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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Ethics & moral philosophy
The Heart is the meeting place of the individual and the divine,
the inner ground of morality, authenticity, and integrity. The
process of coming to the Heart and of realizing the person we were
meant to be is what Carl Jung called 'Individuation'. This path is
full of moral challenges for anyone with the courage to take it.
Using Jung's premise that the main causes of psychological problems
are conflicts of conscience, Christina Becker takes the reader
through the philosophical and spiritual aspects of the ethical
dimensions of this individual journey toward wholeness. This book
is a long overdue and unique contribution to the link between
individuation and ethics. Christina Becker, M.B.A. is a
Zurich-trained Jungian Analyst in private practice in Toronto,
Ontario Canada.
Antonia Lolordo presents an original interpretation of John Locke's
conception of moral agency-one that has implications both for his
metaphysics and for the foundations of his political theory. Locke
denies that species boundaries exist independently of human
convention, holds that the human mind may be either an immaterial
substance or a material one to which God has superadded the power
of thought, and insists that animals possess the ability to
perceive, will, and even reason-indeed, in some cases to reason
better than humans. Thus, he eliminates any sharp distinction
between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom. However, in his
ethical and political work Locke assumes that there is a sharp
distinction between moral agents and other beings. He thus needs to
be able to delineate the set of moral agents precisely, without
relying on the sort of metaphysical and physical facts his
predecessors appealed to. Lolordo argues that for Locke, to be a
moral agent is simply to be free, rational, and a person.
Interpreting the Lockean metaphysics of moral agency in this way
helps us to understand both Locke's over-arching philosophical
project and the details of his accounts of liberty, personhood, and
rationality.
This book brings together the study of two great disciplines of the
Islamic world: law and philosophy. In both sunni and shiite Islam,
it became the norm for scholars to acquire a high level of
expertise in the legal tradition. Thus some of the greatest names
in the history of Aristotelianism were trained jurists, like
Averroes, or commented on the status and nature of law, like
al-Farabi. While such authors sought to put law in its place
relative to the philosophical disciplines, others criticized
philosophy from a legal viewpoint, like al-Ghazali and Ibn
Taymiyya. But this collection of papers does not only explore the
relative standing of law and philosophy. It also looks at how
philosophers, theologians, and jurists answered philosophical
questions that arise from jurisprudence itself. What is the logical
structure of a well-formed legal argument? What standard of
certainty needs to be attained in passing down judgments, and how
is that standard reached? What are the sources of valid legal
judgment and what makes these sources authoritative? May a believer
be excused on grounds of ignorance? Together the contributions
provide an unprecedented demonstration of the close connections
between philosophy and law in Islamic society, while also
highlighting the philosophical interest of texts normally studied
only by legal historians.
Talbot Brewer presents an invigorating new approach to ethical
theory, in the context of human selfhood and agency. The first main
theme of the book is that contemporary ethical theorists have
focused too narrowly on actions and the discrete episodes of
deliberation through which we choose them, and that the subject
matter of the field looks quite different if one looks instead at
unfolding activities and the continuous forms of evaluative
awareness that carry them forward and that constitute an essential
element of those activities. The second is that ethical reflection
is itself a centrally important life activity, and that
philosophical ethics is an extension of this practical activity
rather than a merely theoretical reflection upon it.
Brewer's approach is founded on a far-reaching reconsideration of
the notions of the nature and sources of human agency, and
particularly of the way in which practical thinking gives shape to
activities, relationships and lives. He contests the usual
understanding of the relationship between philosophical psychology
and ethics. The Retrieval of Ethics shows the need for a new
contemplative vision of the point or value of human action --
without which we will remain unable to make optimal sense of our
efforts to unify our lives around a tenable conception of how best
to live them, or of the yearnings that draw us to our ideals and to
each other.
Now available in English for the first time, Norwegian philosopher
Arne Naess's meditation on the art of living is an exhortation to
preserve the environment and biodiversity. As Naess approaches his
ninetieth year, he offers a bright and bold perspective on the
power of feelings to move us away from ecological and cultural
degradation toward sound, future-focused policy and action. Naess
acknowledges the powerlessness of the intellect without the heart,
and, like Thoreau before him, he rejects the Cartesian notion of
mind-body separation. He advocates instead for the integration of
reason and emotion-a combination Naess believes will inspire us to
make changes for the better. Playful and serious, this is a
guidebook for finding our way on a planet wrecked by the harmful
effects of consumption, population growth, commodification,
technology, and globalization. It is sure to mobilize today's
philosophers, environmentalists, policy makers, and the general
public into seeking-with whole hearts rather than with superficial
motives-more effective and timelier solutions. Naess's style is
reflective and anecdotal as he shares stories and details from his
rich and long life. With characteristic goodwill, wit, and wisdom,
he denounces our unsustainable actions while simultaneously
demonstrating the unsurpassed wonder, beauty, and possibility our
world offers, and ultimately shows us that there is always reason
for hope, that everyone is a potential ally in our fight for the
future.
Weakness of will, the phenomenon of acting contrary to one's own
better judgment, has remained a prominent discussion topic of
philosophy. The history of this discussion in ancient, medieval,
and modern times has been outlined in many studies. Weakness of
Will in Renaissance and ReformationThought is, however, the first
book to cover the fascinating source materials on weakness of will
between 1350 and 1650. In addition to considering the work of a
broad range of Renaissance authors (including Petrarch, Donato
Acciaiuoli, John Mair, and Francesco Piccolomini), Risto Saarinen
explores the theologically coloured debates of the Reformation
period, such as those provided by Martin Luther, Philip
Melanchthon, John Calvin, and Lambert Daneau. He goes on to discuss
the impact of these authors on prominent figures of early
modernity, including Shakespeare, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz.
While most of the historical research on weakness of will has
focused on the reception history of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics,
Saarinen pays attention to the Platonic and Stoic discussions and
their revival during the Renaissance and the Reformation. He also
shows the ways in which Augustine's discussion of the divided will
is intertwined with the Christian reception of ancient Greek
ethics, and argues that the theological underpinnings of early
modern authors do not rule out weakness of will, but transform the
philosophical discussion and lead it towards new solutions.
A nameless character. A faceless figure. A disturbing,
thought-provoking journey through the facts of the world we live in
that we often refuse to acknowledge. By taking full advantage of
their author's lack of identity and extreme levels of
introspection, The Unwords unleash a full scale attack on all
fronts of cultural and social decay. Education, religion, politics,
language, relationships and common every day social activities are
stripped down to their bare foundations and deconstructed through
the eyes of a man who has rejected any notion of self in his quest
for the truth. The Unwords became a Goodreads Choice Awards
Finalist in 2012, the first ever book to be nominated in the
history of Goodreads that didn't have an identifiable author.
Written in fluent poetic verse which expands into full-page, full
color illustrations, the words blend seamlessly with the arts as
they form novel-like chapters which end with a single, dynamic
sentence; a new, refreshing form of writing known as
"Graphic-verse." Words are meant to be spoken. In a dishonest
world, what remains unspoken can only be the truth. In a dishonest
world... the pen is never mightier than the sword
Some of our most fundamental moral rules are violated by the
practices of torture and war. If one examines the concrete forms
these practices take, can the exceptions to the rules necessary to
either torture or war be justified? Fighting Hurt brings together
key essays by Henry Shue on the issue of torture, and relatedly,
the moral challenges surrounding the initiation and conduct of war,
and features a new introduction outlining the argument of the
essays, putting them into context, and describing how and in what
ways his position has modified over time. The first six chapters
marshal arguments that have been refined over 35 years for the
conclusion that torture can never be justified in any actual
circumstances whatsoever. The practice of torture has nothing
significant in common with the ticking bomb scenario often used in
its defence, and weak U.S. statutes have loop-holes for
psychological torture of the kind now favoured by CIA in the 'war
against terrorism'. The other sixteen chapters maintain that for as
long as wars are in fact fought, it is morally urgent to limit
specific destructive practices that cannot be prohibited. Two
possible exceptions to the UN Charter's prohibition on all but
defensive wars, humanitarian military intervention and preventive
war to eliminate WMD, are evaluated; and one possible exception to
the principle of discrimination, Michael Walzer's 'supreme
emergency', is sharply criticized. Two other fundamental issues
about the rules for the conduct of war receive extensive
controversial treatment. The first is the rules to limit the
bombing of dual-use infrastructure, with a focus on alternative
interpretations of the principle of proportionality that limits
'collateral damage'. The second is the moral status of the laws of
war as embodied in International Humanitarian Law. It is argued
that the current philosophical critique of IHL by Jeff McMahan
focused on individual moral liability to attack is an intellectual
dead-end and that the morally best rules are international laws
that are the same for all fighters. Examining real cases, including
U.S. bombing of Iraq in 1991, the Clinton Administration decision
not to intervene in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, NATO bombing of
Serbia in 1999, and CIA torture after 9/11 and its alternatives,
this book is highly accessible to general readers who are
interested in the ethical status of American political life,
especially foreign policy.
Can you be a self on your own or only together with others? Is
selfhood a built-in feature of experience or rather socially
constructed? How do we at all come to understand others? Does
empathy amount to and allow for a distinct experiential
acquaintance with others, and if so, what does that tell us about
the nature of selfhood and social cognition? Does a strong emphasis
on the first-personal character of consciousness prohibit a
satisfactory account of intersubjectivity or is the former rather a
necessary requirement for the latter? Engaging with debates and
findings in classical phenomenology, in philosophy of mind and in
various empirical disciplines, Dan Zahavi's new book Self and Other
offers answers to these questions. Discussing such diverse topics
as self-consciousness, phenomenal externalism, mindless coping,
mirror self-recognition, autism, theory of mind, embodied
simulation, joint attention, shame, time-consciousness, embodiment,
narrativity, self-disorders, expressivity and Buddhist no-self
accounts, Zahavi argues that any theory of consciousness that
wishes to take the subjective dimension of our experiential life
serious must endorse a minimalist notion of self. At the same time,
however, he also contends that an adequate account of the self has
to recognize its multifaceted character, and that various
complementary accounts must be integrated, if we are to do justice
to its complexity. Thus, while arguing that the most fundamental
level of selfhood is not socially constructed and not
constitutively dependent upon others, Zahavi also acknowledges that
there are dimensions of the self and types of self-experience that
are other-mediated. The final part of the book exemplifies this
claim through a close analysis of shame.
Christoph Luetge takes on a fundamental problem of contemporary
political philosophy and ethics. He questions the often implicit
assumption of many contemporary political philosophers according to
which a society needs its citizens to adopt some shared basic
qualities, views or capabilities (here termed a moral surplus).
Luetge examines the respective theories of, among others, Habermas,
Rawls, Gauthier, Buchanan, and Binmore with a focus on their
respective moral surpluses. He finds that each moral surplus is
either not necessary for the stability of societies or cannot
remain stable when faced with opposing incentives. Binmore's idea
of empathy is the only one that is, at least partly, not confronted
with this dilemma. Luetge provides an alternative view termed order
ethics, which weakens the necessary assumptions for modern
societies and basically only relies on mutual advantages as the
fundamental basis of society.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer's dramatic biography, a son of privilege who
suffered imprisonment and execution after involving himself in a
conspiracy to kill Hitler and overthrow the Third Reich, has helped
make him one of the most influential Christian figures of the
twentieth century. But before he was known as a martyr or a hero,
he was a student and teacher of theology. This book examines the
academic formation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's theology, arguing that
the young Bonhoeffer reinterpreted for a modern intellectual
context the Lutheran understanding of the 'person' of Jesus Christ.
In the process, Bonhoeffer not only distinguished himself from both
Karl Barth and Karl Holl, whose dialectical theology and Luther
interpretation respectively were two of the most important
post-World War I theological movements, but also established the
basic character of his own 'person-theology.' Barth convinces
Bonhoeffer that theology must understand revelation as originating
outside the human self in God's freedom. But whereas Barth
understands revelation as the act of an eternal divine subject,
Bonhoeffer treats revelation as the act and being of the historical
person of Jesus Christ. On the basis of this person-concept of
revelation, Bonhoeffer rejects Barth's dialectical thought,
designed to respect the distinction between God and world, for a
hermeneutical way of thinking that begins with the reconciliation
of God and world in the person of Christ. Here Bonhoeffer mines a
Lutheran understanding of the incarnation as God's unreserved entry
into history, and the person of Christ as the resulting historical
reconciliation of opposites. This also distinguishes Bonhoeffer's
Lutheranism from that of Karl Holl, one of Bonhoeffer's teachers in
Berlin, whose location of justification in the conscience renders
the presence of Christ superfluous. Against this, Bonhoeffer
emphasizes the present person of Christ as the precondition of
justification. Through these critical conversations, Bonhoeffer
develops the features of his person-theology -- a person-concept of
revelation and a hermeneutical way of thinking -- which remain
constant despite the sometimes radical changes in his thought.
We need to know what sustainability is, before it can be achieved.
How must sustainability be defined? Fuzzy Ethics describes a new
moral criterion which locates ethics in the physical world and,
based on it, proposes a new definition of sustainability that
generalizes concepts from engineering, physics, and ethics. This
book has two main parts. The first conducts a dialogue in order to
establish the operative definitions (for example: order; and
effort) needed to increase the rigor of argumentation; ethical
framework; and moral criterion to follow. The second sees a final
reflection isolating one by one, the main sentences on which the
previous dialogue is based. Here the key points that the reader
must interrogate in order to find any flaws in the theory are
detailed. The final part links ethics and sustainability, and
reveals how the finitude of humankind leads to fuzziness. Efren M.
Benavides is a Professor at the School of Aeronautics, Universidad
Politecnica de Madrid, Spain. He specialises in theories of
sustainable design, mechanical design, reciprocating engines and
propulsion systems with research work in the field of aeronautics.
Efren has written books and numerous articles about these subjects
in a variety of scholarly journals and scientific literature. This
is his first book with TrueHeart Press.
The medieval Jewish philosophers Saadia Gaon, Bahya ibn Pakuda, and
Moses Maimonides made significant contributions to moral philosophy
in ways that remain relevant today.
Jonathan Jacobs explicates shared, general features of the thought
of these thinkers and also highlights their distinctive
contributions to understanding moral thought and moral life. The
rationalism of these thinkers is a key to their views. They argued
that seeking rational understanding of Torah's commandments and the
created order is crucial to fulfilling the covenant with God, and
that intellectual activity and ethical activity form a spiral of
mutual reinforcement. In their view, rational comprehension and
ethical action jointly constitute a life of holiness. Their
insights are important in their own right and are also relevant to
enduring issues in moral epistemology and moral psychology,
resonating even in the contemporary context.
The central concerns of this study include (i) the relations
between revelation and rational justification, (ii) the roles of
intellectual virtue and ethical virtue in human perfection, (iii)
the implications of theistic commitments for topics such as freedom
of the will, the acquisition of virtues and vices, repentance,
humility, and forgiveness, (iv) contrasts between medieval Jewish
moral thought and the practical wisdom approach to moral philosophy
and the natural law approach to it, and (v) the universality and
objectivity of moral elements of Torah.
Responsibility, Complexity, and Abortion: Toward a New Image of
Ethical Thought draws from feminist theory, post-structuralist
theory, and complexity theory to develop a new set of ethical
concepts for broaching the thinking challenges that attend the
experience of unwanted pregnancy. Author Karen Houle does not only
argue for these concepts; she enacts a method for working with
them, a method that brackets the tendency to take positions and to
think that position-taking is what ethical analysis involves. This
book thus provides concrete evidence of a theoretically-grounded,
compassionate way that people in all walks of life, academic or
otherwise, could come to a better understanding of, and more
complex relationship to, difficult ethical issues. On the one hand,
this is a meta-ethical book about how people can conceive and
communicate moral ideas in ways that are more constructive than
position-taking; on the other hand, it is also a book about
abortion. It testifies from a first-person female perspective about
the life-long complexity that attends fertility, sexuality and
reproduction. But it does not do so in order to ratify abortion as
a woman's issue or a private matter or as feminist work. Rather,
its aim is to excavate the ethical richness of the situation of
unwanted pregnancy showing that it connects to everyone, affects
everyone, and thus gives everyone something unique and new to
think.
Margaret Gilbert offers an incisive new approach to a classic
problem of political philosophy: when and why should I do what the
laws of my country tell me to do? Beginning with carefully argued
accounts of social groups in general and political societies in
particular, the author argues that in central, standard senses of
the relevant terms membership in a political society in and of
itself obligates one to support that society's political
institutions. The obligations in question are not moral
requirements derived from general moral principles, as is often
supposed, but a matter of one's participation in a special kind of
commitment: joint commitment. An agreement is sufficient but not
necessary to generate such a commitment. Gilbert uses the phrase
'plural subject' to refer to all of those who are jointly committed
in some way. She therefore labels the theory offered in this book
the plural subject theory of political obligation. The author
concentrates on the exposition of this theory, carefully explaining
how and in what sense joint commitments obligate. She also explores
a classic theory of political obligation -- actual contract theory
-- according to which one is obligated to conform to the laws of
one's country because one agreed to do so. She offers a new
interpretation of this theory in light of a theory of plural
subject theory of agreements. She argues that actual contract
theory has more merit than has been thought, though the more
general plural subject theory is to be preferred. She compares and
contrasts plural subject theory with identification theory,
relationship theory, and the theory of fair play. She brings it to
bear on some classic situations of crisis, and, in the concluding
chapter, suggests a number of avenues for related empirical and
moral inquiry. Clearly and compellingly written, A Theory of
Political Obligation will be essential reading for political
philosophers and theorists.
When Barack Obama praised the writings of philosopher theologian
Reinhold Niebuhr in the run up to the 2008 US Presidential
Elections, he joined a long line of top politicians who closely
engaged with Niebuhr's ideas, including Tony Benn, Jimmy Carter,
Martin Luther King Jr. and Dennis Healey.
Beginning with his early ministry amongst industrial workers in
early twentieth century Detroit, Niebuhr displayed a passionate
commitment to social justice that infused his life's work.
Rigorously championing 'Christian Realism' he sought a practically
orientated intellectual engagement with the political challenges of
his day. His ideas on International Relations have also helped to
shape debate amongst leading academic thinkers and policy makers.
In both Christian and secular contexts he continues to attract new
readers today.
In this timely re-evaluation both critics and disciples of
Niebuhr's work reflect on his notable contribution to Christian
social ethics, the Christian doctrine of humanity, and the
engagement of Christian thought with contemporary politics. The
authors bring a wide range of expertise from both sides of the
Atlantic, indicating how a re-evaluation of Niebuhr's thought can
help inform contemporary debates on Christian social ethics and
other wider theological issues.
Intelligent Virtue presents a distinctive new account of virtue and
happiness as central ethical ideas. Annas argues that exercising a
virtue involves practical reasoning of a kind which can
illuminatingly be compared to the kind of reasoning we find in
someone exercising a practical skill. Rather than asking at the
start how virtues relate to rules, principles, maximizing, or a
final end, we should look at the way in which the acquisition and
exercise of virtue can be seen to be in many ways like the
acquisition and exercise of more mundane activities, such as
farming, building or playing the piano. This helps us to see virtue
as part of an agent's happiness or flourishing, and as constituting
(wholly, or in part) that happiness. We are offered a better
understanding of the relation between virtue as an ideal and virtue
in everyday life, and the relation between being virtuous and doing
the right thing.
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