bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Mandeville, Bernard
Authors: Brown Charlotte R. 
Published: January 2013

AbstractAs journalist, satirist, social critic, and moral philosopher, Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733) aimed to be provocative and he succeeded. He attracted the attention of almost every thinker in the eighteenth century because his doctrines were thought to be offensive and dangerous. He was regarded as an advocate for immorality and irreligion as well as a more cynical reincarnation of Hobbes. He endorses government‐run brothels, argues that Christianity is useful for making good soldiers, and seems to defend the idea that vice makes a nation flourish and prosper. Moral philosophers were repelled by his depiction of human beings as selfish and unruly creatures and were shocked by his claim that morality is nothing but an invention used by clever politicians to tame us. Many took Mandeville to be denying the reality of virtue.
Sexual Equality
Authors: Brennan Samantha 
Published: January 2013

AbstractInequalities between men and women are of concern for moral and political philosophers, especially feminist philosophers, inasmuch as the ideal of equality (seeEquality) has shaped much of the history of ethics, and inasmuch as the inequalities between men and women remain so striking. Some political theorists, such as Will Kymlicka (1990), think of equality astheshared value at the core of a wide range of theories from Kantian deontology to utilitarianism and from Rawlsian liberalism (seeRawls, John) to libertarianism. While sexual equality as a normative (seeNormativity) ideal has proven more controversial than the notion of equality more generally, it too has guided much of our thinking in moral and political philosophy. Getting clarity on just what the ideal of sexual equality demands has been a matter of controversy among both advocates and critics of equality between the sexes. Some theorists opt for a very abstract notion of equality, such as equal moral worth or equal respect, while other theorists argue for a more robust, substantive account of equality which includes equality of treatment and/or equality of outcomes. Just as with the value of equality more generally, we see versions of sexual equality that are consequentialist (seeConsequentialism) in nature, where we evaluate states of affairs on the basis of inequality, and versions which are closer to deontological principles (seeDeontology), where sexual equality is seen as equal treatment and respect.
Islamic Ethics
Authors: Kelsay John 
Published: January 2013

Abstract

If we think of ethics in an Aristotelian sense – that is, as a discourse on the good life – then we might consider
al‐akhlaq
, the study of character, as the best candidate for an equivalent in Islamic tradition (
see
Aristotle; Character; Virtue; Virtue Ethics). And certainly one should consider the body of literature Muslims associate with this term, along with the related discourse on wisdom, virtue, and self‐formation associated with
falsafa
(philosophy),
adab
(letters), and a variety of Sufi texts.
Political Obligation
Authors: McCabe David 
Published: January 2013

Abstract

To have a political obligation is to have a duty to one's political community (perhaps to follow its laws, to defend it, to ensure its thriving, and so on) simply by virtue of one's membership in it. The central questions in the debates over political obligation are whether there are any such requirements and what grounds might justify them. Many approach this general issue through the question whether one has a duty to obey the law simply because the state has commanded it, a natural approach if one views political obligation as the flip side of state authority and holds that a state has authority if and only if its commands give rise to obligations (perhaps defeasible) that citizens act in certain ways. But as Knowles (2010) has argued, the idea of political obligation has greater extension than the question of the duty to obey law and touches on issues broader than that of political authority (
see
Authority). For example, if one's country is invaded one may have an obligation to enlist in its armed services even if no law compels one to do so. Indeed, membership in a political community may impose on one a duty to oppose certain decisions and policies of one's government. So even if questions about the duty to obey law are the most common and important way whereby citizens confront the issue of political obligation, we misunderstand the latter if we see it as just another way of asking about the former.
Criminal Law
Authors: Gardner John , Edwards James 
Published: January 2013

AbstractPhilosophical scholarship on the criminal law explores many questions and this essay deals with just four. First, what is criminal law? Any answer to this question will have something to say about criminal prosecution and punishment. If we are realistic about the damage both of these may do, we must also ask whether we are justified in having criminal law at all. If our answer to this second question does not entail abolition, we must face up to two more. We must ask what scope can permissibly be given to the criminal law, and we must ask which principles should determine whether and when we are criminally responsible for our actions.
Stevenson,C.L.
Authors: Tresan Jon 
Published: January 2013

AbstractCharles Leslie Stevenson (1908–79), a moral philosopher located primarily at the University of Michigan (1946–77), had a significant influence on the development of twentieth‐century moral thought. He exhibited and promoted three increasingly prominent characteristics in Anglo‐American philosophy: careful attention to ordinary uses of language, avoidance of posits beyond those supportable by ordinary scientific methods, and a focus on the “non‐cognitive” – emotional, motivational, social‐practical – features of morality. Early in the century, especially in the wake of Moore'sPrincipia Ethica(1903), many philosophers took moral discourse to be about a metaphysically distinctive subject matter: a realm of simple, nonnatural properties, implicated by terms like “good” and “right,” and known by direct intuition (seeMoore, G. E.; Nonnaturalism, Ethical; Intuitionism, Moral). By the 1960s that view had been eclipsed by the fundamentally different idea that moral discourse is not best understood by its subject matter but by its practical role: for expressing or evoking attitudes, telling people to do things, or promoting social coordination (seeNon‐Cognitivism). Stevenson was, with Ayer and Hare, among those most responsible for this intellectual revolution (seeAyer, A. J.; Hare, R. M.). His most influential works were “The Emotive Meaning of Moral Terms” (1937), andEthics and Language(1944). Some of his papers are collected inFacts and Values(1963).
Contractualism
Authors: Kumar Rahul 
Published: January 2013

AbstractContractualist moral theories aim to clarify the basis of familiar considered convictions concerning how it is and is not permissible for individuals to relate to one another. They are frequently identified with the view that how it is and is not permissible for individuals to relate to one another is fixed by principles for the general regulation of conduct, the principles in question being those that all persons within the moral domain would agree to were they to consider the matter under suitably specified conditions.
Trust
Authors: Jones Karen 
Published: January 2013

AbstractWe are finite social beings who depend on each other for many different things, from information, to the food we eat, the health care we receive, and our physical safety as we go about our daily life. Dependency inevitably brings with it risk, but, when well placed, it also enables us to achieve what we cannot achieve alone. The value of trust is not merely instrumental: trust is constitutive of morally significant relationships that make life meaningful, such as love and friendship. Trust is thus vital for human flourishing and so it is important to understand it. On the surface, trust is a two‐place relation: A trusts B. But this surface grammar belies a deeper three‐place structure, for the trust that we have in another is seldom global but is instead restricted to a domain or an action. Thinking of trust as a three‐place relation captures this tacit restriction: A trusts B to do Z (Baier 1986; Holton 1994). On some accounts of trust anything at all – people, machinery, animals – can fill the role of B; while on other accounts, only agents, whether human or artificial, such as corporations, are proper objects for trust. Central questions in the philosophy of trust to be addressed in this essay are: What is the value of trust? What is trust? What is trustworthiness? What sort of reasons can provide grounds to trust? When is trust justified?
Suicide
Authors: Cholbi Michael 
Published: January 2013

Abstract

Suicide is a controversial ethical issue in large part because the reasonings of (a) and (b) above appear plausible but support contradictory conclusions. (a) in effect asks: Why should we be granted an exemption to the prohibition on human killing when the person we kill is ourselves? What makes killing
oneself
so special? (b) on the other hand starts from the intuition that there is something special or distinctive about the moral relationship we stand in to ourselves, a relationship that can at least sometimes morally justify suicide. The reasoning of (a) and (b) thus establishes the contours of the ethical debate concerning the permissibility of suicide and explains why suicide is one of the most hotly debated issues in bioethics (
see
Bioethics).
Biocentrism
Authors: Attfield Robin 
Published: January 2013

AbstractBiocentrism holds that all living things are morally considerable (seeMoral Status), whereas many people hold that only human beings are so (seeAnthropocentrism). Certain Eastern religions, such as Jainism (seeJain Ethics), are biocentrist, but the first prominent Western thinker to advocate biocentrism was Albert Schweitzer, who, in his bookCivilization and Ethics(1923), coined the phrase “reverence for life.” For Schweitzer, everything that lives has a will to live (or an inbuilt drive toward self‐preservation and living its own life), and the reverence that one feels toward one's own “will‐to‐live” ought, morally, to be extended to all. However, no philosophically sophisticated version of biocentrism appeared until 1981, when Paul Warren Taylor published his article “The Ethics of Respect for Nature,” the themes of which he later developed in his bookRespect for Nature(1986).
Marcuse, Herbert
Authors: Pfeifer Geoff 
Published: January 2013

Abstract

Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) was a German‐born philosopher, social theorist, member of the Frankfurt School (
see
Critical Theory), and one of the leaders of the New Left movement in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. His conception of the ethical can best be understood in relation to his conception of politics and political liberation (
see
Political Ethics). Marcuse claims in
An Essay on Liberation
: “Political radicalism … implies moral radicalism: The emergence of a morality which might precondition man for freedom. This radicalism activates the elementary, organic foundation of morality in human beings” (Marcuse 1969: 10). He goes on to argue that morality itself is to be distinguished from various (and varying) historical and social conceptions of what it is to be a good person. The proper moral orientation is not relative (
see
Relativism, Moral) to history or culture but is rather “a ‘disposition’ of the organism perhaps rooted in the erotic drive to counter aggressiveness, to create and preserve ‘ever greater unities’ of life” (Marcuse 1969: 10). Morality is then, according to Marcuse, based in our biology, in our fundamental human nature, and is ultimately “an instinctual foundation for solidarity among human beings” (Marcuse 1969: 10). It is, however, according to Marcuse, the case that this biologically founded solidarity (
see
Solidarity) has been “repressed” and reconstructed by the structures of modern social, economic, and political life. For this reason, ethics and politics are inseparably linked. Ethical action requires that one must work to end the repressive political and social processes that have come to exist in order to free this biologically grounded solidarity among humans from its repression in modern society. Thus, Marcuse endorses a type of humanistic ethics in which ethical norms are founded on human nature (
see
Normativity).
Equality
Authors: Young Robert 
Published: January 2013

AbstractEquality is a relational notion: thus, for example, there is equality between two people in relation to a benefit (or a burden) when each receives the same benefit (or shoulders the same burden). This relational (or comparative) feature is common to all claims about equality, whether equality is considered afoundational value(e.g., in proclamations of “the equality of every person”), aformal value(e.g., in principles like “the equality of all before the law,” and in proscriptions against discrimination of various kinds), or asubstantive value(e.g., in the contention that the welfare of each person in a specific group should be equalized).
Brentano, Franz
Authors: Simons Peter 
Published: January 2013

Abstract

Franz Brentano (1838–1917) was one of the most influential philosophers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His students included many famous philosophers such as Edmund Husserl and Alexius Meinong, political leaders, and Sigmund Freud. He is a key figure for understanding phenomenology, object theory, gestalt psychology, and Polish analytic philosophy. His views on ethics influenced not only his students but also philosophers abroad like G. E. Moore (
see
Moore, G. E.). His Vienna lectures on ethics or “practical philosophy,” delivered many times between 1876 and 1894, were hugely popular and well attended. They remained unpublished during his lifetime, appearing in German only in 1952, and in English translation as
The Foundation and Construction of Ethics
(Brentano 1973a). For this reason his ethics have been important mainly for their influence on others. This includes the one important ethical work published in his lifetime, an 1889 address to lawyers,
The Origin of Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong
(Brentano 1969), a distillation of his thinking whose English translation Moore (1903) hailed with the words, “This is a far better discussion of the most fundamental principles of Ethics than any others with which I am acquainted.”
Courage
Authors: Wallace James D. 
Published: January 2013

Abstract

Courage and cowardice are of considerable intrinsic interest. A number of the philosophical discussions of the topic, moreover, raise fundamental philosophical problems about ethics, the nature of Emotion (
see
Emotion), Practical Reasoning (
see
Practical Reasoning), and Action (
see
Action), and about the relationships of these things to one another. Plato's and Aristotle's discussions of courage set many of the topics and issues pursued by later writers.
Wollaston, William
Authors: Tilley John J. 
Published: January 2013

AbstractWilliam Wollaston (1659–1724) was one of several early modern British moral theorists known today as “moral rationalists” (seeRationalism In Ethics). Others in this group included Ralph Cudworth, Samuel Clarke, John Balguy, and Richard Price (seeCudworth, Ralph; Clarke, Samuel; Balguy, John; Price, Richard). They were foils or opponents of such “moral sentimentalists” as Lord Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, and David Hume (seeShaftesbury, Third Earl of; Hutcheson, Francis; Hume, David), their disagreements with whom anticipated and influenced many later debates over moral cognitivism and moral intuitionism (seeCognitivism; Non‐Cognitivism; Intuitionism, Moral). Uniting the rationalists was the view that reason, rather than feeling, sentiment, or a moral sense, is the source of moral perceptions. Many rationalists held also that what we detect when we perceive moral rightness is some sort of “fitness,” reasonableness, or agreement with truth.
Health Surveillance, Ethics of
Authors: Fairchild Amy L. , Johns David Merritt 
Published: January 2013

AbstractEthics in the context of public health surveillance can be understood as the principles and values that guide the collection and use of names for the surveillance of infectious and chronic diseases (seeInfectious Diseases). The practice of public health traditionally has been animated by a concern for the well‐being of populations. Public health ethics (seePublic Health Ethics) reflects that orientation, providing a foundation for the affirmative duty to monitor threats to health, intervene to promote the public good, engage in research activities that produce generalizable knowledge, and promptly disseminate findings from such efforts to health officials, other stakeholders, and the public at large (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 1986). At the same time, there is consensus that surveillance activities designed to safeguard the public's health must be subject to some limits involving individual rights (Childress et al. 2002). Thus, even while prioritizing affirmative duties to promote population health, public health ethics has been characterized as a “code of restraint” that strives to fairly preserve the rights of individuals to noninterference (Kass 2001: 1777). In the case of surveillance, individual concerns and subsequent restraints typically involve claims to privacy (seePrivacy).
Civil Rights
Authors: Shin Patrick S. 
Published: January 2013

AbstractThe notion of civil rights encompasses a cluster of individual entitlements that protect individual dignity and collectively constitute basic, minimum requirements for free and equal membership in democratic society. These entitlements are generally understood to include rights against discrimination and subordinating segregation in employment, education, and housing, the freedom of speech and assembly, rights pertaining to religious exercise and liberty, voting rights, and an array of protections against abuses in the context of criminal law enforcement, trials, and punishments (seeDiscrimination; Speech, Freedom of; Liberty).
Business Ethics
Authors: Norman Wayne 
Published: January 2013

Abstract“Business ethics” is a concise, but in many ways misleading, label for an interdisciplinary field covering a vast range of normative issues in the world of commerce. The label lends itself most directly to a core set of questions about how individuals in the business world ought to behave, or what principles they might appeal to in order to negotiate moral dilemmas at work. But if we consider the array of topics covered in the leading business ethics journals or textbooks, we see that these core issues aboutindividualvirtues and ethical decision‐making are surrounded by layers of issues involvingorganizationsandinstitutions. In other words, business ethics in the broadest sense also inquires about the most appropriate or just designs for firms, markets, market regulations, and political oversight in a democratic society and a globalized economy.
Parents' Rights and Responsibilities
Authors: Brighouse Harry , Swift Adam 
Published: January 2013

AbstractAs early theories of rights developed in the seventeenth century, the idea that parents had extensive and strongly protected rights over their children was largely unquestioned. In Europe children were, mostly, treated by the law as the property of parents. But the basic paradigm of the “right” is a right to control over‐ or non‐interference with oneself, and, of course, children are not their parents, nor are they mere extensions of them. They are individuals in their own right, with their own separate interests, which they are, when young, ill‐positioned to protect and promote. So it is natural to question whether parents have rights over their children, and, if so, what those rights are, and what responsibilities they have to their children (seeAssociative Duties). By having a child one alters the environment for other people: one adds another person to the set of people to whom each other person has an obligation. One also alters the environment by raising a child: one can raise it to be cooperative or conflictual, friendly or hostile, someone who respects or harms others. So what responsibilities to other people accompany parenthood?
Hare, R. M.
Authors: Hare John E. 
Published: January 2013

AbstractRichard Mervyn Hare (henceforth RMH) lived from 1919 to 2002. He went to Oxford, where he studied classics and philosophy. In 1938, at the time of the Munich Agreement, he decided against pacifism and joined the Officer Training Corps. He was captured by the Japanese at the fall of Singapore, and was sent to work on the Burma–Thailand railway. While a prisoner, he wrote a book,An Essay on Monism, which was never published, but is now available in the library of Balliol College, Oxford. After the war, RMH returned to Oxford to finish his degree, but, as he writes in his autobiography, there had been a revolution in philosophy as a whole in Britain, and nowhere was this more apparent than in moral philosophy. Emotivism (seeemotivism), prefigured before the war by A. J. Ayer'sLanguage, Truth and Logic(1936;seeayer, a. j.), had been developed in a less belligerent form in Charles Stevenson'sEthics and Language(1944;seestevenson, c. l.). In RMH's first published book,The Language of Morals(1952), he proposed a return to a rational ethics in the Kantian mold (seekant, immanuel), acknowledging the recent developments in the philosophy of language associated with J. L. Austin and the “ordinary language” school of philosophy. It is striking that all three of the titles just mentioned contain the word “Language.” John Austin, after the war, had assembled a group of like‐minded philosophers, including RMH, who worked together to produce an account of the use in ordinary language of terms that constantly arise in philosophical discussion. Austin did not suppose that ordinary language was infallible, but he did think that it preserved a great deal of wisdom that had passed the test of centuries of experience, and that traditional philosophical discussions had ignored this resource. In his most influential book,How to Do Things with Words(1965), published after his death, he identified, as one fruit of his method, the diagnosis of what he called the “descriptive” fallacy, which is to hold that all utterances that look like statements are intended to record or impart straightforward information about the facts.
Methods of Practical Ethics
Authors: Arras John D. , Brody Howard 
Published: January 2013

AbstractScholars working in the field of practical ethics rightly tend to focus most of their attention on the practical problem at hand, whether it concerns the proper treatment of trees, duties to stockholders, protection of clinical research subjects, or promoting the health of populations. From time to time, however, such scholars become self‐reflective regarding the methods they use to reach their normative conclusions. Practical ethics has witnessed a robust debate regarding the proper method or methods that should be deployed in attempting to reach normative conclusions about cases or public policy. Some conceive this debate as a contest for methodological supremacy. To paraphrase Tolkien, there must be one method to rule them all. Others believe that some degree of methodological reflection is both unavoidable and salutary, but that the search for a single “best method” is a misguided enterprise. The latter group might counter that the interesting question is not “Which method?” but rather “What does self‐consciousness about method contribute to practical ethics?”