Suffering and Moral Responsibility

ISBN-13: 9780195115994 / Angielski / Twarda / 1999 / 256 str.

Jamie Mayerfeld

Opis

In this original study, Jamie Mayerfeld undertakes a careful inquiry into the meaning and moral significance of suffering. Understanding suffering in hedonistic terms as an affliction of feeling, he addresses difficulties associated with its identification and measurement. He then turns to an examination of the duty to relieve suffering: its content, its weight relative to other moral considerations, and the role it should play in our lives.

Among the claims defended in the book are that suffering needs to be distinguished from both physical pain and the frustration of desire, that interpersonal comparisons of the intensity of happiness and suffering are possible, that several psychological processes hinder our awareness of other people's suffering, and that the prevention of suffering should often be pursued indirectly. Mayerfeld concludes his discussion by arguing that the reduction of suffering is morally more important than the promotion of happiness, and that most of us greatly underestimate the force of the duty to prevent suffering.

As the first systematic book-length inquiry into the moral significance of suffering, Suffering and Moral Responsibility makes an important contribution to moral philosophy and political theory, and will interest specialists in each of these areas.

Recenzje

Those who want their morality tough, demanding, and impersonal will find much to like in Jamie Mayerfeld's Suffering and Moral Responsibility ... Mayerfeld's book is an important one ... the overall effect of the book is a haunting challenge to us all to come to grips with what suffering is and what our moral responsibilities are to alleviating it. Few will leave the book inspired, but many sobered, and that is an achievment.