Levinas's ethical metaphysics is essentially a meditation on what makes ethical agency possible - that which enables us to act in the interest of another, to put the well-being of another before our own. This line of questioning found its inception in and drew its inspiration from the mass atrocities that occurred during the Second World War. The Holocaust, like the Cambodian genocide, or those in Rwanda and Srebrenica, exemplifies what have come to be known as the 'never again' situations. After these events, we looked back each time, with varying degrees of incomprehension, horror, anger...

This book explores the overlooked but vital theoretical relationships between R. M. Hare, Alan Gewirth, and Jurgen Habermas. The author claims their accounts of value, while failing to address classic virtue-theoretical critiques, bear the seeds of a resolution to the ultimate question "What is most valuable?" These dialectical approaches, as claimed, justify a reinterpretation of value and value judgment according to the Carnapian conception of an empirical-linguistic framework or grammar. Through a further synthesis with the work of Philippa Foot and Thomas Magnell, the author shows that...

Degradation, dehumanization, instrumentalization, humiliation, and non-recognition point to ways in which we understand human beings to be violated in their dignity. Then there are practices and situations that we associate negatively with human dignity; some more or less accepted, and others contested. This volume collates reflections on such abstract concepts and a range of concrete practices, deepening understanding of our negative vocabulary of violating human dignity, bringing to the surface inter-relationships and commonalities, and pointing to the values that are thereby shown to be in...

Jeffrie G. Murphy's third collection of essays further pursues the topics of punishment and retribution that were explored in his two previous collections: Retribution, Justice and Therapy and Retribution Reconsidered. Murphy now explores these topics in the light of reflections on issues that are normally associated with religion: forgiveness, mercy, and repentance. He also explores the general issue of theory and practice and discusses a variety of topics in applied ethics - e.g., freedom of artistic expression, the morality of gambling, and the value of...

2 first-person point of view, I acknowledge these possible handicaps and try to overcome them. Other people may coherently judge that I am incapable of figuring out correctly what I rationally ought to do, or they may inform me of reasons of which I had heretofore been ignorant, or they may try to help me overcome intellectual hindrances. Like me, these people would be assuming that the goal is to identify what I really rationally ought to do. Nevertheless, we are concerned with reasons for the agent to act in a certain way, rather than with reasons, say, for someone to want it to be the case...

How, if at all, can we do moral philosophy in the light of the radical critique made by Elizabeth Anscombe in "Modem Moral Philosophy"? Among the principal theses of this essay is that ethical thinking (that of philosophers and others) suffers from a widespread appeal to incoherent uses of terms such as 'obligation, ' 'ought, ' 'right' and 'wrong. ' In this book I first explain and evaluate her thesis and the argument for it, and I then confront the challenge it poses: what ways are there of doing moral philosophy that avoid the kind of incoherence to which she has drawn our attention? The...

According to the neutrality thesis, in designing state policies governments should not allow themselves to be informed by any particular conceptions of the good life. The aim of this book is to contribute to the debate about this thesis in two specific ways. Firstly, the limits of acceptable state perfectionism are examined, not on a general level but by reference to some particular concerns of government policy; transgenic animals, future generations, the promotion of the arts, minority cultures, the allocation of scarce health care resources, the integration of mentally handicapped people...

Ton van den Beld This book is one of the results of the international conference on Moral Responsibility and Ontology, which was held at Utrecht University in 1 June 1998. It contains a selection of the revised versions of the papers discussed at the conference. The theme is in need of some clarification. In the first place, 'responsi- bility' is an ambiguous term. Although addition of the adjective 'moral' reduces the variety of its meanings (for example, moral responsibility cannot be confused with causal responsibility), different interpretations are still possible. Thus, the care of...

Some time ago I wrote a book (Moral Language, 1982) in which I argued that moral judgments are capable of being true ('truth-apt, ' to use a current phrase, or descriptive and having truth-value, to use a more traditional term), that the methods of discovering moral facts are fundamentally similar to those of discovering non-moral facts, and that moral judgments may be true. What I did not do at that time was to develop a moral theory which would demonstrate how the method of discovering moral truths would work and what the criteria of truth actually are. In a later work (Persons, Animals,...