Download or read book Value Obligation and Meta ethics written by Robin Attfield and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 1995 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work defends an interrelated set of theses in value-theory, normative ethics and meta-ethics. The three Parts correspond to these three areas. Part One (Value) defends a biocentric theory of moral standing, and then the coherence and objectivity of belief in intrinsic value, despite recent objections. Intrinsic value is located in the flourishing of living creatures; specifically, a neo-Aristotelian, species-relative account is supplied of wellbeing or flourishing, in terms of the development of the essential capacities of one's species. There follows a theory of priorities, or of relative intrinsic value, in which the satisfaction of basic needs takes priority over other needs and over wants, and the interests of complex and sophisticated creatures over those of others, where they are at stake. Part Two defends a practice-consequentialist theory of the criteria of rightness and of obligation, which leaves room for supererogation, underpins our intuitions about justice, commends population growth only where it is genuinely desirable, and responds better than act-consequentialism to objections like that concerned with the separateness of persons. Part Three sifts meta-ethical theories, rejects moral relativism, and defends a cognitivist and naturalist meta-ethic. In defending analytical naturalism, it takes into account the latest literature on supervenience. By responding to recent discussions, this study supersedes my Theory of Value and Obligation (1987). It is equipped with detailed end-notes and an ample bibliography, which could prove a research tool of itself.
Download or read book Value Obligation and Meta Ethics written by Robin Attfield and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-12 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work defends an interrelated set of theses in value-theory, normative ethics and meta-ethics. The three Parts correspond to these three areas. Part One (Value) defends a biocentric theory of moral standing, and then the coherence and objectivity of belief in intrinsic value, despite recent objections. Intrinsic value is located in the flourishing of living creatures; specifically, a neo-Aristotelian, species-relative account is supplied of wellbeing or flourishing, in terms of the development of the essential capacities of one's species. There follows a theory of priorities, or of relative intrinsic value, in which the satisfaction of basic needs takes priority over other needs and over wants, and the interests of complex and sophisticated creatures over those of others, where they are at stake. Part Two defends a practice-consequentialist theory of the criteria of rightness and of obligation, which leaves room for supererogation, underpins our intuitions about justice, commends population growth only where it is genuinely desirable, and responds better than act-consequentialism to objections like that concerned with the separateness of persons. Part Three sifts meta-ethical theories, rejects moral relativism, and defends a cognitivist and naturalist meta-ethic. In defending analytical naturalism, it takes into account the latest literature on supervenience. By responding to recent discussions, this study supersedes my Theory of Value and Obligation (1987). It is equipped with detailed end-notes and an ample bibliography, which could prove a research tool of itself.
Download or read book A Theory of Value and Obligation written by Robin Attfield and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-07-20 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1987 and re-issued in 2020 with a new Preface, this book presents and elaborates interrelated solutions to a number of problems in moral philosophy, from the location of intrinsic value and the nature of a worthwhile life, via the limits of obligation and the nature of justice, to the status of moral utterances. After developing a biocentric account of moral standing, the author locates worthwhile life in the development of the generic capacities of a creature, whether human or nonhuman, and presents an account of relative intrinsic value which later generates a theory of interspecific justice. This value-theory also informs a consequentialist understanding of obligation, of moral rightness and of supererogation. The understanding thus supplied is shown to cope with the problems of integrity, of justice and of the ‘Repugnant Conclusion’ in population ethics. A cognitivist account of ethical conclusions such as those so far reached is then defended against non-cognitivist and relativist objections and a far-reaching naturalist theory is defended, integrating earlier conclusions with an account of the logic of the fundamental ethical concepts. This wide-ranging volume which maps the whole area of morality is thoroughly argued with reference both to contemporary philosophical developments and to classical theories.
Download or read book Kantian Ethics written by Robert Stern and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents a selection of Robert Stern's work on the theme of Kantian ethics. The topics he explores include value, perfectionism, agency, autonomy, moral motivation, moral scepticism, and obligation, and he consider the influence of Kant's ethics on subsequent thinkers, up to the present day.
Download or read book Ethics An Overview written by Robin Attfield and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-03-08 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the definitive companion to the study of ethics. It provides students with an accessible, comprehensive and philosophically rigorous introduction to the major thinkers, issues and debates. Ideal for use on undergraduate courses, but also of lasting value for postgraduate students, the structure and content of this textbook closely reflect the way ethics is studied. Thematically structured, the text provides a historical overview of the subject and a comprehensive introduction to the main branches of ethics: meta-ethics, normative ethics and applied ethics. The book also includes coverage of key aspects of value-theory and key issues concerning agency and moral responsibility. It applies ethics to contemporary issues such as climate change, the environment, development, poverty and war. Crucially, the book encourages students to do ethics for themselves, equipping the reader with a wide-ranging grasp of the discipline in all its central areas of contemporary study and reflection. Robin Attfield's cogent and thorough analysis is supplemented by student-friendly features, including chapter summaries, study questions, exercises, and a comprehensive guide to further reading and other resources.
Download or read book Ethics for A Level written by Mark Dimmock and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2017-07-31 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does pleasure have to do with morality? What role, if any, should intuition have in the formation of moral theory? If something is ‘simulated’, can it be immoral? This accessible and wide-ranging textbook explores these questions and many more. Key ideas in the fields of normative ethics, metaethics and applied ethics are explained rigorously and systematically, with a vivid writing style that enlivens the topics with energy and wit. Individual theories are discussed in detail in the first part of the book, before these positions are applied to a wide range of contemporary situations including business ethics, sexual ethics, and the acceptability of eating animals. A wealth of real-life examples, set out with depth and care, illuminate the complexities of different ethical approaches while conveying their modern-day relevance. This concise and highly engaging resource is tailored to the Ethics components of AQA Philosophy and OCR Religious Studies, with a clear and practical layout that includes end-of-chapter summaries, key terms, and common mistakes to avoid. It should also be of practical use for those teaching Philosophy as part of the International Baccalaureate. Ethics for A-Level is of particular value to students and teachers, but Fisher and Dimmock’s precise and scholarly approach will appeal to anyone seeking a rigorous and lively introduction to the challenging subject of ethics. Tailored to the Ethics components of AQA Philosophy and OCR Religious Studies.
Download or read book Facts and Values written by Giancarlo Marchetti and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-11-03 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection offers a synoptic view of current philosophical debates concerning the relationship between facts and values, bringing together a wide spectrum of contributors committed to testing the validity of this dichotomy, exploring alternatives, and assessing their implications. The assumption that facts and values inhabit distinct, unbridgeable conceptual and experiential domains has long dominated scientific and philosophical discourse, but this separation has been seriously called into question from a number of corners. The original essays here collected offer a diversity of responses to fact-value dichotomy, including contributions from Hilary Putnam and Ruth Anna Putnam who are rightly credited with revitalizing philosophical interest in this alleged opposition. Both they, and many of our contributors, are in agreement that the relationship between epistemic developments and evaluative attitudes cannot be framed as a conflict between descriptive and normative understanding. Each chapter demonstrates how and why contrapositions between science and ethics, between facts and values, and between objective and subjective are false dichotomies. Values cannot simply be separated from reason. Facts and Values will therefore prove essential reading for analytic and continental philosophers alike, for theorists of ethics and meta-ethics, and for philosophers of economics and law.
Download or read book Understanding Moral Obligation written by Robert Stern and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-12-15 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In many histories of modern ethics, Kant is supposed to have ushered in an anti-realist or constructivist turn by holding that unless we ourselves 'author' or lay down moral norms and values for ourselves, our autonomy as agents will be threatened. In this book, Robert Stern challenges the cogency of this 'argument from autonomy', and claims that Kant never subscribed to it. Rather, it is not value realism but the apparent obligatoriness of morality that really poses a challenge to our autonomy: how can this be accounted for without taking away our freedom? The debate the book focuses on therefore concerns whether this obligatoriness should be located in ourselves (Kant), in others (Hegel) or in God (Kierkegaard). Stern traces the historical dialectic that drove the development of these respective theories, and clearly and sympathetically considers their merits and disadvantages; he concludes by arguing that the choice between them remains open.
Download or read book The Concept of Moral Obligation written by Michael J. Zimmerman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-03-29 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The principal aim of this book is to develop and defend an analysis of the concept of moral obligation. What it seeks to do is generate new solutions to a range of philosophical problems concerning obligation and its application. Amongst these problems are deontic paradoxes, the supersession of obligation, conditional obligation, actualism and possibilism, dilemmas, supererogation, and cooperation. By virtue of its normative neutrality, the analysis provides a theoretical framework within which competing theories of obligation can be developed and assessed.
Download or read book Ethics of the Global Environment written by Robin Attfield and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2015-02-12 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fully updated and expanded textbook looks at issues including climate change, sustainable development and biodiversity preservation, and sensitively addresses global developments such as the Summits at Durban on climate and at Nagoya on biodiversity.
Download or read book Nursing Ethics in Modern China written by Samantha Mei-che Pang and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-11-08 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book follows two lines of inquiry in understanding nursing ethics in the historical-cultural context of modern China. Firstly, it scrutinizes the prescribed set of moral virtues for nurses in fulfilling their role requirements during different periods of nursing development over the past century. Based on empirical studies, the book, secondly, explores the nurses’ evaluations of their ethical responsibilities in current practice. It carefully examines the particular viewpoints of nurses in their ethical appraisal of nursing practice and patient care situations. Drawing upon traditional ethical outlooks, international norms, and the experiences of nurses as they face difficult care situations, this book concludes with recommendations for improving the quality of nursing in contemporary China.
Download or read book The Intrinsic Value of Nature written by Leena Vilkka and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-11-15 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is intrinsic value? What is the origin of value? Are people always superior to nature? This book is a philosophical analysis of the human relationship to the non-human world. It is a pioneering study of the philosophy of nature-conservation in relation to the discussion of intrinsic value. Vilkka develops a naturalistic or naturocentric theory of value that is based on ethical extensionism and pluralism. Vilkka analyzes natural values and environmental attitudes: zoocentrism, biocentrism, and ecocentrism. This book forms a taxonomy for nature having intrinsic value. The theory of intrinsic value is based on naturocentric and naturogenic values. The book questions the thesis of weak anthropocentrism that denies the existence of naturogenic values. In Vilkka's theory, animals and nature are the origin of value. She defends the existence of zoogenic and biogenic values in the non-human world and discusses the possibility of ecogenic value, nature as a whole having value independent of human or animal minds. Vilkka analyzes the goodness and rights of nature, the problem of priorities, and ecological humanism. A naturocentric recommendation is that the well-being of animals and nature should have priority over human values at least in some real decision contexts. Ecological humanism recommends an attitude of respect for people, animals, and nature. The book includes an extensive glossary, index, and bibliography.
Download or read book A Utilitarian General Theory of Value written by C.L. Sheng and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-07-18 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The thesis of this book is to develop a theory of value covering all kinds of values, based on my unified utilitarian theory. It is unique and is different from all traditional and existing theories of value. Like the views of most psychologists and decision-scientists, value is asserted to be subjective in nature because value exists only for a subject. Value and value judgment are considered statistical in nature in three dimensions, namely in the dimensions of subject, object, and judge. This theory covers a modified von Neumann-Morgenstern utility theory as an integral part. The three conceptions of utility held by philosophers, economicsts, and decision-scientists are unified. The traditional and conventional classification of value into intrinsic and instrumental, which may lead to confusion, misunderstanding, and circularity, is not used. Instead, a classification based on the classification of good things in life according to the principle of exchangeability and replaceability is emphasized and used. A decision-theoretic approach is taken for the study of actions in life. All the actions in a person's life are for the pursuit of values, and all the values pursued are related, directly or indirectly, closely or remotely, to a life plan. Thus, this utilitarian general theory of value eventually leads to a philosophy of life, which is also consequential, teleological, and utilitarian.
Download or read book Anatomy of What We Value Most written by William Gerber and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-05-16 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book analyzes, synthesizes, and evaluates the insights of the world's outstanding thinkers, prophets, and literary masters on the good, the morally right, and the lovely (part one); the question whether the world operates on the basis of such universal laws as the logos, the tao, and the principle of polarity (part two); what there is and isn't in the world, including such categories as existence, reality, being, and nonbeing (part three); and pre-eminently credible and enriching beliefs about truth, wisdom, and what it all means (part four). Emphasis is placed on the divergent views of such intellectual giants as Confucius and Laotse in ancient China; the classical Hindu philosophers from ancient times to Gandhi and Tagore; patriarchs and prophets quoted in Scripture; Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages; Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, and Kant; and nineteenth- and twentieth-century luminaries such as Bentham, Mill, Peirce, James, Dewey, Sartre, and Wittgenstein. The differences and resemblances of their cogitations are portrayed as a conversation of the ages on questions of persistent concern.
Download or read book The Death of the Ethic of Life written by John Basl and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-01 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many subscribe to an Ethic of Life, an ethical perspective on which all living things deserve some level of moral concern. Within philosophy, the Ethic of Life has been clarified, developed, and rigorously defended; yet it has also found its harshest critics. Between biocentrists, those that endorse the Ethic of Life, and those that accept a more restricted view of moral status, the debate has reached a standstill, with few new resources for shifting or complicating it. In The Death of the Ethic of Life, John Basl seeks to end this comfortable stalemate by emphasizing a simple truth: the well-being of non-sentient beings, such as plants, species, and ecosystems, is morally significant only to the extent that it matters to sentient beings. Basl first develops a version of The Ethic of Life that best meets traditional challenges: the Ethic, if it is to survive criticism, must be able to explain how it is that all living things have a welfare or a good of their own. The best hope of offering such an explanation is to ground that welfare in teleology or goal-directedness, and then to ground that goal-directedness in the workings of natural selection. While a naturalistic account of teleology is crucial to defending an Ethic of Life, it is also its downfall. This Ethic ultimately entails that not only are ecosystems and collectives morally considerable, but so, too, are artifacts: everything from can openers to computers. Basl shows that evaluation of the resources for distinguishing artifacts from organisms forces us to abandon, for good, the Ethic of Life. The Death of the Ethic of Life provides not only a new answer to a fundamental question in environmental ethics, but a new way to conceive of fundamental concepts and issues in debates over who or what matters from the moral point of view, with wide-ranging implications in the philosophy of technology and bioethics.
Download or read book Meta Ethics and Normative Ethics written by H.J. MacCloskey and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The purpose of this work is to develop a general theory of ethics which ex plains the logical status of moral judgments and the nature of the general principles which we should adopt and on the basis of which we should act. The enquiry into the logical function of moral judgments is entered into as important in its own right and as a preliminary to the normative enquiry, for it is on the basis of our conclusions in the area of meta-ethics, that we de termine the appropriate method of reaching our normative ethic. The ap proach followed in the meta-ethical enquiry is that of examining theories of the past and present with a view to seeing why and in what respects they fail, in particular, what features of moral discourse are not adequately explained or accommodated by them. A positive theory which seeks to take full account of these and all other logical features of moral discourse is then developed in terms of a modified intuitionism of the kind outlined by W. D. Ross, 'good' being explained as the name of a consequential property, 'right' in terms of moral suitability, and moral obligations as consisting in our being constrained to act in certain ways by facts we apprehend to constitute moral reasons which constrain us so to act.
Download or read book Values and Education written by Thomas Magnell and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 1998 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together eighteen essays on education and matters of evaluative concern to which it gives rise. The essays range from discussions of basic issues on the nature of education and the importance of its two sides, teaching and learning, to practical issues that bear on curricular development. Several of the authors focus on liberal education and its place in a liberal state. Some authors take up the topic of moral education, while others examine the notion of multicultural education. Broad social issues of educational opportunity and affirmative action are also considered. A number of authors speak to educational reforms and conditions in particular countries, including Italy, Canada, and the United States. For anyone with an interest in formal education or a love of life-long learning, the essays in this book offer fresh ideas for reflection.
