Ethics: The Key Thinkers

281 Pages·2012·1.456 MB·English

by  Tom Angier (editor)

Ethics: The Key
Thinkers
Key ThinKers
The Key Thinkers series is aimed at undergraduate students and
offers clear, concise and accessible edited guides to the key
thinkers in each of the central topics in philosophy. Each book
offers a comprehensive overview of the major thinkers who
have contributed to the historical development of a key area
of philosophy, providing a survey of their major works and the
evolution of the central ideas in that area.
Key Thinkers in Philosophy available now from Bloomsbury:
Aesthetics, Edited by Alessandro Giovannelli
Epistemology, Edited by Stephen Hetherington
Philosophy of Language, Edited by Barry Lee
Philosophy of Religion, Edited by Jeffrey J. Jordan
Philosophy of Science, Edited by James Robert Brown
Ethics: The Key
Thinkers
EditEd by
tom AngiEr
LONDON • NEW DELHI • NEW YORK • SYDNEY
Bloomsbury Academic
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www.bloomsbury.com
First published 2012
© Tom Angier and Contributors, 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including p hotocopying,
recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior
permission in writing from the publishers.
Tom Angier has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on
or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be
accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-6453-7
e-ISBN: 978-1-4411-1382-5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ethics: the key thinkers/edited by Tom Angier.
p. cm. – (Key thinkers)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4411-6453-7 – ISBN 978-1-4411-4939-8 (pbk.) –
ISBN 978-1-4411-5102-5 (epub) – ISBN 978-1-4411-1382-5 (ebook (pdf))
1. Ethics. 2. Ethicists. I. Angier, Tom P. S.
BJ1031.E77 2012
170.92’2–dc23
2012006889
Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
Contents
Notes on contributors vi
Acknowledgements x
Introduction 1
1 Plato Tom Angier 11
2 Aristotle Timothy Chappell 33
3 The Stoics Jacob Klein 57
4 Aquinas Vivian Boland O. P. 83
5 Hume Peter Millican 105
6 Kant Ralph Walker 133
7 Hegel Kenneth Westphal 153
8 Marx Sean Sayers 175
9 Mill Krister Bykvist 197
10 Nietzsche Ken Gemes and Christoph Schuringa 217
11 MacIntyre David Solomon 239
Index 263
Notes on
contributors
Tom Angier is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Kent,
Canterbury. While his thematic interests lie in ethical and political
theory, his historical interests centre on two periods: nineteenth
century (post-Kantian) and ancient Greek philosophy. He has two
monographs: Either Kierkegaard/Or Nietzsche: Moral Philosophy in a
New Key (Ashgate 2006), and Technē in Aristotle’s Ethics: Crafting the
Moral Life (Continuum 2010). His current research is on well-being
and second nature in the context of Aristotelian virtue theory.
Vivian Boland O. P. studied philosophy and theology in Dublin,
Edinburgh and Rome. He has taught at the Dominican House of
Studies in Dublin, at St Mary’s University College in London and at
Blackfriars in Oxford. His publications include Ideas in God According
to St Thomas Aquinas (Brill, 1996) and St Thomas Aquinas (Continuum
Library of Educational Thought, 2007). His research has been
centred on various aspects of Aquinas’ work, particularly his moral
and educational thought, his anthropology and his understanding of
philosophy and theology.
Krister Bykvist is Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Jesus College,
Oxford. He is the author of Utilitarianism: A Guide for the Perplexed
(Continuum, 2009), and his recent articles include ‘No good fit – Why
the fitting attitude analysis of value fails’ (Mind 18, 2009, pp. 763–92)
and ‘Can unstable preferences provide a stable standard of well-
being?’ (Economics and Philosophy 26:1, 2010, pp. 1–26). His current
research is on well-being, value theory and moral uncertainty.
Timothy Chappell is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the
Ethics Centre at the Open University, and Visiting Research Fellow in
Philosophy at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. He works on
notES on ContribUtorS vii
ethics, ancient philosophy, epistemology and philosophy of religion.
His recent books include: Human Values: New Essays on Ethics
and Natural Law (edited with D. Oderberg, 2004), The Inescapable
Self (2005), Reading Plato’s Theaetetus (2005), Values and Virtues:
Aristotelianism in Contemporary Ethics (editor, 2006), The Problem
of Moral Demandingness (2009) and Ethics and Experience (2009).
Ken Gemes came to Birkbeck College, University of London, in 2000,
having taught for 10 years at Yale University, Connecticut, USA. His
research interests include philosophy of science, philosophy of logic
and Nietzsche. His latest publications are ‘Freud and Nietzsche on
Sublimation’ in the Journal Of Nietzsche Studies 38:38–59 (2009),
and ‘We Remain of Necessity Strangers to Ourselves: The Key
Message of Nietzsche’s Genealogy’, 191–208 in C.D. Acampora (ed.),
Nietzsche’s ‘On the Genealogy of Morals’: Critical Essays (2006).
Jacob Klein gained his PhD on ‘Nature and Reason in Stoic Ethics’
from Cornell University, New York, USA, in 2010 and now teaches at
Colgate University, New York, USA. His current research focuses on
the Stoic theory of practical reason. His paper ‘Stoic Eudaimonism and
the Natural Law Tradition’ is appearing in November 2012 in Reason,
Religion and Natural Law: From Plato to Spinoza , ed. Jonathan Jacobs
(Oxford University Press).
Peter Millican is Gilbert Ryle Fellow and Professor of Philosophy at
Hertford College, Oxford University, Visiting Professor at the University
of York, and Illumni David Hume Fellow at Edinburgh University.
From 2005 until 2010 he was co-editor of Hume Studies, and his
publications include detailed studies of Hume’s views on induction,
causation, free will and miracles, several editions of Hume’s works
(printed or electronic) and the collection Reading Hume on Human
Understanding (Oxford, 2002). His other major interests include
ethics, logic and language, philosophy of religion and the connections
between computer science and philosophy, in which he recently
instituted a new joint degree programme at Oxford University.
Sean Sayers is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kent,
Canterbury. He has written extensively on topics in Hegelian and
Marxist philosophy. His books include: Marx and Alienation: Essays
viii notES on ContribUtorS
on Hegelian Themes (2011), Plato’s Republic: An Introduction (1999),
Marxism and Human Nature (1998, paperback 2007), Reality and
Reason: Dialectic and the Theory of Knowledge (1985) and Hegel,
Marx and Dialectic: A Debate (1980). He was one of the founders of
Radical Philosophy (1972) and of ‘The Marx and Philosophy Society’
(2003). He is the founder and Editor in Chief of the online Marx and
Philosophy Review of Books (2010).
Christoph Schuringa is a doctoral candidate in the Department of
Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London, writing a dissertation
on Nietzsche supervised by Ken Gemes. He is currently a DAAD
scholar at the T.U. Berlin, working with Günter Abel, and has published
several papers on Nietzsche.
David Solomon is the H.B. and W.P. White Director of the Centre
for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame, where he
has been a member of the Department of Philosophy since 1968.
His most recent books are Medical Ethics at Notre Dame (2009)
and The Common Good: Aristotelian and Confucian Perspectives
(forthcoming in 2012). His main research interests are in contemporary
ethical theory, the history of moral philosophy and bioethics. He is
currently completing a history that will focus on the manner in which
Anglophone academic ethics in the twentieth century engaged (or
failed to engage) the broader culture.
Ralph Walker studied philosophy at McGill University in Montréal
and at Oxford University. He was a Tutor at Magdalen College, Oxford
from 1972 to 2011 and has also taught in Uganda, Brazil, Czechoslovakia
and the Czech and Slovak Republics. His main interests centre on the
nature of truth and on the work of Kant, subjects he takes to be closely
related. He has published three books: Kant (1978), The Coherence
Theory of Truth (1989) and Kant and the Moral Law (1998).
Kenneth R. Westphal is Professorial Fellow in the School of
Philosophy at the University of East Anglia (Norwich). His primary
research interest is rational justification in the non-formal domains
of theoretical and practical philosophy. He is author of Kant’s
Transcendental Proof of Realism (Cambridge 2004) and editor of
notES on ContribUtorS ix
The Blackwell Guide to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (2009).
His recent articles include ‘Urteilskraft, gegenseitige Anerkennung
und rationale Rechtfertigung’ (in H.-D. Klein, ed., Ethik als prima
philosophia?, 2011) and ‘Norm Acquisition, Rational Judgement and
Moral Particularism’ (Theory and Research in Education 10.1, 2012).
He is completing a monograph with the tentative title of ‘Hume, Kant
and the Proper Construction of Justice’.