Modern Moral Philosophy

Collection of original essays by leading researchers on current approaches to moral philosophy.

Anscombe's 1958 paper challenged the very foundations of moral philosophy, the discipline that tries to understand and differentiate between actions, right and wrong. It argues that moral philosophy should not be explored until a philosophy of psychology is already in place, and that, without a belief in God, morality can have no absolute rules.

Moral Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction is a compact yet comprehensive book offering an explication and critique of the major theories that have shaped philosophical ethics. Engaging with both historical and contemporary figures, this book explores the scope, limits, and requirements of morality. DeNicola traces our various attempts to ground morality: in nature, in religion, in culture, in social contracts, and in aspects of the human person such as reason, emotions, caring, and intuition.

This remarkable book is the most comprehensive study ever written of the history of moral philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its aim is to set Kant's still influential ethics in its historical context by showing in detail what the central questions in moral philosophy were for him and how he arrived at his own distinctive ethical views. The book is organised into four main sections, each exploring moral philosophy by discussing the work of many influential philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In an epilogue the author discusses Kant's view of his own historicity, and of the aims of moral philosophy. In its range, in its analyses of many philosophers not discussed elsewhere, and in revealing the subtle interweaving of religious and political thought with moral philosophy, this is an unprecedented account of the evolution of Kant's ethics.

The outstanding features of this book are that it directly confronts the challenge posed by G.E.M. Anscombe in Modern Moral Philosophy of how moral philosophy can be done, it makes a significant contribution to the debate on virtue theory and anti-theory in ethics, and it shows the relevance of such theoretical discussion by grounding it in, and applying it to, contemporary moral issues such as abortion, suicide, and the moral status of animals. No other book currently available covers this ground. The book is aimed primarily at upper-level undergraduates, graduate students and faculty in philosophy, but it should be accessible to anyone with an interest in practical ethics or the philosophy of Wittgenstein.

A completely revised and updated second edition of Modern Moral Philosophy , first published in 1970. During the twentieth-century many philosophers of the analytical tradition have debated the meaning of moral judgements. This book analyzes the principle moves and countermoves in that debate. To the first five chapters of the original edition Dr Hudson has added three new chapters on The Derivation of Ought from Is , Further Forms of Descriptivism and Anti-Utilitarianism and the Two-level Theory , taking into account the recent work of Gewirth, Geach, Philippa Foot, Hampshire, Williams, MacIntyre, Hare and other contemporary philosophers.

Constantly revised and refined over three decades, Rawls's lectures on various historical figures reflect his developing and changing views on the history of liberalism and democracy. With its careful analyses of the doctrine of the social contract, utilitarianism, and socialism, this volume has a critical place in the traditions it expounds.