philopapers

Cheap (under £10) and readable books on ethics. Moral Philosophy by D.D. Raphael. OUP £7.99 A genuine introduction to moral philosophy assuming no previous knowledge and taking you through all the main theories of the subject in straightforward language. Weak on Continental ethics. Utilitarianism: For and Against by J.J.C. Smart and Bernard Williams. CUP £9.95 […]

by Peter Lloyd and Innes Crellin Professor Crellin (Philosophy Now No.15) is right to say “… authenticity, and not moral judgment, … reveals to us the full horror of an Auschwitz … Moral philosophy or religious dogma is no substitute for this.” Nevertheless… (a) ‘Authenticity’ is not enough. It cannot handle moral dilemmas because it

Ethics (or moral philosophy) is crucially important because it is devoted to answering questions like these: “What is best?”“What is the good life?”“How should I live?”“How should I behave towards other people?”“What is the purpose of life?” These are questions about what makes things valuable; they were the questions which drew me to philosophy in

Rick’s handy tear-out’n’keep guide to the main positions in moral philosophy. For two millennia the West has been dominated by Christianity, and the ethical systems associated with it have shaped (and been shaped by?) our commonsense ideas of what is right and wrong. Christian ethics derives from the ideas of the Old Testament and of

Vance Morgan on how to build a moral environment of your very own. Being a living organism is hard work. Any organism, from the simplest to the most complex, must navigate a physical environment of dizzying intricacy in order to survive, an environment whose elements gain and lose importance depending on the organism. A crab,

Bob Harrison talks about Moral Realists and the Boo/Hurrah party, and explains what David Hume overlooked. “What that fellow did was morally unacceptable. It was wrong. In fact, it was disgusting; downright revolting.” You could say all of these things about the same act, and they could all refer, quite properly, to the same thing.

Michael Philips argues that the possibility of empathy is incompatible with the idea that the world is physical through and through. A few years ago I suffered from a short spell of hyperthyroidism. Excessive levels of thyroxin flooded my bloodstream. My energy kicked up in an uncomfortably jerky, speedy, edgy way. I had no patience

Graham Haydon thinks about what it is to think about moral education. If we could categorise and quantify all the thinking devoted to education, we would find that the great majority takes for granted certain assumptions about the goals of educational policy and the means by which they are to be achieved. But it is

A five-minute tour of some political thinkers and ideas by Anja Steinbauer. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), one of the greatest political thinkers of the Western tradition, declared that “man is by nature a political animal.” However, there is a tension between two forces which move us; the Greeks termed them ethos – morality and kratos –

Alex Carley looks briefly at the role of reason in the euthanasia debate. Rarely is philosophy so pertinent to everyday life as in the case of voluntary euthanasia. In a world which some believe to be overpopulated, there are people fighting for what they believe is their right to die. Yet, for many of us,