Introduction to Ethical Theory

2019

We often make judgments about good and bad, right and wrong. Philosophical ethics is the critical examination of these and other concepts central to how we evaluate our own and each others’ behavior and choices. This text examines some of the main threads of discussion on these topics that have developed over the last couple of millenia, mostly within the Western cultural tradition. It considers basic questions about moral and ethical judgment: Is there such a thing as something that is really right or really wrong independent of time, place and perspective? What is the relationship between religion and ethics? How can we reconcile self-interest and ethics? Is it ever acceptable to harm one person in order to help others? What do recent discussions in evolutionary biology or have to say about human moral systems? What is the relation between gender and ethics? The authors invite you to participate in their exploration of these and many other questions in philosophical ethics.

A short survey of classical western theories of ethics.

Ethics: The Key Thinkers (2nd edition), 2023

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Bloomsbury Academic, 2012

From Plato to MacIntyre, my edited collection surveys the history of Western moral philosophy by guiding students new to the subject through the work and ideas of the field's most important figures. With entries written by leading contemporary scholars, the book covers such thinkers as: Plato [by myself]; Aristotle; Thomas Aquinas; David Hume; Immanuel Kant; J.S. Mill ; Friedrich Nietzsche; The book explores the contributions of each thinker individually, while also building a picture of how ethical thought has developed through their interactions. The book includes guides to the latest further reading on each thinker.

Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 1989

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2009

Lecture notes, Lakeland College Wisconsin, Japan Campus, Shinjuku, Tokyo, 2006-2007.

Philosophy in review, 1997

Normative ethics asks, what makes right acts right? W.D. Ross attempted to answer this question in The Right and the Good. Most theorists have agreed that Ross provided no systematic explanatory answers. Ross’s intuitionism lacks any decision procedure, and, McNaughton states, it ‘turns out after all to have nothing general to say about the relative stringency of our basic duties’. Here I’ll show that my own Rossian intuitionism does have a systematic way of explaining what makes right acts right. Deontological theories have struggled to say what internal to acts could make them right. From Price to Ross, the striking but uninformative answer has been the nature of the act. In this paper I’ll provide a Rossian theory of the moral natures of acts. It contains a set of self-evident principles of moral stringency and other considerations that can assist agents in deciding what prima facie duty overrides what.