Moral Aggregation

Moral Aggregation PDF Author: Iwao Hirose
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199933685
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
This book elucidates the theoretical structure and scope of interpersonal and intra-personal aggregation--a trade-off between benefits to a group of individuals and losses to another group of individuals--and defends a form of aggregation -- formal aggregation -- that resolves a variety of outstanding problems arising from the conventional understanding of aggregation, including the Number Problem concerning the moral relevance of the number of individuals.

Moral Aggregation

Moral Aggregation PDF Author: Iwao Hirose
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199933685
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book elucidates the theoretical structure and scope of interpersonal and intra-personal aggregation--a trade-off between benefits to a group of individuals and losses to another group of individuals--and defends a form of aggregation -- formal aggregation -- that resolves a variety of outstanding problems arising from the conventional understanding of aggregation, including the Number Problem concerning the moral relevance of the number of individuals.

Facing Up to Scarcity

Facing Up to Scarcity PDF Author: Barbara H. Fried
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192587099
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
Facing Up to Scarcity offers a powerful critique of the nonconsequentialist approaches that have been dominant in Anglophone moral and political thought over the last fifty years. In these essays Barbara H. Fried examines the leading schools of contemporary nonconsequentialist thought, including Rawlsianism, Kantianism, libertarianism, and social contractarianism. In the realm of moral philosophy, she argues that nonconsequentialist theories grounded in the sanctity of "individual reasons" cannot solve the most important problems taken to be within their domain. Those problems, which arise from irreducible conflicts among legitimate (and often identical) individual interests, can be resolved only through large-scale interpersonal trade-offs of the sort that nonconsequentialism foundationally rejects. In addition to scrutinizing the internal logic of nonconsequentialist thought, Fried considers the disastrous social consequences when nonconsequentialist intuitions are allowed to drive public policy. In the realm of political philosophy, she looks at the treatment of distributive justice in leading nonconsequentialist theories. Here one can design distributive schemes roughly along the lines of the outcomes favoured--but those outcomes are not logically entailed by the normative premises from which they are ostensibly derived, and some are extraordinarily strained interpretations of those premises. Fried concludes, as a result, that contemporary nonconsequentialist political philosophy has to date relied on weak justifications for some very strong conclusions.

What We Owe to Each Other

What We Owe to Each Other PDF Author: T. M. Scanlon
Publisher: Belknap Press
ISBN: 067400423X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
“This magnificent book...opens up a novel, arresting position on matters that have been debated for thousands of years.” —Times Literary Supplement How do we judge whether an action is morally right or wrong? If an action is wrong, what reason does that give us not to do it? Why should we give such reasons priority over our other concerns and values? In this book, T. M. Scanlon offers new answers to these questions, as they apply to the central part of morality that concerns what we owe to each other. According to his contractualist view, thinking about right and wrong is thinking about what we do in terms that could be justified to others and that they could not reasonably reject. He shows how the special authority of conclusions about right and wrong arises from the value of being related to others in this way, and he shows how familiar moral ideas such as fairness and responsibility can be understood through their role in this process of mutual justification and criticism. Scanlon bases his contractualism on a broader account of reasons, value, and individual well-being that challenges standard views about these crucial notions. He argues that desires do not provide us with reasons, that states of affairs are not the primary bearers of value, and that well-being is not as important for rational decision-making as it is commonly held to be. Scanlon is a pluralist about both moral and non-moral values. He argues that, taking this plurality of values into account, contractualism allows for most of the variability in moral requirements that relativists have claimed, while still accounting for the full force of our judgments of right and wrong.

Moral Uncertainty

Moral Uncertainty PDF Author: William MacAskill
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198722273
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
About the bookToby Ord try to fill this gap. They argue that there are distinctive norms that govern how one ought to make decisions and defend an information-sensitive account of how to make such decisions. They do so by developing an analogy between moral uncertainty and social choice, noting that different moral views provide different amounts of information regarding our reasons for action, and arguing that the correct account of decision-making under moral uncertainty must be sensitive to that. Moral Uncertainty also tackles the problem of how to make intertheoretic comparisons, and addresses the implications of their view for metaethics and practical ethics. Very often we are uncertain about what we ought, morally, to do. We do not know how to weigh the interests of animals against humans, how strong our duties are to improve the lives of distant strangers, or how to think about the ethics of bringing new people into existence. But we still need to act. So how should we make decisions in the face of such uncertainty? Though economists and philosophers have extensively studied the issue of decision-making in the face of uncertainty about matters of fact, the question of decision-making given fundamental moral uncertainty has been neglected. In Moral Uncertainty, philosophers William MacAskill, Krister Bykvist, and Toby Ord try to fill this gap. They argue that there are distinctive norms that govern how one ought to make decisions and defend an information-sensitive account of how to make such decisions. They do so by developing an analogy between moral uncertainty and social choice, noting that different moral views provide different amounts of information regarding our reasons for action, and arguing that the correct account of decision-making under moral uncertainty must be sensitive to that. Moral Uncertainty also tackles the problem of how to make intertheoretic comparisons, and addresses the implications of their view for metaethics and practical ethics.

Intricate Ethics

Intricate Ethics PDF Author: F.M. Kamm
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199707359
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 520

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Book Description
"Reading F.M. Kamm's latest book is like watching a brilliant astronomer map an uncharted galaxy--the meticulousness and the display of mental stamina must inspire awe. There is a kind of beauty in the performance alone. Intricate Ethics is a major event in normative ethical theory by a living master of the subject.... In the end, professional moral philosophers cannot reasonably ignore Intricate Ethics.... Kamm continues to prove herself the most imaginative, detail-oriented deontologist writing in English today... Professor Kamm is in a class by herself."--Jeffrey Brand-Ballard, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews "The operative word in this masterful work is 'intricate.' Watching Kamm's mind dissect and reconstruct different cases is like watching a juggler, riding a unicycle, carrying on a conversation, while getting dressed. It is a glorious celebration of what moral philosophy does best, and what one of its most gifted practitioners can do to enlighten our understanding of the most pressing ethical issues of our time. But it is also a rich playground for empirically minded philosophers and psychologists who want to play with the clever class of dilemmas that Kamm has created, dilemmas that will both amuse and torture generations of people."--Marc Hauser is a Harvard College Professor and author of "Moral Minds" "Frances Kamm once again proves herself to be an astonishingly subtle and creative defender of a deontological outlook. Anyone at all interested in normative ethics will find something of value in Intricate Ethics. There are striking and original views on a wide range of topics. And no one--absolutely no one--compares to Kamm when it comes to constructing relevant test cases and carefully assessing our intuitive reactions to them. This is a master at work, at the height of her powers."--Shelly Kagan, Clark Professor of Philosophy, Yale University "Intricate Ethics fully justifies its title. It is as deep, subtle, imaginative, and analytically rigorous as any work in moral philosophy written in a great many years. It is dense with highly original and fertile ideas supported by powerful and ingenious arguments. This book amply confirms Frances Kamm's standing as one of the greatest living philosophers.--Jeff McMahan, Rutgers University "Kamm's virtuosity in hypothesizing cases in defense or refutation of moral principles remains unsurpassed. Intricate Ethics is also a testament to the fruitfulness of this rarefied method of ethics. One might have thought that, having already devoted several hundred path-breaking pages to the topic of nonconsequentialism in her earlier two-volume Morality, Mortality, it would have been impossible to break much new ground in this sequel. Yet what Kamm has to say here on the topics of harming and saving from harm is as novel, arresting, and insightful as ever."--Michael Otsuka, Professor of Philosophy, University College London "Kamm ...is the most sophisticated of the contemporary exponents of "intuitionist" or "nonconsequentialist" ethics...No one else makes such extraordinarily meticulous and penetrating attempts to extract the principles behind our ordinary moral intuitions...I highly recommend it as an inclusive and subtle attempt to work out nonconsequentialism on an intuitionist basis. As a bonus, Intricate Ethics also offers searching analyses of the work of Peter Unger, Peter Singer, Bernard Gert, T.M. Scanlon, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky."--Ingmar Persson, Times Literary Supplement

The Oxford Handbook of Consequentialism

The Oxford Handbook of Consequentialism PDF Author: Douglas W. Portmore
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190905328
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 689

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Book Description
Provides an authoritative and comprehensive overview of consequentialism today, Includes a brief summary of the anthology's four parts and a concise primer on the nature and importance of the consequentialism/nonconsequentialism distinction, Relates consequentialism to the significant reform movements calling for environmentalism, effective altruism, animal liberation, and women's liberation Book jacket.

The Limits of Moral Authority

The Limits of Moral Authority PDF Author: Dale Dorsey
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191044725
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Dale Dorsey considers one of the most fundamental questions in philosophical ethics: to what extent do the demands of morality have normative authority over us and our lives? Must we conform to moral requirements? Most who have addressed this question have treated the normative significance of morality as simply a fact to be explained. But Dorsey argues that this traditional assumption is misguided. According to Dorsey, not only are we not required to conform to moral demands, conforming to morality's demands will not always even be normatively permissible---moral behavior can be (quite literally) wrong. This view is significant not only for understanding the content and force of the moral point of view, but also for understanding the basic elements of how one ought to live.

Society's Choices

Society's Choices PDF Author: Institute of Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309051320
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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Book Description
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.

Morally-Demanding Infinite Responsibility

Morally-Demanding Infinite Responsibility PDF Author: Julio Andrade
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030616304
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
This book presents a conceptual mapping of supererogation in the analytic moral philosophical tradition. It first asks whether supererogation can be conceptualised in the absence of obligation or duty and then makes the case that it can be. It does so by enlisting the resources of the continental tradition, specifically using the work of Emmanuel Levinas and his notion of infinite responsibility. In so doing the book contributes to the ongoing efforts to create a common ethical terminology between the analytic and continental traditions within moral philosophy. Supererogatory actions are praiseworthy actions that go ‘beyond duty’, and yet are not blameworthy when not performed. In responding to this paradox, moral philosophy either brackets or attempts a reductionism of supererogation. Supererogation is epitomised in the paradigmatic figures of the saint and hero. Yet, most would agree that emulating these figures is too morally demanding. We rightly ask: where does moral obligation end? Is it even possible, or desirable to demarcate such a boundary? Besides the important theoretical issues these questions raise, they also speak to practical ethical dilemmas in the contemporary milieu, as they concern the global wealthy’s responsibility to the poor and the challenges of development aid work.

From Normativity to Responsibility

From Normativity to Responsibility PDF Author: Joseph Raz
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199693811
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
What are our duties or rights? How should we act? What are we responsible for? Joseph Raz examines the philosophical issues underlying these everyday questions. He explores the nature of normativity--the reasoning behind certain beliefs and emotions about how we should behave--and offers a novel account of responsibility.