An international team of experts explores the distinction between 'thin' concepts (general, evaluative terms like 'good' and 'bad') and 'thick' concepts (more specific concepts, such as 'brave', or 'rude'). Their essays touch on key debates in metaethics about the evaluative and normative, and raise fascinating questions about how language works.

What is the difference between judging someone to be good and judging them to be kind? Both judgements are typically positive, but the latter seems to offer more description of the person: we get a more specific sense of what they are like. Very general evaluative concepts (such as good, bad, right and wrong) are referred to as thin concepts, whilst more specific ones (including brave, rude, gracious, wicked, sympathetic, and mean) are termed thick concepts. In this volume, an international team of experts addresses the questions that this distinction opens up. How do the descriptive and evaluative functions or elements of thick concepts combine with each other? Are these functions or elements separable in the first place? Is there a sharp division between thin and thick concepts? Can we mark interesting further distinctions between how thick ethical concepts work and how other thick concepts work, such as those found in aesthetics and epistemology? How, if at all, are thick concepts related to reasons and action? These questions, and others, touch on some of the deepest philosophical issues about the evaluative and normative. They force us to think hard about the place of the evaluative in a (seemingly) nonevaluative world, and raise fascinating issues about how language works.

This book explores, in rich and rigorous ways, the possibilities and limitations of “thick” (concepts of) autonomy in light of contemporary debates in philosophy, ethics, and bioethics. Many standard ethical theories and practices, particularly in domains such as biomedical ethics, incorporate minimal, formal, procedural concepts of personal autonomy and autonomous decisions and actions. Over the last three decades, concerns about the problems and limitations of these “thin” concepts have led to the formulation of “thick” concepts that highlight the mental, corporeal, biographical and social conditions of what it means to be a human person and that enrich concepts of autonomy, with direct implications for the ethical requirement to respect autonomy. The chapters in this book offer a wide range of perspectives on both the elements of and the relations (both positive and negative) between “thin” and “thick” concepts of autonomy as well as their relative roles and importance in ethics and bioethics. This book offers valuable and illuminating examinations of autonomy and respect for autonomy, relevant for audiences in philosophy, ethics, and bioethics.

The concepts we use to value and prescribe (concepts like good, right, ought) are historically contingent, and we could have found ourselves with others. But what does it mean to say that some concepts are better than others for purposes of action-guiding and deliberation? What is it to choose between different normative conceptual frameworks?

When Bernard Williams died in 2003, the Times newspaper hailed him as 'the greatest moral philosopher of his generation'. This collection of essays on Williams' work is essential reading for anyone interested in Williams, ethics and moral philosophy and philosophy in general.

This book examines contemporary structural social injustices from a feminist perspective. It asks: what makes oppression, discrimination, and domination wrongful? Is there a single wrongness-making feature of various social injustices that are due to social kind membership? Why is sexist oppression of women wrongful? What does the wrongfulness of patriarchal damage done to women consist in? In thinking about what normatively grounds social injustice, the book puts forward two related views. First, it argues for a paradigm shift in focus away from feminist philosophy that is organized around the gender concept woman, and towards feminist philosophy that is humanist. This is against the following theoretical backdrop: Politically effective feminism requires ways to elucidate how and why patriarchy damages women, and to articulate and defend feminism's critical claims. In order to meet these normative demands an influential theoretical outlook has emerged: for emancipatory purposes feminist philosophers should articulate a thick conception of the gender concept woman around which feminist philosophical work is organized. However, Part I of the book argues that we should resist this move, and that feminist philosophers should reframe their analyses of injustice in humanist terms. Second, the book spells out a humanist alternative to the more prevalent gender-focus in feminist philosophy. This hinges on a notion of dehumanization, which Part II of the book develops. The argued for understanding of dehumanization is used to explicate the wrongness-making feature of social injustices, both in general and of those due to patriarchy. Dehumanization is not another form of injustice-rather, it is that which makes forms of social injustice unjust. The book's second part then provides a regimentation of social injustice from a feminist perspective in order to spell out the specifics of the proposed humanist feminism, and to demonstrate how it improves some non-feminist analyses of injustice too.

Introduces the idea of a flexible approach to the human rights movement that returns to basics in an increasingly diverse and multipolar world.

Literature and Moral Theory investigates how literature, in the past 30 years, has been used as a means for transforming the Anglo-American moral philosophical landscape, which until recently was dominated by certain ways of ?doing theory?. It illuminates the unity of the overall agenda of the ethics/literature discussion in Anglo-American moral philosophy today, the affinities and differences between the separate strands discernible in the discussion, and the relationship of the ethics/literature discussion to other (complexly overlapping) trends in late-20th century Anglo-American moral philosophy: neo-Aristotelianism, post-Wittgensteinian ethics, particularism and anti-theory. It shows why contemporary philosophers have felt the need for literature, how they have come to use it for their own (philosophically radical) purposes of understanding and argument, and thus how this turn toward literature can be used for the benefit of a moral philosophy which is alive to the varieties of lived morality.