What Should I Do?

Philosophers on the Good, the Bad, and the Puzzling
1. Auflage 2010
ISBN: 978-0-19-958612-7
Verlag: OUP UK

Buch, Englisch, 224 Seiten, Format (B × H): 129 mm x 198 mm, Gewicht: 244 g

Your questions answered -- by a panel of philosophers
Intriguing, personal, and controversial responses to moral problems
Ranges over love, sex, death, religion, politics, and war
Accessible to all readers -- no knowledge of philosophy required
Over 80 thoughtful questions
Drawn from the popular website askphilosophers.org

Is it ever OK to be dishonest? Is it wrong to enjoy violent video games, or to cheat on one's tax returns? Should we be vegetarians? When is war justified? Are there any moral facts, or is morality relative?

Life throws ethical questions at us every day. Some are momentous and difficult, while others are relatively trivial and easily worked out; still others lodge themselves in our heads and bother us for years. We regularly encounter controversial issues (such as prostitution, abortion, or racial profiling), tricky conundrums (Would I be wrong to take advantage of my teacher's forgetfulness? When should I allow my teenage daughter to have a boyfriend? Are we responsible for our emotions?), and classic problems (What is the relation between religion and morality? Is suicide wrong? Why should we be moral?)

Philosophers have engaged with these questions for as long as there have been philosophers, but most people have had no exposure to the wide variety of arguments and positions that they have offered. The website AskPhilosophers.org has sought to fill this void, bringing together a panel of distinguished philosophers who use their knowledge of the history of philosophy, as well as their own skills and ingenuity, to respond to questions sent in from all over the world. What Should I Do? is a collection of some of the most interesting questions about ethics to have appeared on the website during ist first five years. It is a delightfully fresh book that will encourage readers to think a bit more deeply about the moral questions they frequently encounter, and will provide them with the tools to do so.

Zielgruppe

General readers, high-school/secondary school students, undergraduates.

Autoren/Hrsg.

George, Alexander

Mai, Elisa

Fachgebiete

• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften: Allgemeines Populärwissenschaftliche Werke
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Ethik, Moralphilosophie
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Philosophie: Sachbuch

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction
1: The Personal
Children · Love and Sex · Abortion · Emotion · Sincerity · Death · Suicide
2: The Public
Medicine · Business · Sports and Games · Interacting with Others · Environment · Animals · Religion
3: The Political
Justice · Rights · Government · Law · Punishment · War
4: The Nature of Morality
Moral Truth · Moral Knowledge · Moral Theories · Putting Morality into Practice
Biographical Information
Suggested Readings
Index

Über Autor(innen)

George, Alexander
Alexander George teaches at Amherst College. Before arriving at Amherst, he was an undergraduate at Columbia, a graduate student at Harvard, and a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford. He is the author (with Daniel J. Velleman) of Philosophies of Mathematics (Blackwell). He is also the author (with Lawrence Douglas) of a humor book, Sense and Nonsenibility: Lampoons of Learning and Literature (Simon and Schuster). He founded AskPhilosophers.org in 2005.

Edited by Alexander George, Amherst College, MA, and Elisa Mai

Alexander George teaches at Amherst College. Before arriving at Amherst, he was an undergraduate at Columbia, a graduate student at Harvard, and a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford. He is the author (with Daniel J. Velleman) of Philosophies of Mathematics (Blackwell). He is also the author (with Lawrence Douglas) of a humor book, Sense and Nonsenibility: Lampoons of Learning and Literature (Simon and Schuster). He founded AskPhilosophers.org in 2005.

Contributors:
Ernie Alleva, Smith College.
Louise Antony, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Lorraine Besser-Jones, Middlebury College.
David O. Brink, University of California, San Diego,
Douglas Burnham, Staffordshire University.
Andrew N. Carpenter, Ellis University.
Lisa Cassidy, Ramapo College of New Jersey.
Mark Crimmins, Stanford University.
Roger Crisp, University of Oxford.
Peter S. Fosl, Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky.
Miranda Fricker, University of London.
Jay L. Garfield, Smith College.
Jyl Gentzler, Amherst College.
Alexander George, Amherst College.
Mitch Green, University of Virginia.
Sally Haslanger, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Richard Heck, Brown University.
Amy Kind, Claremont McKenna College.
Marc Lange, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Oliver Leaman, University of Kentucky.
Peter Lipton (1954-2007), formerly Cambridge University
Thomas Pogge, Yale University, Australian National University Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, and Oslo University.
Kalynne Hackney Pudner, Auburn University.
Jasper Reid, King's College London.
Gabriel Segal, King's College London.
Matthew Silverstein, NYU Abu Dhabi.
Nicholas D. Smith, Lewis and Clark College.
Peter Smith, University of Cambridge.
Miriam Solomon, Temple University.
Allen Stairs, University of Maryland.
Saul Traiger, Occidental College.
Jonathan Westphal, formerly University of Munich and Idaho State University