Ethics and Experience : Life Beyond Moral Theory

"Ethics and Experience" presents a wide-ranging and thought-provoking introduction to the question famously posed by Socrates: How is life to be lived? 'An excellent primer for any student taking a course on moral philosophy, the book introduces ethics as a single and broadly unified field of inquiry in which we apply reason to try and solve Socrates' question. "Ethics and Experience "examines the major forms of ethical subjectivism and objectivism - including expressivism, error theory', naturalism, and intuitionism. The book lays out the detail of the most significant contemporary moral theories - including utilitarianism, virtue ethics, Kantianism, and contractarianism - and reconsiders these theories in the light of two questions that should perhaps be asked more often: Is moral theory, with its tendency to regiment ethical thought and experience, really the best way for us to apply reason to deciding how to live? And, might it not be more truly reasonable to look for less system and more insight? ETHICS & MORAL PHILOSOPHY. "Understanding Ethics" presents a wide-ranging and thought-provoking introduction to the question, first posed by Socrates, 'How is life to be lived?' It treats ethics as a single and broadly unified field of inquiry in which the abstract questions of metaethics and the real-world issues of applied ethics are immediately and directly connected. The book explores the connections and the tensions between happiness and virtue, reason and commitment, motivation and justification, and objectivity and personal significance. And it re-examines familiar theories in normative ethics such as utilitarianism, virtue ethics, Kantianism, and intuitionism from a fresh and revealing perspective. The book is an excellent primer for students taking courses on moral philosophy Dedication 6 Contents 8 Acknowledgements 10 1 The turn to reason: how human beings got ethical 12 2 Demarcation: what does “ethical” mean? 16 3 Motivation: why be moral? 22 4 Deliberation: the question of reason 31 5 Introducing subjectivism and objectivism 48 6 Five arguments for ethical subjectivism 60 7 The content of ethics: expressivism, error theory, objectivism again 84 8 Virtue ethics 108 9 Utilitarianism 136 10 Kantianism and contractarianism 164 11 Theory and insight in ethics 195 Further reading 226 Bibliography 230 Index 238