Reconciling Our Aims: In Search of Bases for Ethics (The ^ABerkeley Tanner Lectures) - Hardcover

Gibbard, Allan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195370422 ISBN 13: 9780195370423

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2008

Synopsis

In these three Tanner lectures, distinguished ethical theorist Allan Gibbard explores the nature of normative thought and the bases of ethics. In the first lecture he explores the role of intuitions in moral thinking and offers a way of thinking about the intuitive method of moral inquiry that both places this activity within the natural world and makes sense of it as an indispensable part of our lives as planners. In the second and third lectures he takes up the kind of substantive ethical inquiry he has described in the first lecture, asking how we might live together on terms that none of us could reasonably reject. Since working at cross purposes loses fruits that might stem from cooperation, he argues, any consistent ethos that meets this test would be, in a crucial way, utilitarian. It would reconcile our individual aims to establish, in Kant's phrase, a "kingdom of ends." The volume also contains an introduction by Barry Stroud, the volume editor, critiques by Michael Bratman (Stanford University), John Broome (Oxford University), and F. M. Kamm (Harvard University), and Gibbard's responses.

About this title

About the Author

Allan Gibbard is Richard B. Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has been President of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association, and is Member of the American Philosophical Society and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His books include Wise Choices, Apt Feelings and Thinking How to Live.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0195370422
• ISBN 13: 9780195370423
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224