Download or read book Moral Realism written by Russ Shafer-Landau and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2003-06-19 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moral Realism is a systematic defence of the idea that there are objective moral standards. In the tradition of Plato and G. E. Moore, Russ Shafer-Landau argues that there are moral principles that are true independently of what anyone, anywhere, happens to think of them. These principles are a fundamental aspect of reality, just as much as those that govern mathematics or the natural world. They may be true regardless of our ability to grasp them, and their truth is not a matter of their being ratified from any ideal standpoint, nor of being the object of actual or hypothetical consensus, nor of being an expression of our rational nature. Shafer-Landau accepts Plato's and Moore's contention that moral truths are sui generis. He rejects the currently popular efforts to conceive of ethics as a kind of science, and insists that moral truths and properties occupy a distinctive area in our ontology. Unlike scientific truths, the fundamental moral principles are knowable a priori. And unlike mathematical truths, they are essentially normative: intrinsically action-guiding, and supplying a justification for all who follow their counsel. Moral Realism is the first comprehensive treatise defending non-naturalistic moral realism in over a generation. It ranges over all of the central issues in contemporary metaethics, and will be an important source of discussion for philosophers and their students interested in issues concerning the foundations of ethics.
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 Ethical Realism written by Anatol Lieven and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-03-12 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America today faces a world more complicated than ever before, but our politicians have failed to envision a foreign policy that addresses our greatest threats. Ethical Realism shows how the United States can successfully combine genuine morality with tough and practical common sense. By outlining core principles and a set of concrete proposals for tackling the terrorist threat and contend with Iran, Russia, the Middle East, and China, Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman show us how to strengthen our security, pursue our national interests, and restore American leadership in the world.
Download or read book The Normative Web written by Terence Cuneo and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2010-03-04 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Antirealist views about morality claim that moral facts or truths do not exist. Do these views imply that other types of normative facts, such as epistemic ones, do not exist? The Normative Web develops a positive answer to this question. Terence Cuneo argues that the similarities between moral and epistemic facts provide excellent reason to believe that, if moral facts do not exist, then epistemic facts do not exist. But epistemic facts, it is argued, do exist: to deny their existence would commit us to an extreme version of epistemological skepticism. Therefore, Cuneo concludes, moral facts exist. And if moral facts exist, then moral realism is true. In so arguing, Cuneo provides not simply a defense of moral realism, but a positive argument for it. Moreover, this argument engages with a wide range of antirealist positions in epistemology such as error theories, expressivist views, and reductionist views of epistemic reasons. If the central argument of The Normative Web is correct, antirealist positions of these varieties come at a very high cost. Given their cost, Cuneo contends, we should find realism about both epistemic and moral facts highly attractive.
Download or read book Aristotle s Moral Realism Reconsidered written by Pavlos Kontos and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-03 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book elaborates a moral realism of phenomenological inspiration by introducing the idea that moral experience, primordially, constitutes a perceptual grasp of actions and of their solid traces in the world. The main thesis is that, before any reference to values or to criteria about good and evil—that is, before any reference to specific ethical outlooks—one should explain the very materiality of what necessarily constitutes the ‘moral world’. These claims are substantiated by means of a text- centered interpretation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in dialogue with contemporary moral realism. The book concludes with a critique of Heidegger’s, Gadamer’s and Arendt’s approaches to Aristotle’s ethics.
Download or read book Essays on Moral Realism written by Geoffrey Sayre-McCord and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of influential essays illustrates the range, depth, and importance of moral realism, the fundamental issues it raises, and the problems it faces.
Download or read book Compassionate Moral Realism written by Colin Marshall and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Colin Marshall offers a ground-up defense of objective morality, in which the central role is played by compassion. Only compassion, Marshall argues, lets us be in touch with others' motivational mental properties. Compassionate Moral Realism offers a new answer to the question "Why be moral?", a central philosophical concern since Plato.
Download or read book Aristotle And Moral Realism written by Robert A Heinaman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-03-08 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of essays brings together scholars of ancient philosophy and some of today's most distinguished moral philosophers to discuss Aristotle's ethics and the problems of moral realism. One of the central and perennial philosophical problems is the question of whether our ethical assertions and beliefs can be justifiably claimed to rest on some objective foundation. As an upholder of the objectivity of ethics and as one of the most important ethical thinkers in the history of philosophy, Aristotle's writings on these questions are of the greatest interest. Indeed, much of recent moral philosophy has looked directly to Aristotle for inspiration on the problem of moral objectivity. For example, "virtue theorists" were influenced by Aristotle in their proposal that what determines the right thing to do in a particular case is what the virtuous man would do. Similarly, "sensibility theorists" have found support for their view in Aristotle's remarks about the importance of the conditioning of one's desires for the development of virtue and knowledge about the human good.
Download or read book Moral Realism written by Kevin DeLapp and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-04-11 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An accessible and original overview of contemporary debates in moral realism and relativism.
Download or read book Explaining Morality written by Steve Ash and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-03-30 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adopting a critical realist approach to morality, this book considers morality as an aspect of social reality, enquiring into the nature of moral agency and asking whether we can legitimately argue for a specific moral position and whether moral positions can be understood to apply universally. Drawing on the thought of Bhaskar, Collier and Sayer, it explores a series of ontological questions about morality, shedding light on the ways in which critical realism can be used to address them, ultimately responding to the question of whether critical realism and the moral theories that have been produced through its use can provide an explanation of morality as a feature of reality. Through a synthesis of realist thought, the author develops a comprehensive theoretical understanding of morality that can be tested for its explanatory power through subsequent practical research. As such, it will appeal to scholars of philosophy and social science with interests in critical realism, ontology and meta-ethics.
Download or read book Plato s Moral Realism written by John M. Rist and published by CUA Press. This book was released on 2012-07-31 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surveying many of Plato's dialogues from the early, middle, and late periods, prominent philosopher John M. Rist shows how Plato gradually came to realize the need for metaphysics to support his ethical position and that a rigorous ethics required a secure metaphysics grounded in universal values.
Download or read book Hermeneutic Moral Realism in Psychology written by Brent D. Slife and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-02-12 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traditional sources of morality—philosophical ethics, religious standards, and cultural values—are being questioned at a time when we most need morality’s direction. Research shows that though moral direction is vital to our identities, happiness, productivity and relationships, there is a decline in its development and use, especially among younger adults. This book argues that hermeneutic moral realism is the best hope for meeting the twenty-first century challenges of scientism, individualism, and postmodernism. In addition to providing a thorough understanding of moral realism, the volume also takes preliminary steps toward its application in important practical settings, including research, psychotherapy, politics, and publishing.
Download or read book Evolutionary Moral Realism written by Michael Stingl and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-11-25 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Against standard approaches to evolution and ethics, this book develops the idea that moral values may find their origin in regularly recurring features in the cooperative environments of species of organisms that are social and intelligent. Across a wide range of species that are social and intelligent, possibilities arise for helping others, responding empathetically to the needs of others, and playing fairly. The book identifies these underlying environmental regularities as biological natural kinds and as natural moral values. As natural kinds, moral values help to provide more complete explanations for the selection of traits that arise in response to them. For example, helping in an aquatic environment is quite different than helping in an arboreal environment, and so we can expect the selection of traits for helping to reflect these underlying environmental differences. With the human ability to name, talk, and reason about important features of our environment, moral values become part of moral discourse and argument, helping to produce coherent systems of moral thought. Combining a naturalistic approach to morality with an equal emphasis on moral argument and truth, this book will be of interest to philosophers and historians of biology, theoretical biologists, comparative psychologists, and moral philosophers.
Download or read book Taking Morality Seriously written by David Enoch and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2011-07-28 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism David Enoch develops, argues for, and defends a strongly realist and objectivist view of ethics and normativity more broadly. This view—according to which there are perfectly objective, universal, moral and other normative truths that are not in any way reducible to other, natural truths—is familiar, but this book is the first in-detail development of the positive motivations for the view into reasonably precise arguments. And when the book turns defensive—defending Robust Realism against traditional objections—it mobilizes the original positive arguments for the view to help with fending off the objections. The main underlying motivation for Robust Realism developed in the book is that no other metaethical view can vindicate our taking morality seriously. The positive arguments developed here—the argument from the deliberative indispensability of normative truths, and the argument from the moral implications of metaethical objectivity (or its absence)—are thus arguments for Robust Realism that are sensitive to the underlying, pre-theoretical motivations for the view.
Download or read book Praise and Blame written by Daniel N. Robinson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-11 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How should a prize be awarded after a horse race? Should it go to the best rider, the best person, or the one who finishes first? To what extent are bystanders blameworthy when they do nothing to prevent harm? Are there any objective standards of moral responsibility with which to address such perennial questions? In this fluidly written and lively book, Daniel Robinson takes on the prodigious task of setting forth the contours of praise and blame. He does so by mounting an important and provocative new defense of a radical theory of moral realism and offering a critical appraisal of prevailing alternatives such as determinism and behaviorism and of their conceptual shortcomings. The version of moral realism that arises from Robinson's penetrating inquiry--an inquiry steeped in Aristotelian ethics but deeply informed by modern scientific knowledge of human cognition--is independent of cognition and emotion. At the same time, Robinson carefully explores how such human attributes succeed or fail in comprehending real moral properties. Through brilliant analyses of constitutional and moral luck, of biosocial and genetic versions of psychological determinism, and of relativistic-anthropological accounts of variations in moral precepts, he concludes that none of these conceptions accounts either for the nature of moral properties or the basis upon which they could be known. Ultimately, the theory that Robinson develops preserves moral properties even while acknowledging the conditions that undermine the powers of human will.
Download or read book Whatever Happened to Good and Evil written by Russ Shafer-Landau and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2004 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a brief introduction to ethics, with a point of view. The book addresses "meta-ethical" questions that go beyond what most introductory ethics books address, which are "normative" theories (egoism, utilitarianism, etc.) and "applied" ethics (abortion, capital punishment, etc.).
Download or read book Ethical Intuitionism written by M. Huemer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-12-14 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A defence of ethical intuitionism where (i) there are objective moral truths; (ii) we know these through an immediate, intellectual awareness, or 'intuition'; and (iii) knowing them gives us reasons to act independent of our desires. The author rebuts the major objections to this theory and shows the difficulties in alternative theories of ethics.
