Download or read book In Search of Moral Knowledge written by R. Scott Smith and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2014-05-02 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For most of the church's history, people have seen Christian ethics as normative and universally applicable. Recently, however, this view has been lost, thanks to naturalism and relativism. R. Scott Smith argues that Christians need to overcome Kant's fact-value dichotomy and recover the possibility of genuine moral and theological knowledge.
Download or read book Moral Knowledge written by Sarah McGrath and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-10 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compared to other kinds of knowledge, how fragile is our knowledge of morality? Does knowledge of the difference between right and wrong fundamentally differ from knowledge of other kinds, in that it cannot be forgotten? What makes reliable evidence in fundamental moral convictions? And what are the associated problems of using testimony as a source of moral knowledge? Sarah McGrath provides novel answers to these questions and many others, as she investigates the possibilities, sources, and characteristic vulnerabilities of moral knowledge. She also considers whether there is anything wrong with simply outsourcing moral questions to a moral expert and evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of the method of equilibrium as an account of how we make up our mind about moral questions. Ultimately, McGrath concludes that moral knowledge can be acquired in any of the ways in which we acquire ordinary empirical knowledge. Our efforts to acquire and preserve such knowledge, she argues, are subject to frustration in all of the same ways that our efforts to acquire and preserve ordinary empirical knowledge are.
Download or read book Virtue Ethics and Moral Knowledge written by R. Scott Smith and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-24 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in a time of moral confusion: many believe there are no overarching moral norms, and we have lost an accepted body of moral knowledge. Alasdair MacIntyre addresses this problem in his much-heralded restatement of Aristotelian and Thomistic virtue ethics; Stanley Hauerwas does so through his highly influential work in Christian ethics. Both recast virtue ethics in light of their interpretations of the later Wittgenstein's views of language. This book systematically assesses the underlying presuppositions of MacIntyre and Hauerwas, finding that their attempts to secure moral knowledge and restate virtue ethics, both philosophical and theological, fail. Scott Smith proposes alternative indications as to how we can secure moral knowledge, and how we should proceed in virtue ethics.
Download or read book The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge written by Dallas Willard and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-06-12 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on an unfinished manuscript by the late philosopher Dallas Willard, this book makes the case that the 20th century saw a massive shift in Western beliefs and attitudes concerning the possibility of moral knowledge, such that knowledge of the moral life and of its conduct is no longer routinely available from the social institutions long thought to be responsible for it. In this sense, moral knowledge—as a publicly available resource for living—has disappeared. Via a detailed survey of main developments in ethical theory from the late 19th through the late 20th centuries, Willard explains philosophy’s role in this shift. In pointing out the shortcomings of these developments, he shows that the shift was not the result of rational argument or discovery, but largely of arational social forces—in other words, there was no good reason for moral knowledge to have disappeared. The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge is a unique contribution to the literature on the history of ethics and social morality. Its review of historical work on moral knowledge covers a wide range of thinkers including T.H Green, G.E Moore, Charles L. Stevenson, John Rawls, and Alasdair MacIntyre. But, most importantly, it concludes with a novel proposal for how we might reclaim moral knowledge that is inspired by the phenomenological approach of Knud Logstrup and Emmanuel Levinas. Edited and eventually completed by three of Willard’s former graduate students, this book marks the culmination of Willard’s project to find a secure basis in knowledge for the moral life.
Download or read book Practical Reasoning and Ethical Decision written by Robert Audi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-03-20 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presenting the most comprehensive and lucid account of the topic currently available, Robert Audi's "Practical Reasoning and Ethical Decision" is essential reading for anyone interested in the role of reason in ethics or the nature of human action. The first part of the book is a detailed critical overview of the influential theories of practical reasoning found in Aristotle, Hume and Kant, whilst the second part examines practical reasoning in the light of important topics in moral psychology - weakness of will, self-deception, rationalization and others. In the third part, Audi describes the role of moral principles in practical reasoning and clarifies the way practical reasoning underlies ethical decisions. He formulates a comprehensive set of concrete ethical principles, explains how they apply to reasoning about what to do, and shows how practical reasoning guides moral conduct.
Download or read book Moral Epistemology written by Aaron Zimmerman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-06-10 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we know right from wrong? Do we even have moral knowledge? Moral epistemology studies these and related questions about our understanding of virtue and vice. It is one of philosophy’s perennial problems, reaching back to Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, Hume and Kant, and has recently been the subject of intense debate as a result of findings in developmental and social psychology. In this outstanding introduction to the subject Aaron Zimmerman covers the following key topics: What is moral epistemology? What are its methods? Including a discussion of Socrates, Gettier and contemporary theories of knowledge skepticism about moral knowledge based on the anthropological record of deep and persistent moral disagreement, including contextualism moral nihilism, including debates concerning God and morality and the relation between moral knowledge and our motives and reasons to act morally epistemic moral scepticism, intuitionism and the possibility of inferring ‘ought’ from ‘is,’ discussing the views of Locke, Hume, Kant, Ross, Audi, Thomson, Harman, Sturgeon and many others how children acquire moral concepts and become more reliable judges criticisms of those who would reduce moral knowledge to value-neutral knowledge or attempt to replace moral belief with emotion. Throughout the book Zimmerman argues that our belief in moral knowledge can survive sceptical challenges. He also draws on a rich range of examples from Plato’s Meno and Dickens’ David Copperfield to Bernard Madoff and Saddam Hussein. Including chapter summaries and annotated further reading at the end of each chapter, Moral Epistemology is essential reading for all students of ethics, epistemology and moral psychology.
Download or read book Society s Choices written by Institute of Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 1995-03-27 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Breakthroughs in biomedicine often lead to new life-giving treatments but may also raise troubling, even life-and-death, quandaries. Society's Choices discusses ways for people to handle today's bioethics issues in the context of America's unique history and cultureâ€"and from the perspectives of various interest groups. The book explores how Americans have grappled with specific aspects of bioethics through commission deliberations, programs by organizations, and other mechanisms and identifies criteria for evaluating the outcomes of these efforts. The committee offers recommendations on the role of government and professional societies, the function of commissions and institutional review boards, and bioethics in health professional education and research. The volume includes a series of 12 superb background papers on public moral discourse, mechanisms for handling social and ethical dilemmas, and other specific areas of controversy by well-known experts Ronald Bayer, Martin Benjamin, Dan W. Brock, Baruch A. Brody, H. Alta Charo, Lawrence Gostin, Bradford H. Gray, Kathi E. Hanna, Elizabeth Heitman, Thomas Nagel, Steven Shapin, and Charles M. Swezey.
Download or read book Virtue Is Knowledge written by Lorraine Smith Pangle and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-05-23 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The relation between virtue and knowledge is at the heart of the Socratic view of human excellence, but it also points to a central puzzle of the Platonic dialogues: Can Socrates be serious in his claims that human excellence is constituted by one virtue, that vice is merely the result of ignorance, and that the correct response to crime is therefore not punishment but education? Or are these assertions mere rhetorical ploys by a notoriously complex thinker? Lorraine Smith Pangle traces the argument for the primacy of virtue and the power of knowledge throughout the five dialogues that feature them most prominently—the Apology, Gorgias, Protagoras, Meno, and Laws—and reveals the truth at the core of these seemingly strange claims. She argues that Socrates was more aware of the complex causes of human action and of the power of irrational passions than a cursory reading might suggest. Pangle’s perceptive analyses reveal that many of Socrates’s teachings in fact explore the factors that make it difficult for humans to be the rational creatures that he at first seems to claim. Also critical to Pangle’s reading is her emphasis on the political dimensions of the dialogues. Underlying many of the paradoxes, she shows, is a distinction between philosophic and civic virtue that is critical to understanding them. Ultimately, Pangle offers a radically unconventional way of reading Socrates’s views of human excellence: Virtue is not knowledge in any ordinary sense, but true virtue is nothing other than wisdom.
Download or read book Metaethics from a First Person Standpoint written by Catherine Wilson and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2016-01-18 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Metaethics from a First Person Standpoint addresses in a novel format the major topics and themes of contemporary metaethics, the study of the analysis of moral thought and judgement. Metathetics is less concerned with what practices are right or wrong than with what we mean by ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’ Looking at a wide spectrum of topics including moral language, realism and anti-realism, reasons and motives, relativism, and moral progress, this book engages students and general readers in order to enhance their understanding of morality and moral discourse as cultural practices. Catherine Wilson innovatively employs a first-person narrator to report step-by-step an individual’s reflections, beginning from a position of radical scepticism, on the possibility of objective moral knowledge. The reader is invited to follow along with this reasoning, and to challenge or agree with each major point. Incrementally, the narrator is led to certain definite conclusions about ‘oughts’ and norms in connection with self-interest, prudence, social norms, and finally morality. Scepticism is overcome, and the narrator arrives at a good understanding of how moral knowledge and moral progress are possible, though frequently long in coming. Accessibly written, Metaethics from a First Person Standpoint presupposes no prior training in philosophy and is a must-read for philosophers, students and general readers interested in gaining a better understanding of morality as a personal philosophical quest.
Download or read book Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics written by David Owen Brink and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1989-02-24 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A systematic analysis considers the objectivity of ethics, the relationship between the moral point of view and a scientific or naturalist worldview and its role in a person's rational lifespan.
Download or read book Regard for Reason in the Moral Mind written by Joshua May and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-04 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The burgeoning science of ethics has produced a trend toward pessimism. Ordinary moral thought and action, we're told, are profoundly influenced by arbitrary factors and ultimately driven by unreasoned feelings. This book counters the current orthodoxy on its own terms by carefully engaging with the empirical literature. The resulting view, optimistic rationalism, shows the pervasive role played by reason our moral minds, and ultimately defuses sweeping debunking arguments in ethics. The science does suggest that moral knowledge and virtue don't come easily. However, despite the heavy influence of automatic and unconscious processes that have been shaped by evolutionary pressures, we needn't reject ordinary moral psychology as fundamentally flawed or in need of serious repair. Reason can be corrupted in ethics just as in other domains, but a special pessimism about morality in particular is unwarranted. Moral judgment and motivation are fundamentally rational enterprises not beholden to the passions.
Download or read book AI Ethics written by Mark Coeckelbergh and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This overview of the ethical issues raised by artificial intelligence moves beyond hype and nightmare scenarios to address concrete questions—offering a compelling, necessary read for our ChatGPT era. Artificial intelligence powers Google’s search engine, enables Facebook to target advertising, and allows Alexa and Siri to do their jobs. AI is also behind self-driving cars, predictive policing, and autonomous weapons that can kill without human intervention. These and other AI applications raise complex ethical issues that are the subject of ongoing debate. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers an accessible synthesis of these issues. Written by a philosopher of technology, AI Ethics goes beyond the usual hype and nightmare scenarios to address concrete questions. Mark Coeckelbergh describes influential AI narratives, ranging from Frankenstein’s monster to transhumanism and the technological singularity. He surveys relevant philosophical discussions: questions about the fundamental differences between humans and machines and debates over the moral status of AI. He explains the technology of AI, describing different approaches and focusing on machine learning and data science. He offers an overview of important ethical issues, including privacy concerns, responsibility and the delegation of decision making, transparency, and bias as it arises at all stages of data science processes. He also considers the future of work in an AI economy. Finally, he analyzes a range of policy proposals and discusses challenges for policymakers. He argues for ethical practices that embed values in design, translate democratic values into practices and include a vision of the good life and the good society.
Download or read book The Ethics of Care written by Alan Blum and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-28 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning with a focus on the ethical foundations of caregiving in health and expanding towards problems of ethics and justice implicated in a range of issues, this book develops and expands the notion of care itself and its connection to practice. Organised around the themes of culture as a restraint on caregiving in different social contexts and situations, innovative methods in healthcare, and the way in which culture works to position care as part of a rhetorical approach to dependency, responsibility, and justice, The Ethics of Care presents case studies examining institutional responses to end-of-life issues, the notion of informed consent, biomedicine, indigenous rights and postcolonialism in care and theoretical approaches to the concept of care. Offering discussions from a variety of disciplinary approaches, including sociology, communication, and social theory, as well as hermeneutics, phenomenology, and deconstruction, this book will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in healthcare, medicine, justice and the question of how we think about care as a notion and social form, and how this is related to practice.
Download or read book What We Can t Not Know written by J. Budziszewski and published by Ignatius Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Professor J. Budziszewski questions the modern assumption that moral truths are unknowable. With clear and logical arguments he rehabilitates the natural law tradition and restores confidence in a moral code based upon human nature. --from publisher description.
Download or read book The Imperative of Responsibility written by Hans Jonas and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1984 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hans Jonas here rethinks the foundations of ethics in light of the awesome transformations wrought by modern technology: the threat of nuclear war, ecological ravage, genetic engineering, and the like. Though informed by a deep reverence for human life, Jonas's ethics is grounded not in religion but in metaphysics, in a secular doctrine that makes explicit man's duties toward himself, his posterity, and the environment. Jonas offers an assessment of practical goals under present circumstances, ending with a critique of modern utopianism.
Download or read book Moral Aims written by Cheshire Calhoun and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2016 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Moral Aims' brings together nine previously published essays that focus on the significance of the social practice of morality for what we say as moral theorists, the plurality of moral aims that agents are trying to realize and that sometimes come into tension, and the special difficulties that conventionalised wrongdoing poses.
Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Moral Epistemology written by Aaron Zimmerman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-11-02 with total page 664 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Moral Epistemology brings together philosophers, cognitive scientists, developmental and evolutionary psychologists, animal ethologists, intellectual historians, and educators to provide the most comprehensive analysis of the prospects for moral knowledge ever assembled in print. The book’s thirty chapters feature leading experts describing the nature of moral thought, its evolution, childhood development, and neurological realization. Various forms of moral skepticism are addressed along with the historical development of ideals of moral knowledge and their role in law, education, legal policy, and other areas of social life. Highlights include: • Analyses of moral cognition and moral learning by leading cognitive scientists • Accounts of the normative practices of animals by expert animal ethologists • An overview of the evolution of cooperation by preeminent evolutionary psychologists • Sophisticated treatments of moral skepticism, relativism, moral uncertainty, and know-how by renowned philosophers • Scholarly accounts of the development of Western moral thinking by eminent intellectual historians • Careful analyses of the role played by conceptions of moral knowledge in political liberation movements, religious institutions, criminal law, secondary education, and professional codes of ethics articulated by cutting-edge social and moral philosophers.
