality

Brute Rationality PDF Author: Joshua Gert
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139454153
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
This book presents an account of normative practical reasons and the way in which they contribute to the rationality of action. Rather than simply 'counting in favour of' actions, normative reasons play two logically distinct roles: requiring action and justifying action. The distinction between these two roles explains why some reasons do not seem relevant to the rational status of an action unless the agent cares about them, while other reasons retain all their force regardless of the agent's attitude. It also explains why the class of rationally permissible action is wide enough to contain not only all morally required action, but also much selfish and immoral action. The book will appeal to a range of readers interested in practical reason in particular, and moral theory more generally.

Nicomachean Ethics

Nicomachean Ethics PDF Author: Aristotle
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 142500086X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 430

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Book Description
Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics" is considered to be one of the most important treatises on ethics ever written. In an incredibly detailed study of virtue and vice in man, Aristotle examines one of the most central themes to man, the nature of goodness itself. In Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics," he asserts that virtue is essential to happiness and that man must live in accordance with the "doctrine of the mean" (the balance between excess and deficiency) to achieve such happiness.