Ethics & Moral Philosophy

This collection features essays from top experts in ethics and philosophy of love that offer varying perspectives on the value of a contemporary secular virtue of chastity. The virtue of chastity has traditionally been portrayed as an excellent...

In bringing the concepts and methods of philosophy to bear on specific, pressing, practical concerns, applied philosophy is the modern expression of a perennial concern: to understand, in part to control, and to come to terms with the conditions in which...

John Stuart Mill's 1861 Utilitarianism remains one of the most widely known and influential works of moral philosophy ever written. It is also a model of critical thinking - one in which Mill's reasoning and interpretation skills are used to create a...

The history of moral philosophy has been dominated by attempts to find and defend the correct moral principle or set of principles. However, over the last two decades the assumption that morality can and should be understood in terms of principles has...

Hippocrates famously advised doctors 'it is far more important to know what person the disease has than what disease the person has'. Yet 2,500 years later, 'personalised medicine', based on individual genetic profiling and the achievements of genomic...

The Skillfulness of Virtue provides a new framework for understanding virtue as a skill, based on psychological research on self-regulation and expertise. Matt Stichter lays the foundations of his argument by bringing together theories of self-regulation...

The moral status of animals is a subject of controversy both within and beyond academic philosophy, especially regarding the question of whether and when it is ethical to eat meat. A commitment to animal rights and related notions of animal protection is...

Knowledge aims to fit the world, and action to change it. In this collection of essays, Onora O'Neill explores the relationship between these concepts and shows that principles are not enough for ethical thought or action: we also need to understand how...

Many people have claimed that integrity requires sticking to one's convictions come what may. Greg Scherkoske challenges this claim, arguing that it creates problems in distinguishing integrity from fanaticism, close-mindedness or mere inertia. Rather,...

In this risk-taking book, a major feminist philosopher engages the work of the actor and director who has progressed from being the stereotypical "man's man" to pushing the boundaries of the very genres-the Western, the police thriller, the war or boxing...

Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Volume XXIV, Life and Death: Metaphysics and Ethics is an important contribution to the literature on the intersection of issues of metaphysics and issues of ethics. In the Midwest Studies tradition, twenty of the more...

Despite an explosion of studies on memory in historical and cultural studies, there is relatively little in moral philosophy on this subject. In this book, Jeffrey Blustein provides a systematic and philosophically rigorous account of a morality of...

Are leaders morally special? Is there something ethically distinctive about the relationship between leaders and followers? Should leaders do whatever it takes to achieve group goals? Leadership Ethics uses moral theory, as well as empirical research in...

This book contributes to current bioethical debates by providing a critical analysis of the philosophy of human death. Bernard N. Schumacher discusses contemporary philosophical perspectives on death, creating a dialogue between phenomenology,...

This book explores the impact of neuroscience research over the past 20 or more years on brain function as it affects moral decisions. Findings show that the mind and brain are very close, if not the same, and that the brain 'makes' the mind. This is...

Taking a unique approach that emphasizes careful reasoning, this cutting-edge reader is structured around twenty-seven landmark arguments that have provoked heated debates on current ethical issues. Contemporary Moral Arguments: Readings in Ethical...

Samuel J. Kerstein develops a new, broadly Kantian account of the ethical issues that arise when a person treats another merely as a means, that is, 'just uses' the other and thereby acts wrongly. He takes his inspiration from Immanuel Kant's 'Formula of...

Thomas Pink offers a new approach to the problem of free will. Do we have control of how we act, so that we are free to act in more than one way, and does it matter to morality whether we do? Pink argues that what matters to morality is not in fact the...

This essay is a version of the text presented as a paper in Kolkata in February 2003. This was the first day of the two-day S. G. Deuskar lecture delivered by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. Fifteen...

This work is in the form of letters written by an old philosopher, at the end of his career and life, to a young student. The letters cover a comprehensive introduction to philosophy, wisdom, and the art of thinking. Inspired from Letters to a Young Poet...

Oxford Studies in Metaethics is the only publication devoted exclusively to original philosophical work in the foundations of ethics. It provides an annual selection of much of the best new scholarship being done in the field. Its broad purview includes...

The new field of experimental philosophy has emerged as the methods of psychological science have been brought to bear on traditional philosophical issues. Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy is the place to go to see outstanding new work in the...

The great Danish philosopher and theologian K. E. Logstrup (1905-81) offers a distinctive assessment and comparative critique of two key thinkers in Kierkegaard's and Heidegger's Analysis of Existence and its Relation to Proclamation (1950). Logstrup...

In Morality by Degrees, Alastair Norcross articulates and defends a radical new approach to ethical theory. Consequentialist theories of the right connect the rightness and wrongness (and related notions) of actions with the intrinsic goodness and...

Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics is an annual forum for new work in normative ethical theory. Leading philosophers present original contributions to our understanding of a wide range of moral issues and positions, from analysis of competing approaches...

This is the first edited collection devoted entirely to the question of the role of animals in the thought of Immanuel Kant. Though the topic is not one treated systematically in his work, mentions of animals occur throughout his corpus in relation to...

Everyone is disabled in some respect, at least in the sense that others can do things that we cannot. But significant limitations on pursuing major life activities due to severely limited eyesight, hearing, mobility, cognitive functioning and so on pose...

Knowing Better presents a novel solution to the problem of reconciling the seemingly conflicting perspectives of ordinary virtue and normative ethics. These two perspectives appear to tell us incompatible things about the practical reasons that guide our...

When discussing normative reasons, oughts, requirements of rationality, motivating reasons, and so on, we often have to use verbs like "believe" and "want" to capture a relevant subject's perspective. According to the received view...

W. J. Mander examines the nature of idealist ethics, that is to say, the form and content of ethical belief most typically adopted by philosophical idealists. While there exist many studies of the ethical views of individual idealist philosophers there...

Katherin A. Rogers presents a new theory of free will, based on the thought of Anselm of Canterbury. We did not originally produce ourselves. Yet, according to Anselm, we can engage in self-creation, freely and responsibly forming our characters by...

When the logical positivists espoused emotivism as a theory of moral discourse, they assumed that their general theories of meaning could be straightforwardly applied to the subject of metaethics. The philosophical research program of expressivism,...

Most of us care about being a good person. Most of us also recognize that we fall far short of our morals aspirations, that there is a gap between what we are like and what we think we should be like. The aim of moral improvement is to narrow that gap...

We ought to opt for the best-that is, we ought to choose the option that is best in terms of whatever ultimately matters. So, if maximizing happiness is what ultimately matters, then we ought to perform the option that results in the most happiness. And...

Oxford Studies in Metaethics is the only publication devoted exclusively to original philosophical work in the foundations of ethics. It provides an annual selection of much of the best new scholarship being done in the field. Its broad purview includes...

Through an original and close reading of the key literature regarding both revolutionary violence and nonviolence, this book collapses the widely-assumed concepts of violence and nonviolence as mutually exclusive. By revealing that violence and...

The Ethics of Animal Beauty provides a novel account of the aesthetics of animals and explores the ethical implications of recognizing and admiring their beauty. Samantha Vice argues that animation, the aesthetic property of being an individual with a...

What gives someone a moral right to parent? What role should the liberal state play in the creation of families? Are prospective parents allowed to create a child in a world facing a changing climate and full of parentless children? In this book, Luara...

Rüdiger Bittner argues that the aim of thinking about what to do, of practical reason, is to find, not what we ought to do, but what it is good to do under the circumstances. Neither under prudence nor under morality are there things we ought to do...

Stephen Ingram defends a robustly realistic metaethical theory, based on the concept of normative arbitrariness, of which he provides the first in-depth analysis. He argues that, in order to capture the normative non-arbitrariness of moral choice, we...