A Liberal Theory of Practical Morality

A Liberal Theory of Practical Morality PDF

Author: Earl Spurgin

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-05-25

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 1786612259

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Moral issues and questions abound in daily life. Media outlets frequently raise awareness of many, such as those concerning individuals’ right to privacy. The same venues seldom, if ever, raise awareness of others, such as moral issues and questions concerning our fantasies. Regardless of the level of publicity various venues afford particular moral matters, most people who become aware of those matters find many interesting and important. A problem most encounter, however, is determining the criteria through which they should approach the moral matters they wish to engage. Ethicists have long sought a moral theory that would provide the desired criteria, but most will grant readily that those efforts have not produced a generally-accepted theory. This book presents the author’s case that a kind of moral liberalism is the theory we should use to engage daily life’s moral matters. The author presents a conception of moral liberalism, argues that it is the best approach to practical morality in a plural society, and applies it to several of morality’s practical matters.

Critical Moral Liberalism

Critical Moral Liberalism PDF

Author: Jeffrey H. Reiman

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9780847683147

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In this important book, Jeffrey Reiman responds to recent assaults on liberal theory by proposing a 'critical moral liberalism.' It is liberal in maintaining the emphasis of classical liberalism on individual freedom, moral in adhering to a distinctive vision of the good life rather than professing neutrality, and critical in taking seriously the objection-raised by feminists and Marxists, among others-that liberal theories often serve as ideological cover for oppression of one group by others. Critical moral liberalism has a conception of ideology, and resources for testing the suspicion that arrangements that look free are really oppressive. Reiman sets forth the basic arguments for the liberal moral obligation to maximize people's ability to govern their own lives, and for the conception of the good life that goes with this. He considers and answers objections to the liberal project, and defends liberal conceptions of privacy, moral virtue, economic justice, and Constitutional interpretation. Reiman then takes up specific policy issues, among them abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, moral education, capital punishment, and threats to privacy from modern information technology. Critical Moral Liberalism will be of interest to scholars and students of ethics, social and political philosophy, political theory, and public policy.

Liberalism and the Moral Life

Liberalism and the Moral Life PDF

Author: Nancy Lipton Rosenblum

Publisher:

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13:

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Liberalism and the Moral Life presents the timely thoughts of twelve prominent scholars who are redrawing the map of liberalism... In essays that go beyond the conventional defense of liberalism based on moral skepticism or the possibility of discovering neutral principles, these writers consider possibilities for reinspiriting liberal thought. They offer fresh arguments for the moral status of individualism and argue that distinctively liberal virtues and practices sustain democracy, constituting a moral life that people share in common. Moving beyond theory, the authors point to a variety of institutional contexts within liberal democracy that provide moral education and opportunities for expressing commitment to substantive moral values.

Value and Justification

Value and Justification PDF

Author: Gerald F. Gaus

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1990-08-31

Total Pages: 558

ISBN-13: 9780521375252

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This important new book takes as its points of departure two questions: What is the nature of valuing? and What morality can be justified in a society that deeply disagrees on what is truly valuable? In Part One, the author develops a theory of value that attempts to reconcile reason with passions. Part Two explores how this theory of value grounds our commitment to moral action. The author argues that rational moral action can neither be seen as a way of simply maximising one's own values, nor derived from reason independent of one's values. Rather, our commitment to the moral point of view is presupposed by our value systems. The book concludes with a defense of liberal political morality.

The Morality of Everyday Life

The Morality of Everyday Life PDF

Author: Thomas Fleming

Publisher: University of Missouri Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 0826262503

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Fleming offers an alternative to enlightened liberalism, where moral and political problems are looked at from an objective point of view and a decision made from a distant perspective that is both rational and universally applied to all comparable cases. He instead places importance on the particular, the local, and moral complexity, advocating a return to premodern traditions for a solution to ethical predicaments. In his view, liberalism and postmodernism ignore the fact that human beings by their very nature refuse to live in a world of abstractions where the attachments of friends, neighbors, family, and country make no difference. Fleming believes that a modern type of "casuistry" should be applied to moral conflicts, using examples from history, literature, and religion to explain this moral ecology that refuses to divorce organisms from their interactions with each other and with their environment.

Liberalism and Its Discontents

Liberalism and Its Discontents PDF

Author: Patrick Neal

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-07-27

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 1349143626

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In these essays the reigning models of liberal political theory of John Rawls and Joseph Raz are immanently criticized. Neal argues that neither 'political' nor 'perfectionist' liberalism adequately gives expression to the liberal spirit. Surprisingly, Neal finds resources for the expression of such a spirit in the much maligned tradition of Hobbesian, or 'vulgar', liberalism. He argues that a turn in this direction is necessary for the articulation of a liberalism more genuinely responsive to the diversity of modes of life in the twenty-first century.

Kant, Respect and Injustice (Routledge Revivals)

Kant, Respect and Injustice (Routledge Revivals) PDF

Author: Victor Seidler

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2009-12-15

Total Pages: 179

ISBN-13: 1135156085

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In this work, originally published in 1986, Victor Seidler explores the different notions of respect, equality and dependency in Kant’s moral writings. He illuminates central tensions and contradictions not only within Kant’s moral philosophy, but within the thinking and feeling about human dignity and social inequality which we take very much for granted within a liberal moral culture. In challenging our assumption of the autonomy of morality, Seidler also questions our understanding of what it means for someone to live as a person in his or her own right. The autonomy of individuals cannot be assumed but has to be reasserted against relationships of subordination. This involves a break with a rationalist morality, so that respect for others involves respect for emotions, feelings, desires and needs, and establishes a fuller autonomy as a basis for freedom and justice.

The Morality of Freedom

The Morality of Freedom PDF

Author: Joseph Raz

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 446

ISBN-13: 0198248075

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"Morality of Freedom" is the winner of the W J M Mackenzie Prize of the Political Studies Association for 1987.

Political Morality

Political Morality PDF

Author: Richard Vernon

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2001-08-02

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9780826450661

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Although liberal democratic polities have an important place in contemporary politics, their justification is contentious. Liberalism and democracy are commonly thought to be inconsistent, or at least in tension with one another; and the reality of liberal democracy is perceived as falling far short of the ideal. In Political Morality, Richard Vernon sets out to show that liberal democracy can make sense as a single political conception, rather than a trade-off between two different values. He also argues that in conceiving of liberal democracy as proposed, other problems inherent in liberalism and in democracy are eased; liberal democracy is not exposed to the same objections as liberalism and it can avoid some of the paradoxes that are said to plague democratic theory. The book also points to some of the ways in which polities currently termed 'liberal democracies' fall clearly short of the values that might legitimize them.

Public and Private Morality

Public and Private Morality PDF

Author: Stuart Hampshire

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1978-10-31

Total Pages: 156

ISBN-13: 9780521293525

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Collection of essays by well-known British and American philosophers on the moral principles by which public policies and political decisions should be judged: does effective political action necessarily involve and justify actions which the individual would regard as unacceptable in "private" morality?