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Principles and Persons
Principles and Persons contains twenty-one new essays addressed to themes drawn from the work of the late Derek Parfit. Topics include the nature of reasons and duties, the rationality of our attitudes to time, and the question of personal identity.
Ethics and Existence
Derek Parfit, who died in 2017, is widely believed to have been the best moral philosopher in well over a century. The twenty new essays in this book were written in his honour and have all been inspired by his work--in particular, his work in an area of moral philosophy known as 'population ethics', which is concerned with moral issues raised by causing people to exist. Until Parfit began writing about these issues in the 1970s, there was almost no discussion of them in the entire history of philosophy. But his monumental book Reasons and Persons (OUP, 1984) revealed that population ethics abounds in deep and intractable problems and paradoxes that not only challenge all the major moral the...
Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, Volume 6
Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics is an annual forum for new work in normative ethical theory. Leading philosophers present original contributions to our understanding of a wide range of moral issues and positions, from analysis of competing approaches to normative ethics (including moral realism, constructivism, and expressivism) to questions of how we should act and live well. OSNE will be an essential resource for scholars and students working in moral philosophy.
The Rules of Rescue
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. In The Rules of Rescue, Theron Pummer argues that we are often morally required to engage in effective altruism, directing altruistic efforts in ways that help the most. Even when the personal sacrifice involved makes it morally permissible not to help at all, he contends, it often remains wrong to provide less help rather than more. He argues that the ubiquity of opportunities to help distant strangers threatens to make morality extremely demanding, and that it is only thanks to adequate permissions grounded in considerations of cost and autonomy that we may pursue our own plans and projects. He concludes that many of us are required to provide no less help over our lives than we would have done if we were effective altruists.
Being Good in a World of Need
"Ours is a rich world filled with misery. This gives rise to a pressing question: how should the well-off respond to the needy? Peter Singer famously argued that just as we have an obligation to save a drowning child, we have an obligation to support charities like Oxfam. Inspired by Singer, Effective Altruism holds that we ought to support those charities doing the most good. Being Good in a World of Need powerfully challenges these views. Drawing on many sources, Temkin illustrates many disanalogies between saving a drowning child and supporting international charities, involving: intervening agents; effects of one's actions; corruption; responsibility; accidents versus injustice; and aid ...
The Bounds of Defense
Most people believe that killing someone, while generally morally wrong, can in some cases be a permissible act. Most people similarly believe that war, while awful, can be justified. Bradley Jay Strawser examines a set of related moral issues in war: when it is permissible to kill in defense of others; what moral responsibility would be required to be liable for such defensive killing; how that permission can extend to whole groups of people; and, lastly, what values undergird the permissibility of that defense, such as individual autonomy. Strawser argues for a rights-based account of permissible defensive harm and an 'evidence-relative' basis for the holding those responsible. His view is...
Morality from Compassion
According to Arthur Schopenhauer, compassion is the basis of morality. He sees concern for justice as a negative form of compassion, directed at not harming anyone, as opposed to the more far-reaching, positive form of benefiting. He thinks a higher degree of compassion involves realizing that the spatio-temporal separation of individuals is illusory and that in reality they are all identical. Such compassion is impartial and all-encompassing. Compassion is suited to be the centre of morality because its object are negative feelings, and only these are real. Contrary to these Schopenhauerian claims, it is here argued that compassion must be supplemented with attitudes like sympathy and benev...
The Pecking Order
A trenchant case for a novel philosophical position: that our political thinking is driven less by commitments to freedom or fairness than by an aversion to hierarchy. Niko Kolodny argues that, to a far greater extent than we recognize, our political thinking is driven by a concern to avoid relations of inferiority. In order to make sense of the most familiar ideas in our political thought and discourse—the justification of the state, democracy, and rule of law, as well as objections to paternalism and corruption—we cannot merely appeal to freedom, as libertarians do, or to distributive fairness, as liberals do. We must instead appeal directly to claims against inferiority—to the convi...
Normativity, Rationality and Reasoning
This volume is a selection of Broome's recent papers on normativity, rationality, and reasoning. It covers a variety of topics such as the meanings of 'ought', 'reason', and 'reasons'; the fundamental structure of normativity and the metaphysical priority of ought over reasons; the ownership - or agent-relativity - of oughts and reasons; the distinction between rationality and normativity; the notion of rational motivation; what characterizes the human activity of reasoning, and what is the role of normativity within it; the nature of preferences and of reasoning with preferences; and others. These papers extend the work presented in his book Rationality Through Reasoning but there is little overlap between their content and the book's. They develop further some themes and arguments from the book, and answer some questions that the book left unanswered.
The Oxford Handbook of Population Ethics
'The Oxford Handbook of Population Ethics' presents up-to-date theoretical analyses of various problems associated with the moral standing of future people and animals in current decision-making. The essays in this handbook shed light on the value of population change and the nature of our obligations to future generations. It brings together world-leading philosophers to introduce readers to some of the paradoxes of population ethics, challenge some fundamental assumptions that may be taken for granted in debates concerning the value of population change, and apply these problems and assumptions to real-world decisions.--
