You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Barbara Herman argues for a radical shift in the way we perceive Kant's ethics. She convincingly reinterprets the key texts, at once allowing Kant to mean what he says while showing that what Kant says makes good moral sense. She urges us to abandon the tradition that describes Kantian ethics as a deontology, a moral system of rules of duty. She finds the central idea of Kantian ethics not in duty but in practical rationality as a norm of unconditioned goodness. This book both clarifies Kant's own theory and adds programmatic vitality to modern moral philosophy.
Herman draws on Kant to address both timeless issues in ethical theory and those arising from current moral questions, such as affirmative action and the costs of reparative justice. Challenging orthodoxies, he offers a view of moral competency as a complex achievement, governed by rational norms and dependent on supportive social conditions.
An intriguing look at vintage perfume's powerful past, including reviews of more than 300 scents, with stunning period advertisements throughout.
First published in 1990. The aim of this thesis is to show that the way to understand the central claims of Kant’s ethics is to accept the idea that morality is a distinctive form of rationality; that the moral "ought" belongs to a system of imperatives based in practical reason; and that moral judgment, therefore, is a species of rational assessment of agents’ actions. It argues, in effect, that you cannot understand Kant’s views about morality if you read him with Humean assumptions about rationality. This title will be of interest to students of philosophy.
In The Moral Habitat, Barbara Herman offers a new and systematic interpretation of Kant's moral and political philosophy. The study begins with an investigation of some understudied imperfect duties which, surprisingly, tell us some important but generally unnoticed facts about what it is to be a moral agent. The second part of the book launches a substantial reinterpretation of Kant's ethics as a system of duties, juridical and ethical, perfect and imperfect, that can incorporate what we learn from imperfect duties and do much more. This system of duties provides the structure for what Herman calls a moral habitat: a made environment, created by and for free and equal persons living togethe...
In The Moral Habitat, Barbara Herman offers a new and systematic interpretation of Kant's moral and political philosophy. The study begins with an investigation of some understudied imperfect duties which, surprisingly, tell us some important but generally unnoticed facts about what it is to be a moral agent. The second part of the book launches a substantial reinterpretation of Kant's ethics as a system of duties, juridical and ethical, perfect and imperfect, that can incorporate what we learn from imperfect duties and do much more. This system of duties provides the structure for what Herman calls a moral habitat: a made environment, created by and for free and equal persons living togethe...
Kantian Commitments comprises ten essays that represent a series of efforts to rethink many of the fundamentals of Kant's ethics and to draw out some implications for moral theory and practice. The essays of Part One revisit and revise central pieces of Kant's moral framework, offering a new understanding of the formulas of the categorical imperative, revisiting the idea of exceptions to duties, and sharpening the contrast between the value commitments of Kantian theory and other deontologies (especially recent contractualisms). The working hypothesis is to take seriously the idea that the formulas of the categorical imperative frame an account of moral reasoning with standards of validity a...
The essays in this volume offer an approach to the history of moral and political philosophy that takes its inspiration from John Rawls. The distinctive feature of this approach is to address substantive normative questions in moral and political philosophy through an analysis of the texts and theories of major figures in the history of the subject: Aristotle, Hobbes, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, and Marx. By reconstructing the core of these theories in a way that is informed by contemporary theoretical concerns, the contributors show how the history of the subject is a resource for understanding present and perennial problems in moral and political philosophy.
Many philosophers believe that normative ethics is in principle independent of psychology. By contrast, the authors of these essays explore the interconnections between psychology and moral theory. They investigate the psychological constraints on realizable ethical ideals and articulate the psychological assumptions behind traditional ethics. They also examine the ways in which the basic architecture of the mind, core emotions, patterns of individual development, social psychology, and the limits on human capacities for rational deliberation affect morality.
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.