Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity

Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity PDF

Author: Alasdair MacIntyre

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016-11-14

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1316820246

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Alasdair MacIntyre explores some central philosophical, political and moral claims of modernity and argues that a proper understanding of human goods requires a rejection of these claims. In a wide-ranging discussion, he considers how normative and evaluative judgments are to be understood, how desire and practical reasoning are to be characterized, what it is to have adequate self-knowledge, and what part narrative plays in our understanding of human lives. He asks, further, what it would be to understand the modern condition from a neo-Aristotelian or Thomistic perspective, and argues that Thomistic Aristotelianism, informed by Marx's insights, provides us with resources for constructing a contemporary politics and ethics which both enable and require us to act against modernity from within modernity. This rich and important book builds on and advances MacIntyre's thinking in ethics and moral philosophy, and will be of great interest to readers in both fields.

Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity

Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity PDF

Author: Alasdair MacIntyre

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016-11-14

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 110717645X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

MacIntyre explores the philosophical, political, and moral issues encountered in understanding what the virtues require in contemporary social contexts.

Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity

Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity PDF

Author: Alasdair MacIntyre

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-01-09

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781316629604

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Alasdair MacIntyre explores some central philosophical, political and moral claims of modernity and argues that a proper understanding of human goods requires a rejection of these claims. In a wide-ranging discussion, he considers how normative and evaluative judgments are to be understood, how desire and practical reasoning are to be characterized, what it is to have adequate self-knowledge, and what part narrative plays in our understanding of human lives. He asks, further, what it would be to understand the modern condition from a neo-Aristotelian or Thomistic perspective, and argues that Thomistic Aristotelianism, informed by Marx's insights, provides us with resources for constructing a contemporary politics and ethics which both enable and require us to act against modernity from within modernity. This rich and important book builds on and advances MacIntyre's thinking in ethics and moral philosophy, and will be of great interest to readers in both fields.

Moral Philosophy on the Threshold of Modernity

Moral Philosophy on the Threshold of Modernity PDF

Author: Jill Kraye

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2006-03-30

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 1402030010

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Over the past twenty years the transition from the late Middle Ages to the early modern era has received increasing attention from experts in the history of philosophy. In part, this new interest arises from claims, made in literature aimed at a less specialist readership, that this transition was responsible for the subsequent philosophical and theological problems of the Enlightenment. Philosophers like Alasdair MacIntyre and theologians like John Milbank display a certain nostalgia for the medieval synthesis of Thomas Aquinas and, consequently, evaluate the period from 1300 to 1700 in rather negative terms. Other historians of philosophy writing for the general public, such as Charles Taylor, take a more positive view of the Reformation but nevertheless conclude that modernity has been shaped by 1 conflicts which stem from early modern times. Ethics and moral thought occupy a central place in these theories. It is assumed that we have lost something – the concept of virtue, for instance, or the source of common morality. Yet those who put forward such notions do not treat the history of ethics in detail. From the historian’s perspective, their far-reaching theoretical assumptions are based on a quite small body of textual evidence. In reality, there was a rich variety of approaches to moral thinking and ethical theories during the period from 1400 to 1600.

Casuistry and Modern Ethics

Casuistry and Modern Ethics PDF

Author: Richard B. Miller

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1996-11

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 9780226526362

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Did the Gulf War defend moral principle or Western oil interests? Is violent pornography an act of free speech or an act of violence against women? In Casuistry and Modern Ethics, Richard B. Miller sheds new light on the potential of casuistry—case-based reasoning—for resolving these and other questions of conscience raised by the practical quandaries of modern life. Rejecting the packaging of moral experience within simple descriptions and inflexible principles, Miller argues instead for identifying and making sense of the ethically salient features of individual cases. Because this practical approach must cope with a diverse array of experiences, Miller draws on a wide variety of diagnostic tools from such fields as philosophy of science, legal reasoning, theology, literary theory, hermeneutics, and moral philosophy. Opening new avenues for practical reasoning, Miller's interdisciplinary work will challenge scholars who are interested in the intersections of ethics and political philosophy, cultural criticism, and debates about method in religion and morality.

After Virtue

After Virtue PDF

Author: Alasdair MacIntyre

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2013-10-21

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1623569818

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Highly controversial when it was first published in 1981, Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue has since established itself as a landmark work in contemporary moral philosophy. In this book, MacIntyre sought to address a crisis in moral language that he traced back to a European Enlightenment that had made the formulation of moral principles increasingly difficult. In the search for a way out of this impasse, MacIntyre returns to an earlier strand of ethical thinking, that of Aristotle, who emphasised the importance of 'virtue' to the ethical life. More than thirty years after its original publication, After Virtue remains a work that is impossible to ignore for anyone interested in our understanding of ethics and morality today.

Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity

Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity PDF

Author: Alasdair C. MacIntyre

Publisher:

Published: 2016

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781316822401

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

"This essay is divided into five chapters. In the first the questions initially posed about our desires and how we should think about them are questions that plain non philosophical persons often find themselves asking. When however they carry their attempt to answer these questions a little further, they find that they have, perhaps inadvertently, become philosophers, and that they need some at least of the conceptual and argumentative resources which professional philosophers provide. So their enquiry, like this one, becomes philosophical. But philosophy in our culture has become an almost exclusively specialized academic discipline whose practitioners for the most part address only each other rather than the educated lay person. Moreover those same practitioners have for the last fifty years been harassed by the academic system into publishing more and more as a condition for academic survival, so that on most topics of philosophical interest there is by now an increasingly large, an often unmanageable large body of literature that has to be read as a prologue before adding to it one more item. Readers should be warned that my references to this literature are selective and few. Had I conscientiously attempted not only to find my way through all the relevant published writing in the philosophy of mind and in ethics, but then also explained how I had come to terms with the claims advanced by its authors, I would have had to write at impossible length and in a format that would have made this essay inaccessible to the lay reader for whom it is written"--

On the Ethics of War and Terrorism

On the Ethics of War and Terrorism PDF

Author: Uwe Steinhoff

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2007-05-24

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 0191527181

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In this book Uwe Steinhoff describes and explains the basic tenets of just war theory and gives a precise, succinct and highly critical account of its present status and of the most important and controversial current debates surrounding it. Rejecting certain in effect medieval assumptions of traditional just war theory and advancing a liberal outlook, Steinhoff argues that every single individual is a legitimate authority and has under certain circumstances the right to declare war on others or the state. He also argues that the just cause cannot be established independently of the other criteria of jus ad bellum (the justification of entering a war), except for right intention, which he interprets more leniently than the tradition does. Turning to jus in bello (which governs the conduct of a war) he criticises the Doctrine of Double Effect and concludes that insofar as wars kill innocents, and be it as "collateral damage", they cannot be just but at best justified as the lesser evil. Steinhoff gives particular attention to the question why soldiers, allegedly, are legitimate targets and civilians not. Discussing four approaches to the explanation of the difference he argues that the four principles underlying them all need to be taken into account and outlines how their weighing can proceed if applied to concrete cases. The resulting approach does not square the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate targets with the distinction between soldiers and civilians, which has extremely important consequences for the conduct of war. Finally, Steinhoff analyses the concept of terrorism and argues that some forms of "terrorism" are actually no terrorism at all and that even terrorism proper can under certain circumstances be justified. This book is a project of the Oxford Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War.

Dependent Rational Animals

Dependent Rational Animals PDF

Author: Alasdair MacIntyre

Publisher: Open Court

Published: 1999-08-10

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 0812697057

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

"MacIntyre--one of the foremost ethicists of the past half-century--makes a sustained argument for the cetnrality, in well-lived human lives, of both virtue and local communities of giving and receiving. He criticizes the mainstream of Western ethics, including his own previous position, for not taking seriously the dependent and animal sides of human nature, thereby overemphasizing the powers of reason and the pursuit of reason and the pursuit of autonomy. . . . This important work in ethics is essential for the professional philosopher and is highly readable for students at all levels and for thoughtful citizens." --Choice

Muslim Ethics and Modernity

Muslim Ethics and Modernity PDF

Author: Sheila McDonough

Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press

Published: 2010-10-30

Total Pages: 136

ISBN-13: 1554587484

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A study of modern Muslim ethics, focussed upon the lives and writings of Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Mawlana Mawdudi, this monograph sheds light upon the modern ethical problems of contemporary Islam. Sayyid Ahmad Khan, often called a liberal, a modernist, or an acculturationist, represents the "liberal" trend of Sunni Muslim ethics. Khan's approach borrows much from reason, yet for Khanreason and revelation are not in conflict. Reason guides the interpretation of Islam when revelation is insufficient. In contrast, Mawlana Mawdudi's fundamentalism is, at least in part, anti-rational; it depends upon revelation (as it comes to one man in particular) and is very autocratic. McDonough is concerned with Khan and Mawdudi, both writers within the Indo-Pakistan Muslim tradition. Their conflicting views, their differing interpretations of ethics that suit Islam in the contemporary world, exemplify the difficulties and turmoil faced by Muslims the world over. For these men, modernity has not spelled the end of Islam; yet each has found a different way of relating Islam to the present and the future in faithfulness to traditional Islam. This monograph will be of interest to students of contemporary Islam, as well as to those interested in questions of comparative ethics, for the liberal/fundamentalist conflicts outlined in this monograph are analogous to manifestations of the same dichotomy in all world religions.