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| Author | : Jeffrey Weeks |
| Publisher | : John Wiley & Sons |
| Total Pages | : 224 |
| Release | : 2013-05-28 |
| Genre | : Social Science |
| ISBN | : 0745678351 |
This is an important intervention in debates on the family and sexuality, exploring clashes over sexual values and contemporary sexual dilemmas such as AIDS.
| Author | : Thomas Dixon |
| Publisher | : |
| Total Pages | : 448 |
| Release | : 2008-05-08 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : |
This volume explores how Victorian philosophers, scientists, clergymen, and novelists debated the meaning of the new term 'altruism'. Including a reappraisal of Charles Darwin's ideas and insights into the rise of popular socialism, this study is highly relevant to contemporary debates about altruism, evolution, religion, and ethics.
| Author | : Jerome B. Schneewind |
| Publisher | : Cambridge University Press |
| Total Pages | : 652 |
| Release | : 1998 |
| Genre | : Philosophy |
| ISBN | : 9780521479387 |
This remarkable book is the most comprehensive study ever written of the history of moral philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its aim is to set Kant's still influential ethics in its historical context by showing in detail what the central questions in moral philosophy were for him and how he arrived at his own distinctive ethical views. The book is organised into four main sections, each exploring moral philosophy by discussing the work of many influential philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In an epilogue the author discusses Kant's view of his own historicity, and of the aims of moral philosophy. In its range, in its analyses of many philosophers not discussed elsewhere, and in revealing the subtle interweaving of religious and political thought with moral philosophy, this is an unprecedented account of the evolution of Kant's ethics.
| Author | : Richard Joyce |
| Publisher | : MIT Press |
| Total Pages | : 285 |
| Release | : 2007-08-24 |
| Genre | : Philosophy |
| ISBN | : 0262263254 |
Moral thinking pervades our practical lives, but where did this way of thinking come from, and what purpose does it serve? Is it to be explained by environmental pressures on our ancestors a million years ago, or is it a cultural invention of more recent origin? In The Evolution of Morality, Richard Joyce takes up these controversial questions, finding that the evidence supports an innate basis to human morality. As a moral philosopher, Joyce is interested in whether any implications follow from this hypothesis. Might the fact that the human brain has been biologically prepared by natural selection to engage in moral judgment serve in some sense to vindicate this way of thinking—staving off the threat of moral skepticism, or even undergirding some version of moral realism? Or if morality has an adaptive explanation in genetic terms—if it is, as Joyce writes, "just something that helped our ancestors make more babies"—might such an explanation actually undermine morality's central role in our lives? He carefully examines both the evolutionary "vindication of morality" and the evolutionary "debunking of morality," considering the skeptical view more seriously than have others who have treated the subject. Interdisciplinary and combining the latest results from the empirical sciences with philosophical discussion, The Evolution of Morality is one of the few books in this area written from the perspective of moral philosophy. Concise and without technical jargon, the arguments are rigorous but accessible to readers from different academic backgrounds. Joyce discusses complex issues in plain language while advocating subtle and sometimes radical views. The Evolution of Morality lays the philosophical foundations for further research into the biological understanding of human morality.
| Author | : J.L. Mackie |
| Publisher | : Penguin UK |
| Total Pages | : 256 |
| Release | : 1990-08-30 |
| Genre | : Philosophy |
| ISBN | : 0141960094 |
An insight into moral skepticism of the 20th century. The author argues that our every-day moral codes are an 'error theory' based on the presumption of moral facts which, he persuasively argues, don't exist. His refutation of such facts is based on their metaphysical 'queerness' and the observation of cultural relativity.
| Author | : Robert Baker |
| Publisher | : MIT Press |
| Total Pages | : 335 |
| Release | : 2019-11-12 |
| Genre | : Philosophy |
| ISBN | : 0262043084 |
A theoretical account of moral revolutions, illustrated by historical cases that include the criminalization and decriminalization of abortion and the patient rebellion against medical paternalism. We live in an age of moral revolutions in which the once morally outrageous has become morally acceptable, and the formerly acceptable is now regarded as reprehensible. Attitudes toward same-sex love, for example, and the proper role of women, have undergone paradigm shifts over the last several decades. In this book, Robert Baker argues that these inversions are the product of moral revolutions that follow a pattern similar to that of the scientific revolutions analyzed by Thomas Kuhn in his influential book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. After laying out the theoretical terrain, Baker develops his argument with examples of moral reversals from the recent and distant past. He describes the revolution, led by the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, that transformed the postmortem dissection of human bodies from punitive desecration to civic virtue; the criminalization of abortion in the nineteenth century and its decriminalization in the twentieth century; and the invention of a new bioethics paradigm in the 1970s and 1980s, supporting a patient-led rebellion against medical paternalism. Finally, Baker reflects on moral relativism, arguing that the acceptance of “absolute” moral truths denies us the diversity of moral perspectives that permit us to alter our morality in response to changing environments.
| Author | : Michael E. McCullough |
| Publisher | : Basic Books |
| Total Pages | : 368 |
| Release | : 2020-07-21 |
| Genre | : Psychology |
| ISBN | : 1541617525 |
"A fine achievement."--Peter Singer, author of The Life You Can Save and The Most Good You Can Do A sweeping psychological history of human goodness -- from the foundations of evolution to the modern political and social challenges humanity is now facing. How did humans, a species of self-centered apes, come to care about others? Since Darwin, scientists have tried to answer this question using evolutionary theory. In The Kindness of Strangers, psychologist Michael E. McCullough shows why they have failed and offers a new explanation instead. From the moment nomadic humans first settled down until the aftermath of the Second World War, our species has confronted repeated crises that we could only survive by changing our behavior. As McCullough argues, these choices weren't enabled by an evolved moral sense, but with moral invention -- driven not by evolution's dictates but by reason. Today's challenges -- climate change, mass migration, nationalism -- are some of humanity's greatest yet. In revealing how past crises shaped the foundations of human concern, The Kindness of Strangers offers clues for how we can adapt our moral thinking to survive these challenges as well.
| Author | : Hanno Sauer |
| Publisher | : Simon and Schuster |
| Total Pages | : 416 |
| Release | : 2024-09-17 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 1668031930 |
What makes us moral beings? How do we decide what is good and what is evil? In the vein of Sapiens comes a grand history of our universal moral values at the moment of their greatest crisis. How did we learn to distinguish good from evil? Have we always been capable of doing so? And will we still be in the world to come? In this breathtaking book, ethics expert Hanno Sauer offers a great universal history of morality in the era of its darkest crisis. He finds that morality existed long before there was talk of God, religion, or philosophy. Its history is, first of all, the fruit of a process of natural selection, going back to the dawn of humanity, in the forests of East Africa which, five million years ago, thinned out owing to climate change. Among the early humans that came down from the trees, there were also our ancestors, who adapted to open spaces by organizing themselves into large groups. Under the pressure of environmental factors, morality emerges as the foundation for cooperation, a quality that is as precarious as it is essential to the survival of the species. Moving between paleontology and genetics, psychology and cognitive science, philosophy and evolutionism, Sauer traces a genealogy of morality and along the journey, marks the main moral transformations in the history of humanity. In the end, he concludes that millions of years of stratifications has led to the moral crisis of our present—and the only way to build a future together is to retrace our history.
| Author | : Nicholas Hookway |
| Publisher | : Routledge |
| Total Pages | : 232 |
| Release | : 2019-04-29 |
| Genre | : Social Science |
| ISBN | : 1317138309 |
Winner of the 2020 Stephen Crook Memorial Prize fromThe Australian Sociological Association, a biennial prize for the best authored book in Australian sociology From concerns of dwindling care and kindness for others to an excessive concern with self and consumerism, plenty of evidence has been provided for the claim that morality is in decline in the West, yet little is known about how people make-sense of and experience their everyday moral lives. This insightful book asks how late-modern subjects construct, understand and experience morality in a context of moral uncertainty. With a focus on two areas of morality and human conduct – love and intimacy, and the human treatment of animals – the author draws on the work of Bauman, Ahmed, Irigaray, Foucault and Taylor to construct an innovative theoretical synthesis, which is combined with new empirical material drawn from online diaries or blogs to examine the complex and intriguing ways that contemporary subjects narrate and experience everyday moral-decision-making. Providing theoretical and empirical insights into the contemporary production of morality and selfhood in late-modernity, Everyday Moralities sheds new light on the ways in which people morally navigate a changing social world and advances sociology beyond models of narcissism, moral loss and community breakdown. As such, it makes an important contribution to an underdeveloped area of the discipline, explicitly addressing the everyday ways morality is lived and practised in a climate of moral ambiguity.
| Author | : Bernard Gert |
| Publisher | : Oxford University Press, USA |
| Total Pages | : 426 |
| Release | : 1998 |
| Genre | : Ethics |
| ISBN | : 0195122569 |
In this final revision of the classic work, the author has produced the fullest and most sophisticated account of this influential theoretical model. Here, he makes clear that morality is an informal system that does not provide unique answers to every moral question but does always limit the range of morally acceptable options, and so explains why some moral disagreements cannot be resolved. The importance placed on the moral ideals also makes clear that the moral rules are only one part of the moral system. A chapter that is devoted to justifying violations of the rules illustrates how the moral rules are embedded in the system and cannot be adequately understood independently of it. The chapter on reasons includes a new account of what makes one reason better than another and elucidates the complex hybrid nature of rationality.
