This posthumous publication attempts to answer the question of what moral code is the most reasonable. Philosophers often turn to consequentialism or deontological ethics to address this issue. As the author points out, each has valid arguments but each is unable to get the other side to agree. To rectify this, he proposes a third way. Inside, readers will discover a theory that tries to do justice to both sides. The author first details consequentialism and deontological ethics. He also explains their fundamental conflict. One holds the view that you should do what has the best consequences. The other believes that there are actions which are wrong to do even if they have the best consequences. Next, the volume considers various ways to solve this conflict. Would rejecting one theory work? Or, is it possible to somehow reconcile them. The author shows why these solutions fail. He then goes on to present his own. The resulting contractual theory brings together the two opposing ethical convictions. It proposes that what is right and wrong depends on what norms people would agree to. Throughout, coverage explores the psychological, sociological, and historical background of the moral theories discussed. The reason is that moral theories are embedded in social and psychological contexts. They are better understood when the contexts are explicit. This key feature distinguishes the volume from other works in moral philosophy. At the time of his death in July 2011, Jan Österberg was close to completing this manuscript. It was taken up and fully completed by Erik Carlson and Ryszard Sliwinski, both of Uppsala University.

This work focuses on one of ethics' most insidious problems: the inability to make clear and consistent choices in everyday life. The practical tools and techniques in this book can help readers design a set of personal standards, based on sound ethical reasoning, for reducing everyday compromises.

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Marchetti offers a revisionist account of James's contribution to moral thought in the light of his pragmatic conception of philosophical activity. He sketches a composite picture of a Jamesian approach to ethics revolving around the key notion and practice of a therapeutic critique of one's ordinary moral convictions and style of moral reasoning.

Writing across theological disciplines, nine African American women scholars reflect on what it means to live as responsible doers of justice. With some classic essays and some contributions published here for the first time, each chapter in this new volume in the Library of Theological Ethics series presents analytical strategies for understanding the story of womanist scholarship in the service of the black community. The Library of Theological Ethics series focuses on what it means to think theologically and ethically. It presents a selection of important and otherwise unavailable texts in easily accessible form. Volumes in this series will enable sustained dialogue with predecessors though reflection on classic works in the field.

One of the most important philosophers of recent times, Morton White has spent a career building bridges among the increasingly fragmented worlds of the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. From a Philosophical Point of View is a selection of White's best essays, written over a period of more than sixty years. Together these selections represent the belief that philosophers should reflect not only on mathematics and science but also on other aspects of culture, such as religion, art, history, law, education, and morality. White's essays cover the full range of his interests: studies in ethics, the theory of knowledge, and metaphysics as well as in the philosophy of culture, the history of pragmatism, and allied currents in social, political, and legal thought. The book also includes pieces on philosophers who have influenced White at different stages of his career, among them William James, John Dewey, G. E. Moore, and W. V. Quine. Throughout, White argues from a holistic standpoint against a sharp epistemological distinction between logical and physical beliefs and also against an equally sharp one between descriptive and normative beliefs. White maintains that once the philosopher abandons the dogma that the logical analysis of mathematics and physics is the essence of his subject, he frees himself to resume his traditional role as a student of the central institutions of civilization. Philosophers should function not merely as spectators of all time and existence, he argues, but as empirically minded students of culture who try to use some of their ideas for the benefit of society.

This study of G. E. Moore’s work in moral philosophy draws upon a close examination of the early essays that preceded the writing of Principia Ethica in order to ground the author’s view that Moore’s famous "naturalistic fallacy argument" of Principia has been widely misunderstood. At the time of his death in 1986, Robert Peter Sylvester was in the process of preparing this book for publication. That process has been brought to completion by Ray Perkins, Jr., and R. W. Sleeper. Sylvester’s reappraisal of the moral philosophy of G. E. Moore argues that criticism of the work of this major twentieth-century British philosopher has been based on misinterpretation of his unified position. He treats Moore’s ideas about "What is Good?", "What things are Good?" and "What ought we to do?" as forming a coherent system. To bring this work up to date since the author’s death, the editors have provided a bibliographic essay following each chapter in which recent scholarship is discussed.

Reading a text is an ethical activity for Emmanuel Levinas. His moral philosophy considers written texts to be natural places to discover relations of responsibility in Western philosophical systems which are marked by extreme violence and totalizing hatred. While ethics is understood to mean a relationship with the other and reading is the appropriation of the other to the self, readings according to Levinas naturally entail relationships with the other. Levinas's own writings are often frought with the struggle between his own maleness, the concerns of feminism, and the Judaism that marks his contributions to the debates of the Talmud. This book uses male feminism as its perspective in presenting the applications of Levinas's ethical vision to texts whose readings have presented moral dilemmas for women readers. Levinas's philosophical theories can provide keys to unlock the difficulties of these texts whose readings will provide models of reading as ethical acts beginning with the ethical contract in Song of Songs where the assumption of a woman writer begins the elaboration of issues that sets a male reader as her other. From the reader's vantage point of seeing the self as other, other issues of male feminism become increasingly poignant, ranging from the solicitude of listening to Céline (Chapter 2), the responsibility for noise in Nizan (Chapter 3), the asymmetrical pattern of face-to-face relationships in Maupassant (Chapter 4), the sovereignty of laughter in Bataille and Zola (Chapter 5), the call of the other in Italo Svevo (Chapter 6), the Woman as Other in Breton (Chapter 7), the ethical self in Drieu la Rochelle (Chapter 8), the response to Hannah Arendt (Chapter 9), and the vulnerability of Bernard-Henri Lévy (Chapter 10). The male feminist reader is thus the incarnation of the struggle at the core of the issues outlined by Levinas for the act of reading as an ethical endeavor.