Reconciling Our Aims: In Search of Bases for Ethics

ISBN-13: 9780195370423 / Angielski / Twarda / 2008 / 224 str.

Allan Gibbard

Opis

In these three Tanner lectures, distinguished ethical theorist Allan Gibbard explores the nature of normative thought and the bases of ethics. In the first lecture he explores the role of intuitions in moral thinking and offers a way of thinking about the intuitive method of moral inquiry that both places this activity within the natural world and makes sense of it as an indispensable part of our lives as planners. In the second and third lectures he takes up the kind of substantive ethical inquiry he has described in the first lecture, asking how we might live together on terms that none of us could reasonably reject. Since working at cross purposes loses fruits that might stem from cooperation, he argues, any consistent ethos that meets this test would be, in a crucial way, utilitarian. It would reconcile our individual aims to establish, in Kant's phrase, a "kingdom of ends." The volume also contains an introduction by Barry Stroud, the volume editor, critiques by Michael Bratman (Stanford University), John Broome (Oxford University), and F. M. Kamm (Harvard University), and Gibbard's responses.

Recenzje

a work of impressive scope for a slim volume. ... Gibbard's own naturalistic picture of the normative is exceptionally rich, and the ways in which he develops it in Reconciling Our Aims are fascinating for anyone interested in the bases of ethics and of normativity in general.

O autorze

Allan Gibbard is Richard B. Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has been President of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association, and is Member of the American Philosophical Society, Membre Titulaire of the Institut International de Philosophie, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Fellow of the Econometric Society. He is the author of Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (1990), Thinking How to Live (2003), and numerous articles both in ethical theory and in such fields as theory of social choice, decision theory, evolutionary moral psychology, philosophy of mind and language, and epistemology.