Moral Philosophy

Ethics at the Cinema is a collection of original philosophical papers on film. Contributors were invited to engage with ethical issues raised within, or within the process of viewing, a single film; they were given the freedom to write on a topic and film of their choice. All contributors have previously written in ethics and/or the philosophy of film, but they come from a wide range of traditions and backgrounds within both. The collection is divided into two parts: ‘Part 1: Critique, Character, and the Power of Film’, and ‘Part 2: Philosophical Readings’. The papers in Part 1 engage explicitly with meta-issues surrounding film, film narratives, and film viewing. The papers comprising Part 2 are engaged less with issues about film than with the details of their chosen film: its characters, its plot, and its particular uses of images.

This is a book of three philosophical chapters on aspects of terrorism, torture, and war. It relates issues in ethical theory to practical ethics. The chapter on torture considers views about what torture is and the various occasions on which it could occur in order to determine why it might be wrong to torture a wrongdoer held captive, even if this were necessary to save his victims. The discussion of terrorism examines whether it is the intention to harm civilians rather than harm to them being “collateral damage” that makes terrorism distinctively wrong, what else might make it wrong, and whether it is always wrong. The third chapter first discusses whether having a right reason, in the sense of a right intention, is necessary in order for starting war to be just. It then examines ways in which the harms of war can be proportional to the achievement of the just cause and other goods war can bring about, so as to make starting war permissible.

The book presents the ethics of care as a promising alternative to more familiar moral theories. The ethics of care is only a few decades old, yet it has become a distinct moral theory or normative approach, relevant to global and political matters as well as to the personal relations that can most clearly exemplify care. The book examines the central ideas, characteristics, and potential importance of the ethics of care. It discusses the feminist roots of this moral approach and why the ethics of care can be a morality with universal appeal. The book explores what is meant by “care” and what a caring person is like. Where such other moral theories as Kantian morality and utilitarianism demand impartiality above all, the ethics of care understands the moral import of ties to families and groups. It evaluates such ties, differing from virtue ethics by focusing on caring relations rather than the virtues of individuals. The book proposes how values such as justice, equality, and individual rights can “fit together” with values such as care, trust, mutual consideration, and solidarity. In considering the potential of the ethics of care for dealing with social issues, the book shows how the ethics of care is more promising than other moral theories for advice on how limited or expansive markets should be, showing how values other than market ones should have priority in such activities as childcare, health care, education, and in cultural activities. Finally, the book connects the ethics of care with the rising interest in civil society, and with limits on what law and rights are thought able to accomplish. It shows the promise of the ethics of care for dealing with global problems and with efforts to foster international civility.

Consent is a basic component of the ethics of human relations, making permissible a wide range of conduct that would otherwise be wrongful. Consent marks the difference between slavery and employment, permissible sexual relations and rape, borrowing or selling and theft, medical treatment and battery, participation in research and being a human guinea pig. This book assembles the contributions of a distinguished group of scholars concerning the ethics of consent in theory and practice. Part One addresses theoretical perspectives on the nature and moral force of consent, and its relationship to key ethical concepts such as autonomy and paternalism. Part Two examines consent in a broad range of contexts, including sexual relations, contracts, selling organs, political legitimacy, medicine, and research.

A comprehensive study of the ethics of killing in cases in which the metaphysical or moral status of the individual killed is uncertain or controversial. Among those beings whose status is questionable or marginal in this way are human embryos and fetuses, newborn infants, animals, anencephalic infants, human beings with severe congenital and cognitive impairments, and human beings who have become severely demented or irreversibly comatose. In an effort to understand the moral status of these beings, this book develops and defends distinctive accounts of the nature of personal identity, the evaluation of death, and the wrongness of killing. The central metaphysical claim of the book is that we are neither nonmaterial souls nor human organisms but are instead embodied minds. In ethical theory, one of the central claims is that the morality of killing is not unitary; rather, the principles that determine the morality of killing in marginal cases are different from those that govern the killing of persons who are self‐conscious and rational. Another important theme is that killing in marginal cases should be evaluated in terms of the impact it would have on the victim at the time rather than on the value of the victim's life as a whole. What primarily matters is how killing would affect that which would be rational for the victim to care about at the time of death. By appealing to various foundational claims about identity, death, and the morality of killing, this book yields novel conclusions about such issues as abortion, prenatal injury, infanticide, the killing of animals, the significance of brain death, the termination of life support in cases of persistent vegetative state, the use of anencephalic infants as sources of organs for transplantation, euthanasia, assisted suicide, and advance directives in cases of dementia. In particular, the book defends the moral permissibility of abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia in certain cases and argues that brain death is not the appropriate criterion of death either for a person or a human organism.

It is argued that the strong claim biological parents have to raise their children isn't a property right but an instance of our general right to continue whatever we have begun. Implications are drawn for a wide range of cases in which there is a dispute over who should serve as parents to a child. Arguments are offered against saying that our only proper concern in such cases is the best interest of the child. A way is offered of also identifying what claims the various adults have in the matter and deciding how those are properly balanced with the child's own claims. The book also contends that children have a claim of their own to have their autonomy respected. Conclusions are drawn about paternalism toward one's children, about reacting differently to bad behavior when the wrongdoer is “only a child,” and about the way in which children should participate in their raising. A final set of chapters concern parents and their grown children. One conclusion is that parents do not have an obligation to love their grown children come what may. Another is that the filial obligations grown children have are best understood not as debts of gratitude but as obligations to give your parents a place in your affections that is roughly equivalent to the one they gave you while you were under their care. The closing chapter offers an alternative to John Hardwig's view about an obligation to die rather than cost your loved ones too dearly.

Millions of children suffer from diseases and illnesses who do not have adequate treatment. And many other children are harmed by medicines intended to help them. To protect and help these children society needs to conduct pediatric research. Yet, critics and courts have argued that it is unethical to expose children to research risks for the benefit of others. They argue that this practice violates our obligation to protect children and exploits them for the benefit of others. In this way, clinical research with children poses what appears to be an irresolvable dilemma: either we can protect pediatric subjects from exploitation or we can protect pediatric patients from dangerous medicines, but not both. The present work, which is the first to systematically evaluate this dilemma, offers an original justification for pediatric research based on an in-depth analysis of when it is in our interests to help others.

The book is in three parts. The first part discusses the nature of contributory reasons, set in the more general context of normative theory. It introduces and defends a distinction between reasons and enabling conditions, and considers some other roles that considerations that are morally relevant but not reasons might play. It also asks which meta-ethical positions have the tools necessary to capture the role of contributory reasons. The second part uses these results to argue for holism in the theory of reasons, and to construct an argument from that holism to particularism in ethics, which is characterised as the view that moral thought and judgement in no way depend on a suitable provision of moral principles. There is also a chapter on the epistemology of moral reasons, from a particularist point of view. The third part is concerned with the theory of value, in particular with a form of holism there which is analogous to holism in the theory of reasons. There is a final chapter on holism in the theory of choice.

Considers the following questions: What accounts for the existence of basic moral disagreements? Why do most people think it is worse to injure someone than to fail to save them from injury? Where does the right of self‐defence come from? Why do many people think it is morally permissible to treat animals in ways we would not treat people? Why are some people moral relativists and others not? What is it to value something and what is it to value something intrinsically? How are a person's values (noun) related to what the person values (verb)? How much of morality can or should be explained in terms of human flourishing or the possession of virtuous character traits? For that matter, are there character traits of the sort we normally suppose there are? How do people come to be moral? Is morality something one learns or does it arise in everyone naturally without instruction?

This book argues that the global economy generates significant egalitarian requirements of fairness, independently of humanitarian, human rights, or other justice concerns. Answering both economic and political forms of skepticism about fairness, the book argues that the global economy as we know it is organized by an international social practice in which countries mutually rely upon common markets. This practice of mutual reliance generates shared responsibilities of “structural equity” for how the benefits and burdens of the global economy are distributed across different societies and their respective social classes. These basic responsibilities are characterized by three basic principles. The principles require compensation of people harmed by their exposure to global economic forces through robust social insurance schemes, and equal division of the “gains of trade,” across and within societies, unless still greater gains flow to developing countries. Fairness so calls for strong social insurance schemes, international capital controls, policy flexibility for developing countries, and more, as the “fair price” of free trade.