The distinguished scholar of ancient philosophy J.L. Ackrill here presents the best of his essays on Plato and Aristotle from the past forty years. He brings philosophical acuity and philological expertise to a range of texts and topics in ancient thought - from ethics and logic to epistemology and metaphysics - which continue to be widely discussed today.

"Mercy killing," "assisting a suicide," "planning your own death," and "euthanasia" are once again high-profile issues. Recent popular referendums have sought to legalize doctor-assisted suicide, while best-selling books have been published about how to kill yourself. In short, Americans are searching for more control over their own mortality.
Hemlock's Cup is the first history of the active euthanasia movement in America, as represented by its most visible proponent, the Hemlock Society. Donald W. Cox traces the growth of the society from its beginnings as a three-person cause to its current world-wide fame. The work of Derek Humphrey, the society's founder, is reviewed and the publicity surrounding Dr. Jack Kevorkian and his controversial "suicide machine" is discussed.
Cox also addresses the Washington and California initiatives to legalize doctor-assisted suicide and the ethical questions they pose. He reflects on the impact of the Quinlan and Cruzan cases to establish the "right to die" for all Americans and he explores the reasons for the delays in enacting living-will laws in various states. In addition, Cox examines the significant connections among AIDS, abortion, and assisted suicide.

Sarah Stroud and Christine Tappolet present eleven original essays on weakness of will, a topic straddling the divide between moral philosophy and philosophy of mind, and the subject of much current attention. An international team of established scholars and younger talent provide perspectives on all the key issues in this fascinating debate; the book will be essential reading for anyone working in the area.

This collection explores the controversial and perhaps even abject idea that evils, large and small, human and natural, may have a central positive function to play in our lives. For centuries a concern of religious thinkers from the Christian tradition, very little systematic work has been done to explore this idea from the secular point of view.

In Reasons and the Good Roger Crisp answers some of the oldest questions in moral philosophy. Claiming that a fundamental issue in normative ethics is what ultimate reasons for action we might have, he argues that the best statements of such reasons will not employ moral concepts. He investigates and explains the nature of reasons themselves; his account of how we come to know them combines an intuitionist epistemology with elements of Pyrrhonist scepticism. He defends a hedonistic theory of well-being and an account of practical reason according to which we can give some, though not overriding, priority to our own good over that of others. The book develops original lines of argument within a framework of some traditional but currently less popular views.

The aim of this book is to clarify the ground on which public service scholars, practitioners and advisers stand in relation to values and virtues in public administration. It explores assumptions, the unspoken and unexamined things that are taken for granted in the field of serving the public good. Accordingly, Value and Virtue in Public Administration gives an account of the recent developments and progress in public sector management and public service. It describes the progress made in the discipline of public administration, in theories related to public administration and in the practice of public administration in tackling the questions surrounding values and virtues. These trends, descriptions, theories and comparisons make it possible to answer the question of how administrative ethics vary and what this variance depends upon. Featuring contributions from scholars in several different disciplines and in-depth case studies, the book concludes that under New Public Management instrumental values and consequential ethics have become dominant and more fundamental values have been neglected.

Dominique Lestel is a French philosopher whose work is significant for the rethinking of animality and human-animal relations. Throughout such important books as L'Animalite (1996), Les Origines animales de la culture (2001) and L'Animal singulier (2004), he offers a fierce critique of reductive, mechanistic models of animal behaviour, as well as a positive contribution to etho-ethnographic and phenomenological methods for understanding animal life. Centred around hybrid human-animal communities of shared interests, affects and meaning, his critical and speculative approach to the animal sciences offers a vision of animals as acting subjects and bearers of culture, who form their own worlds and transform them in concert with human and other partners. In tracing the ways in which we share our lives with animals in the texture of animality, Lestel's cutting-edge philosophical ethology also contributes to an overarching philosophical anthropology of the human as the most animal of animals. This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.

This research monograph is an empirical examination of cultural influences on judgments of professional accountants from Australia, India and Malaysia in relation to a number of ethical issues in accounting including auditor-client conflict resolution, whistle blowing as an internal control mechanism and social desirability response bias. The study informs and guides both the theoretical specification and treatment of culture and its operationalization and methodology. It is shown that enhancement in the quality of cross-cultural research in accounting can be accomplished by providing greater insight into the depth, richness and complexity of cultural similarities and differences between and across nations by complementing the quantified dimensional based cultural measures with relevant historical, sociological and psychological literature. The findings of the study have implications for the management of multinational enterprises, the international convergence and harmonisation of accounting and auditing standards, and for cross-cultural accounting research. This research monograph would be particularly useful for researchers and research students interested in international dimensions of accounting and in ethical issues in international business.

Advances in technology have raised new ethical questions in medicine, concern for pollution has encouraged the growth of "environmental ethics", and the problems of corporate America have sparked more questions about "business ethics". With the population of older persons increasing every year and their social problems becoming ever more acute, it's now time for "geroethics", which assesses the impact of societal values on elders and how the aged may respond to these values. The issues are urgent and compelling: the changing face of elder America, dependence on others for care, the corporate response to agism, the healthcare crisis, how to take charge of one's life and bring meaning to it, living longer verses living better, coping with disabilities, the psychological aspects of aging, and so many others. Ethics embraces concepts of rights and privileges, duties and obligations, choices and their outcomes. In Geroethics: A New Vision of Growing Old in America author Gerald A. Larue shows how social values impact on elders in the United States and how older persons, and those who advocate on their behalf, may respond to the attitudes and actions of others. Dreams and goals, rights and responsibilities, self-respect and personal dignity shouldn't fade with the passing of youth. This latest addition to the Golden Age series offers the elderly and those who care for them a vibrant new look at the challenges of aging: the role elders can and do play in shaping and changing society's views of its oldest members, regaining control of important life choices, and the struggle to live a meaningful and independent existence free of anxiety, fear, and uncertainty. Included are chapters onstereotypes, identifying the elderly, human rights, agism, the ethics of survival, elder power, elder abuse, fear of aging, caring for elders, health care, dementia, loneliness, death and dying, and much more.

Appreciating Our Cosmic Bonds introduces the philosophy and definition behind the term Re-humanism and how this peaceful and honest way of life could touch the people of this world, regardless of religion, class or race, to enhance a better universe. Chidi Giniji instills a wakeup call for mankind by introducing an innovative way to view our universe where people question the meaning of life and earnestly want to know why we are here on earth and why we act the way we do. While defining his theory for achieving a harmonious planet, Giniji emphasizes that re-humanists of diverse backgrounds can co-exist peacefully because they recognize the simple truth that we are all children of one human family, in one world, with one origin and one destiny, influenced by one ultimate power. In a universe where negativity often abounds, a Re-humanist regards fellow human beings and all creation with due respect and empathy while holding his or her own being in high esteem and dignity-a truly uplifting way to live a life and shape a destiny. Appreciating Our Cosmic Bonds encourages those who wish to change the world through their own actions, making each new day a day of personal reassessment.

Against the background of the recent revival of ethics, this handbook aims to show the great fertility of the phenomenological tradition for the study of ethics and moral philosophy by collecting a set of papers on the contributions to ethical thought by major phenomenological thinkers. Twenty-one chapters in the book are articles by experts who explore the thought of the major ethical thinkers in the first two generations of the phenomenological tradition and direct the reader toward the most relevant primary and secondary materials. The final three chapters of the book sketch more recent developments in various parts of the world, and the first three chapters investigate the relations between phenomenology and the dominant normative approaches in contemporary moral philosophy.

This delightful collection of fifty witty and insightful essays is written for real people in plain language by an internationally respected philosopher who is well-known for his efforts to 'popularise' philosophy. Originally published in newspapers and popular magazines, these essays are presented to 'elicit the joy of reflection', to provoke argument and intimacy, and to encourage understanding. Robert Solomon's aim is to make philosophy accessible and fun for everyone. You are cordially invited to join in a fascinating romp through many of the sticky intellectual brambles that have tantalised the human mind for centuries. Read about: "Becoming a Philosopher"; "What's Wrong with Sentimentality?"; "The Game of Love"; "The Politics of Sleep"; "Are the Three Stooges Funny?"; "Righteous Food"; "The One-Minute Moralist"; "In Defense of Kitsch"; "The New Illiteracy"; "Are Ethics Courses Useful?"; "Professors Riot: Kill Moby Dick"; and, much more. This book will captivate the curious and positively unnerve all those who believe that good ideas have to be dull, boring, and impossible to understand.

Few contemporary philosophers have made as wide-ranging and insightful a contribution to philosophical debate as John Cottingham. This collection brings together friends, colleagues and former students of Cottingham, to discuss major themes of his work on moral philosophy. Presented in three parts the collection focuses on the debate on partiality, impartiality and character; the role of emotions and reason in the good life; the meaning of a worthwhile life and the place of theistic considerations in it. The original contributions to this volume celebrate Cottingham's work by embracing and furthering his arguments and, at times, in the best spirit of philosophical engagement, challenging and confronting them. The volume concludes with Cottingham's specially commissioned responses to the contributions.

This book centres on Samuel Pufendorf's (1632-1694) moral and political philosophy, a subject of recently renewed interest among intellectual historians, philosophers and legal scholars in the English-speaking world. Pufendorf's significance in conceptualizing sociability in a way that ties moral philosophy, the theory of the state, political economy, and moral psychology together has already been acknowledged, but this book is the first systematic investigation of the moral psychological underpinnings of Pufendorf's theory of sociability in their own right. Readers will discover how Pufendorf's psychological and social explanation of sociability plays a crucial role in his natural law theory. By drawing attention to Pufendorf's scattered remarks and observations on human psychology, a new interpretation of the importance of moral psychology is presented. The author maintains that Pufendorf's reflection on the psychological and physical capacities of human nature also matters for his description of how people adopt sociability as their moral standard in practice. We see how, since Pufendorf's interest in human nature is mainly political, moral psychological formulations are important for Pufendorf's theorizing of social and political order. This work is particularly useful for scholars investigating the multifaceted role of passions and emotions in the history of moral and political philosophy. It also affords a better understanding of what later philosophers, such as Smith, Hume or Rousseau, might have find appealing in Pufendorf's writings. As such, this book will also interest researchers of the Enlightenment, natural law and early modern philosophy.

Vinciane Despret is a Belgian philosopher whose work proposes new questions and approaches to human-animal relations. Of central importance to her thought is an intellectual and cultural proposal to allow animals to show their agency and allow them to be interesting. With genuine curiosity, Despret looks at how humans and animals transform one another through daily encounters, and she explores these metamorphoses through an engagement with the history of philosophy, literature, science, field research, and art. In a playful though serious tone, Despret claims that animals are always more interesting than we give them credit for, and that the achievements of animals are never far from our own. This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.

People still believe that any behaviour is permitted so long as they can get away with it. This attitude makes our current moral situation both confusing and discouraging. In addition, society has lost confidence in traditional methods of strengthening morality, be it the family, the schools, religion, or the law. Our failure to create a peaceful, moral world is all the more disturbing when compared to the tremendous strides we have made in science and its application to business and industry, medicine, communications, transportation, and agriculture. In "The Morality Maze", Neil M Daniels expands the concept of morality by assigning it a scientific base in biology. In the past, each individual immoral behaviour was described and defined, but we failed to discern what they have in common, other than being forbidden. Daniels reveals one simple moral factor that pervades all moral and immoral behaviour. This "common denominator" is a bioenvironmental fact of human ecology. The human ecosystem artefact common to all forms of morality is "property," an innovative component of moral ecology theory that has revolutionary implications for moral philosophy, law, education, and daily life.

Edwards theory book uses the metaphor of "The Warrior" to advance his philosophy of stoic, Judeo-Christian values as an answer to the problems that face humanity. (Philosophy)

Engaging Bioethics: An Introduction with Case Studies draws students into this rapidly changing field, helping them to actively untangle the many issues at the intersection of medicine and moral concern. Presuming readers start with no background in philosophy, it offers balanced, philosophically based, and rigorous inquiry for undergraduates throughout the humanities and social sciences as well as for health care professionals-in-training, including students in medical school, pre-medicine, nursing, public health, and those studying to assist physicians in various capacities. Written by an author team with more than three decades of combined experience teaching bioethics, this book offers Flexibility to the instructor, with chapters that can be read independently and in an order that fits the course structure Up-to-date coverage of current controversies on topics such as vaccination, access to health care, new reproductive technologies, genetics, biomedical research on human and animal subjects, medically assisted death, abortion, medical confidentiality, and disclosure Attention to issues of gender, race, cultural diversity, and justice in health care Integration with case studies and primary sources Pedagogical features to help instructors and students, including Chapter learning objectives Text boxes and figures to explain important terms, concepts, and cases End-of-chapter summaries, key words, and annotated further readings Discussion cases and questions Appendices on moral reasoning and the history of ethical issues at the end and beginning of life An index of cases discussed in the book and extensive glossary/index A companion website (http://www.routledgetextbooks.com/textbooks/9780415837958/) with a virtual anthology linking to key primary sources, a test bank, topics for papers, and PowerPoints for lectures and class discussion

The Reading Augustine series presents concise, personal readings of St. Augustine of Hippo from leading philosophers and religious scholars. Ian Clausen's On Love, Confession, Surrender and the Moral Self describes Augustine's central ideas on morality and how he arrived at them. Describing an intellectual journey that will resonate especially with readers at the beginning of their own journey, Clausen shows that Augustine's early writing career was an outworking of his own inner turmoil and discovery, and that both were to summit, triumphantly, on his monumental book Confessions (AD 386-401). On Love, Confession, Surrender and the Moral Self offers a way of looking at Augustine's early writing career as an on-going, developing process: a process whose chief result was to shape a conception of the moral self that has lasted and prospered to the present day.

This book argues that significant progress toward a plausible solution of the ancient philosophical problem of free will has been made over the past 125 years by a line of thinkers starting with William James. The latest work integrates Jamesian two-stage models of free will with the self-forming actions of Robert Kane, a leading libertarian and editor of The Oxford Handbook of Free Will. It also includes Daniel Dennett's Valerian Model and Alfred Mele's Modest Libertarianism. In this illustrated college-level sourcebook/textbook, Bob Doyle provides a history of the free will problem, a taxonomy of current free will positions, the standard argument against free will, the physics, biology, and neuroscience of free will, and extensive reviews of the work of Kane, Dennett, Mele, and the leading determinist philosopher, Ted Honderich. John Searle called it a scandal that after all the centuries of writing about free will, we have not agreed on much progress. According to Doyle, a more serious scandal today is that academic philosophers are convincing many young students that they are deterministic biological machines with only a "compatibilist free will," when genuine "libertarian" free will is available to us. Doyle recounts the many different forms of determinism that have been used over the centuries to deny human freedom and responsibility. To end the scandal, philosophers need to teach a two-stage model of free will and creativity that reconciles free will with indeterminism, just as David Hume reconciled freedom of action with determinism. The free-will model is actually triply compatible; compatible with an adequate determinism, compatible with indeterminism (since William James), and compatible with biological evolution. 'Free Will: The Scandal in Philosophy' Bob Doyle Hardcover 9780983580270 480 pages, b&w, 40 figures, 15 sidebars, glossary, bibliography, index. $49.95USD Also available in paperback ($29.95) and various eBook editions.

Ethical Experience provides a unique phenomenological dialogue between psychology and philosophy. This novel approach focuses on lived experiences that belong to daily practical life, such self-identity and ethical decision-making. This practical focus enables the reader to explore how ethics relates to psychology and how the ethical agent determines herself within her surrounding community and world. Using Husserl's ethics the authors present a phenomenological approach moral psychology that offers an alternative to cognitive and neuroscientific theories. This is a practical and theoretically rigorous textbook that will be of use to those researching and studying ethics, morality, psychology and religion.

This book addresses the question of what it means to be moral and which capacities one needs to be moral. It questions whether empathy is a cognitive or an affective capacity, or perhaps both. As most moral beings behave immorally from time to time, the authors ask which factors cause or motivate people to translate their moral beliefs into action? Specially addressed is the question of what is the role of internal factors such as willpower, commitment, character, and what is the role of external, situational and structural factors? The questions are considered from various (disciplinary) perspectives.

Governing for the Environment explores one of the dimensions of the value-knowledge system needed in any movement towards humane governance for the planet: the ecological sustainability and integrity of the Earth's environment. The book begins from the premise that while environmental knowledge and values have developed rapidly, their development must not overwhelm consideration of other core 'humane' values: peace, social justice, and human rights. The book's contributors explore a variety of ethical issues that must inform future global regulation of the Earth's environment.

Michael Pritchard's study of individual morality is set in the trenches, in the valley of life itself. The moral agent he describes is real, not one of the rarified, rational characters portrayed in most ethics texts. Thus the view of morality Pritchard presents in these eleven essays is pluralistic, complex, and down-to-earth.

Pritchard rejects the premise that moral development begins in self-interest, citing evidence of empathy and moral connectedness in very young children. He provides a deliberate and convincing argument for a new starting point for the discussion of moral development, one in which self-interest and empathy are innate and equally essential groundings for individual morality. He then builds a comprehensive framework for tracing moral development that allows human morality to be grounded in both reason and emotion, and recognizes the importance to morality of justice and rights as well as caring and responsibility.

Pritchard's work is both a product of and a contribution to the field of moral psychology that began in the 1960s as a blending of philosophical theories on morality and ethics with insights from psychological theory on human development and moral behavior. Through his essays run the common threads of moral education, the complexity of ingredients and influences in moral life, and the concept of personal integrity.

"Pritchard displays a remarkable, and sometimes ingenious, sensitivity to the fabric of the moral life. Reading through this work is rather like being on a moral 'dig' where one precious gem after the other is turned up. . . . It deals with the moral life as it is actually lived. Virtually any person on the street could identify with Pritchard's moral agents, whereas the moral agents in the texts of most philosophers turn out to be rarified creatures that no one would ever supposed had walked the earth. . . . Pritchard's discussion of Kohlberg is masterful and extraordinarily subtle--a most important and very significant addition to the literature on this central figure in moral development. The chapter "Accountability, Understanding, and Sentiments" is a ground-breaking piece."--Laurence Thomas, author of "Living Morally: A Psychology of Moral Character."

"Offers a thoughtful, imaginative, and responsible consideration of a broad range of issues in ethics that have engaged contemporary philosophers and psychologists."--Gareth Matthews, author of "Philosophy and the Young Child" and "Dialogues with Young Children."