General

As long as large segments of humanity are suffering chronic poverty and dying from treatable diseases, organized giving can save or enhance millions of lives. With the law providing little guidance, ethics has a crucial role to play in ensuring that the philanthropic practices of individuals, foundations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), governments, and international agencies are morally sound and effective. This book brings together an international group of distinguished philosophers, social scientists, lawyers, and practitioners to identify and address the most urgent moral questions arising today in the practice of philanthropy. The topics discussed include the psychology of giving, the reasons for and against a duty to give, the accountability of NGOs and foundations, the questionable marketing practices of some NGOs, the moral priorities that should inform NGO decisions about how to target and design their projects, the good and bad effects of aid, and the charitable tax deduction along with the water's edge policy now limiting its reach. This groundbreaking volume can help bring our practice of charity closer to meeting the vital needs of the millions worldwide who depend on voluntary contributions for their very lives.

Happiness in Good Lives explores happiness as an important dimension of fully desirable lives. Happiness is defined as loving one’s life, valuing it in ways manifested by ample enjoyment and a robust sense of meaning. As such, it interacts with all other dimensions of good lives, in particular with moral decency and goodness, authenticity, mental health, self-fulfillment, and meaningfulness. The book integrates philosophical issues with topics of broad human interest, and it includes chapters on how happiness connects with the virtues, love, philanthropy, suffering, simplicity, balancing work and leisure, and politics. Happiness is a moral value, as well as a self-interested value, which we have a responsibility as well as a right to pursue. Myriad specific virtues contribute to pursuing happiness, and in turn happiness contributes to or manifests an array of virtues such as love, self-respect, gratitude, and hope. Although happiness is by no means the entirety of good lives, it helps define some additional aspects of good lives, including authenticity, self-fulfillment, meaningfulness, and mental health. It also enters into understanding what it means to live a balanced life, and also a simple life centered on what matters most. The moral status of happiness is a central concern in the history of ethics. Recent “positive psychology” has breathed new life into traditional philosophical issues, and the book draws extensively on psychological studies. It also uses myriad examples from memoirs, novels, and films. One chapter is devoted to assessing the claim of Mary Shelley’s monster in Frankenstein: “Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.”

This book provides a new interpretation of the ethical theory of G.W.F. Hegel. The aim is not only to give a new interpretation for specialists in German Idealism, but also to provide an analysis that makes Hegel's ethics accessible for all scholars working in ethical and political philosophy. While Hegel's political philosophy has received a good deal of attention in the literature, the core of his ethics has eluded careful exposition, in large part because it is contained in his claims about conscience. The book shows that, contrary to accepted wisdom, conscience is the central concept for understanding Hegel's view of practical reason and therefore for understanding his ethics as a whole. The argument combines careful exegesis of key passages in Hegel's texts with detailed treatments of problems in contemporary ethics and reconstructions of Hegel's answers to those problems. The main goals are to render comprehensible Hegel's notoriously difficult texts by framing arguments with debates in contemporary ethics, and to show that Hegel still has much to teach us about the issues that matter to us most. Central topics covered in the book are the connection of self‐consciousness and agency, the relation of motivating and justifying reasons, moral deliberation and the holism of moral reasoning, mutual recognition, and the rationality of social institutions.

Hegel's version of naturalism is drawn from Aristotelian naturalism: Hegel fused Aristotle's conception of nature with his insistence that the origin and development of philosophy has empirical physics as its presupposition. As a result, Hegel found that, although modern nature must be understood as a whole to be nonpurposive, there is nonetheless a place for Aristotelian purposiveness within such nature. Such a naturalism provides the framework for explaining how we are both natural organisms and also practically minded (self‐determining, rationally responsive, reason‐giving) beings. In arguing for this point, Hegel shows that the kind of self‐division that is characteristic of human agency also provides human agents with an updated version of an Aristotelian final end of life. In making his case, Hegel argues that both the antinomies of philosophical thought and the essential fragmentation of modern life are all not to be understood as overcome in a higher order unity in the “state.” On the contrary, Hegel demonstrates that modern institutions do not resolve such tensions any more than a comprehensive philosophical account can resolve them theoretically. The job of modern practices and institutions (and at a reflective level the task of modern philosophy) is to help us understand and live with precisely the unresolvability of these oppositions.

This book consists in a series of chapters that trace the development of a distinctively Hegelian approach to metaphysics and certain central metaphysical issues. It begins with an introduction that considers this theme as a whole, followed by a section of chapters on Hegel himself, concerning his idealism, his theory of truth, and his claim concerning the rationality of the actual in the Preface to the Philosophy of Right. The following chapters then focus on the way in which certain key metaphysical ideas in Hegel's system, such as his doctrine of the ‘concrete universal’ and his conception of truth, relate to the thinking of the British Idealists on the one hand, and the American Pragmatists on the other. The chapter concludes by examining a critique of Hegel's metaphysical position from the perspective of the ‘continental’ tradition, and in particular Gilles Deleuze.

Seemingly every day society faces a new ethical challenge raised by a scientific innovation. Human genetic engineering, stem cell research, face transplantation, synthetic biology – all were science fiction only a few decades ago, but are now all are reality. How do we as a society decide whether these technologies are ethical? For decades professional bioethicists have served as a mediator between a busy public and decision-makers, helping people understand their own ethical concerns, framing arguments, discrediting illogical claims and lifting up promising ones. These bioethicists operate in multiple venues such as hospital decision-making, institutions that conduct research on humans, and recommending ethical policy to the government. While functioning quite well for many years, the bioethics profession is in crisis. Policy-makers are less inclined to take the advice of bioethics professionals, with many observers saying that bioethics debates have simply become partisan politics with dueling democratic and republican bioethicists. While this crisis is contained to the task of recommending ethical policy to the government, there is risk that it will spread to the other tasks conducted by bioethicists. To understand how this situation came into being, and the solution to this problem, this book closely examines the history of the bioethics profession. Bioethics debates were originally dominated by theologians, but came to be dominated by the emerging profession of bioethics due to the subtle and slow involvement of the government as the primary consumer of bioethical arguments. However, after the 1980s the views of the government changed, making bioethical arguments not quite so legitimate. With this knowledge of the sociological processes that lead to this evolution, the book proposes a radical solution to the crisis, which is for the bioethics profession to give up on some of the work that it currently does so that it can focus upon its strengths, and change the way the profession makes ethical arguments.

Is shame social? Is it superficial? Is it a morally problematic emotion? Researchers in disciplines as different as psychology, philosophy, and anthropology have thought so. But what is the nature of shame and why are claims regarding its social nature and moral standing interesting and important? Do they tell us anything worthwhile about the value of shame and its potential legal and political applications? In this book, the authors propose an original philosophical account of shame aimed at answering these questions. The book begins with a detailed examination of the evidence and arguments that are taken to support what they call the two dogmas about shame: its alleged social nature and its morally dubious character. Their analysis is conducted against the backdrop of a novel account of shame and ultimately leads to the rejection of these two dogmas. On this account, shame involves a specific form of negative evaluation that the subject takes towards herself: a verdict of incapacity with regard to values to which she is attached. One central virtue of the account resides in the subtle manner it clarifies the ways in which the subject’s identity is at stake in shame, thus shedding light on many aspects of this complex emotion and allowing for a sophisticated understanding of its moral significance. This philosophical account of shame engages with all the current debates on shame as they are conducted within disciplines as varied as ethics, moral, experimental, developmental and evolutionary psychology, anthropology, legal studies, feminist studies, politics and public policy.

This book develops a Platonic creation story. The cosmos exists just because of the ethical need for it. We, and all the intricate structures of our universe, exist as intricately structured thoughts in a divine mind that knows everything worth knowing. There could also be infinitely many other universes in this mind, and after death we might explore the wonders of its knowledge. Minds of the same kind could exist in infinite number. This book unfolds a view of the nature of the universe. This view is unusual, but rich in philosophical inspiration and suggestion. Over the last three decades the author has been developing his theory in a series of publications; now this book gives it its definitive exposition.

Is it fair to leave the next generation a public debt? Is it defensible to impose legal rules on them through constitutional constraints? From combating climate change to ensuring proper funding for future pensions, concerns about ethics between generations are everywhere. In this book sixteen philosophers explore intergenerational justice. Part One examines the ways in which various theories of justice look at the matter. These include libertarian, Rawlsian, sufficientarian, contractarian, communitarian, Marxian, and reciprocity-based approaches. In Part Two, the chapters look more specifically at issues relevant to each of these theories, such as motivation to act fairly towards future generations, the population dimension, the formation of preferences through education and how they impact on our intergenerational obligations, and whether it is fair to rely on constitutional devices.

The “Art of Life” is John Stuart Mill's name for his account of practical reason. In this volume, eleven leading scholars elucidate this fundamental, but widely neglected, element of Mill's thought. Mill divides the Art of Life into three “departments”: “Morality, Prudence or Policy, and Æsthetics.” The first section investigates the relation between the departments of morality and prudence. The chapters ask whether Mill is a rule utilitarian and, if so, whether his practical philosophy must be incoherent. The second section explores the relation between the departments of morality and aesthetics. It discusses issues ranging from supererogation to aesthetic pleasure and humanity's relationship with nature. The chapters in the third section consider the Art of Life's axiological first principle, the principle of utility. This part of the book contends that Mill's own life refutes his claim that the Art of Life has a single axiological first principle. It then maintains that Mill has a dynamic axiology requiring us to continually refine our conception of the good. In the final section, three chapters address what it means to put the Art of Life into practice. Firstly, this part of the book locates an “art of ethics” in On Liberty that is in tension with the Art of Life. It then plumbs the classical roots of Mill's view of the good life. Finally, the book develops Mill's suggestion that we regard our own lives as works of art.