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Thinking About Reasons

Themes from the Philosophy of Jonathan Dancy

Brad Hooker editor David Bakhurst editor Margaret Olivia Little editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press

Published:1st Aug '13

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Thinking About Reasons cover

Thinking about Reasons is a collection of fourteen new essays on topics in ethics and the philosophy of action, inspired in one way or another by the work of Jonathan Dancy--one of his generation's most influential moral philosophers. Many of the most influential living thinkers in the area are contributors to this collection, which also contains an autobiographical afterword by Dancy himself. Topics discussed in this volume include: · the idea that the facts that explain action are non-psychological ones · buck passing theories of goodness and rightness · the idea that some moral reasons justify action without requiring it · the particularist idea that there are no true informative moral principles · the idea that egoism and impartial consequentialism are self-defeating · the idea that moral reasons are dependent on either impersonal value, or benefits to oneself, or benefits to those with whom one has some special connection, but not on deontological constraints · the idea that we must distinguish between reasons and enablers, disablers, intensifiers, and attenuators of reasons · the idea that, although the lived ethical life is shaped by standing commitments, uncodifable judgement is at least sometimes needed to resolve what to do when these commitments conflict · the idea that the value of a whole need not be a mathematical function of the values of the parts of that whole · the idea that practical reasoning is based on inference the idea that there cannot be irreducibly normative properties.

a collection of excellent essays . . . [which] follows Dancy's work in spanning traditional boundaries between the various philosophical disciplines that take an interest in practical reasons: the philosophy of mind/action, moral philosophy, and meta-ethics.

ISBN: 9780199604678

Dimensions: 239mm x 167mm x 28mm

Weight: 700g

360 pages