Moral Philosophy: Selected Readings

Politics & Social Sciences

Sher, George

Philosophy

Harcourt College Pub.

REASON AT WORK is designed for Introduction to Philosophy courses where the instructor prefers to use a collection of readings to introduce the broad divisions of the discipline. This edition includes sixty-two readings organized into the six major branches of philosophical inquiry: Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy, Epistemology, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Religion, and Philosophy of Mind.

Reason at Work: Introductory Readings in Philosophy

Cahn, Steven M.

Cengage Learning'

SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY focuses on the theory of the state, both politically and socially. The text includes readings on "Functions and Purposes," decision making, and obligations, as well as equality, economics, and social commentary on each of three sections within the text.

Social and Political Philosophy

Kitcher, Patricia W.

Harcourt

The essays in Me, You, Us address a range of issues in moral philosophy, political philosophy, and moral psychology, but are unified by their starkly individualistic view of the moral subject. That view regards persons as permanently separated from others by the impenetrability of their subjectivities, and hence as the sole ultimate bearers of both interests and responsibility. Because they are organized around a strong form of moral individualism, the essays challenge recent tendencies to conceptualize normative issues in terms of relationships, collectivities, and social meanings. Of the twelve essays in the collection, the ones on ethics and metaethics deal with questions about the nature of moral standing, the basis of our moral equality, and the justification of the common practice of assigning greater weight to one's own interests than to the interests of others. The essays in political philosophy discuss both the ways in which the wider society does and does not penetrate the individual self and the recent influential attempt to redirect our thinking about justice from the distribution of goods to the relations of domination and subordination that obtain among individuals. The essays in moral psychology criticize some relational accounts of responsibility and blame, and address the complicated relation between what a person knows and what he is responsible and blameworthy for. Three of the collection's essays have not been previously published.

Me, You, Us: Essays

Oxford University Press

In Praise of Blame

Blame is an unpopular and neglected notion: it goes against the grain of a therapeutically-oriented culture and has received relatively little philosophical attention. This book discusses questions about its nature, normative status, and relation to character. The book's most important conclusion is that blame is inseparable from morality itself.

Blame is an unpopular and neglected notion: it goes against the grain of a therapeutically-oriented culture and has been far less discussed by philosophers than such related notions as responsibility and punishment. This book seeks to show that neither the opposition nor the neglect is justified. The book's most important conclusion is that blame is inseparable from morality itself--that any considerations that justify us in accepting a set of moral principles must also call for the condemnation of those who violate the principles. Properly understood, blame and morality must stand or fall together. Because blame has not received much sustained attention, the book works its way toward its conclusions by first raising, and then seeking to resolve, a series of conceptual and normative questions. These questions include: How are blameworthy acts related to the characters of the agents who perform them? Can agents deserve blame for their bad traits as well as their bad acts? Is blame best understood as a kind of action, a kind of belief, a kind of feeling, a combination of these elements, or something different entirely? What sort of normative concept is blameworthiness? How do blame and blameworthiness--correlative notions--fit together? Considered as a group, the questions yield a unified and comprehensive theory of both blame and blameworthiness. In developing that theory, the book both criticizes and draws inspiration from the two most important previous treatments of its topic: Hume's discussion of the relation between character and blame and Strawson's landmark discussion of the "reactive attitudes" However, the theory that emerges is neither Humean nor Strawsonion: it is a new theory that seeks to do more justice than its predecessors to the indispensable role that blame plays in our moral lives.

Who Knew?: Responsibility Without Awareness

To be responsible for their acts, agents must both perform those acts voluntarily and in some sense know what they are doing. Of these requirements, the voluntariness condition has been much discussed, but the epistemic condition has received far less attention. In Who Knew? George Sher seeks to rectify that imbalance. The book is divided in two halves, the first of which criticizes a popular but inadequate way of understanding the epistemic condition, while the second seeks to develop a more adequate alternative. It is often assumed that agents are responsible only for what they are aware of doing or bringing about--that their responsibility extends only as far as the searchlight of their consciousness. The book criticizes this "searchlight view" on two main grounds: first, that it is inconsistent with our attributions of responsibility to a broad range of agents who should but do not realize that they are acting wrongly or foolishly, and, second, that the view is not independently defensible. The book's positive view construes the crucial relation between an agent and his failure to recognize the wrongness or foolishness of what he is doing in causal terms: the agent is responsible when, and because, his failure to respond to his reasons for believing that he is acting wrongly or foolishly has its origins in the same constitutive psychology that generally does render him reason-responsive.

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Books by Sher, George

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Sher, George. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Moral Philosophy: Selected Readings

Reason at Work: Introductory Readings in Philosophy

Social and Political Philosophy

Moral Philosophy: Selected Readings

Reason at Work: Introductory Readings in Philosophy

Me, You, Us: Essays

In Praise of Blame

In Praise of Blame

Who Knew?: Responsibility Without Awareness

Who Knew?: Responsibility Without Awareness