The Routledge Companion to Ethics pdf

  

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO

ETHICS

  The Routledge Companion to Ethics is an outstanding survey of the whole field of ethics by a distinguished international team of contributors. Over 60 entries are divided into six clear sections: The history of ethics Meta-ethics Perspectives from outside ethics Ethical perspectives Morality Debates in ethics.

  The Companion opens with a comprehensive historical overview of ethics, including entries on Plato, Aristotle, Hume and Kant, and the origins of ethical thinking in China, India and the Middle East. The second part covers the domain of meta-ethics, including entries on cognitivism and non-cognitivism, explanation, reasons, moral realism and fictionalism. The third part covers important challenges to ethics from the fields of anthropology, psychology, sociobiology and economics. The fourth and fifth sections cover competing the- ories of ethics and the nature of morality respectively, with entries on con- sequentialism, Kantian morality, virtue ethics, relativism, morality and character, evil, responsibility and particularism in ethics among many others. A compre- hensive final section includes entries on the most important topics and con- troversies in applied ethics, including rights, justice and distribution, the end of life, the environment, poverty, war and terrorism.

  The Routledge Companion to Ethics is a superb resource for anyone interested in the subject, whether in philosophy or related subjects such as politics, education, or law. Fully indexed and cross-referenced, with helpful further reading sections, it is ideal for those coming to the field of ethics for the first time as well as readers already familiar with the subject. John Skorupski is Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. His books include Ethical Explorations (1999) and The Domain of Reasons (forthcoming in 2010).

  

ROUTLEDGE PHILOSOPHY

COMPANIONS

  Routledge Philosophy Companions offer thorough, high quality surveys and assess- ments of the major topics and periods in philosophy. Covering key problems, themes and thinkers, all entries are specially commissioned for each volume and written by leading scholars in the field. Clear, accessible and carefully edited and organized, Routledge Philosophy Companions are indispensable for anyone coming to a major topic or period in philosophy, as well as for the more advanced reader. The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, Second Edition Edited by Berys Gaut and Dominic Lopes The Routledge Companion to Ethics Edited by John Skorupski The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Religion Edited by Chad Meister and Paul Copan The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Science Edited by Stathis Psillos and Martin Curd The Routledge Companion to Twentieth Century Philosophy Edited by Dermot Moran The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film Edited by Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology Edited by John Symons and Paco Calvo The Routledge Companion to Metaphysics Edited by Robin Le Poidevin, Peter Simons, Andrew McGonigal, and Ross Cameron The Routledge Companion to Nineteenth Century Philosophy Edited by Dean Moyar

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  THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO ETHICS Edited by John Skorupski First edition published 2010 by Routledge

  2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 _{collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010.} Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2010 John Skorupski for selection and editorial matter; individual contributors for

their contributions

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised

in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data The Routledge companion to ethics / edited by John Skorupski. p. cm. – (Routledge philosophy companions) Includes bibliographical references and index.

  1. Ethics. I. Skorupski, John, 1946– BJ21.R68 2010 _{ISBN 0-203-85070-X Master e-book ISBN} 170–dc22 2009050204 Hbk ISBN 13: 978-0-415-41362-6 Ebk ISBN 13: 978-0-203-85070-1

  

CONTENTS

  List of illustrations

  Notes on contributors

  Preface

  PART I History

  

  1 Ethical thought in China

   YANG XIAO

  2 Ethical thought in India

   STEPHEN R. L. CLARK

  3 Socrates and Plato

   RICHARD KRAUT

  4 Aristotle

   CHRISTOPHER TAYLOR

  5 Later ancient ethics

   A. A. LONG

  6 The Arabic tradition

   PETER ADAMSON

  7 Early modern natural law

   KNUD HAAKONSSEN

  8 Hobbes

   BERNARD GERT

  9 Ethics and reason

   MICHAEL LEBUFFE

  10 Ethics and sentiment: Shaftesbury and Hutcheson MICHAEL B. GILL

  11 Hume

  JAMES A. HARRIS

  12 Adam Smith

  19 Pragmatist moral philosophy ALAN J. RYAN

  ROBERT AUDI

  24 Reasons for action

  RANDOLPH CLARKE

  23 Freedom and responsibility

  22 Ethics, science, and religion SIMON BLACKBURN

  PART II Meta-ethics

  STEPHEN MULHALL

  21 Heidegger

  JONATHAN WEBBER

  20 Existentialism

  MAUDEMARIE CLARK

  CRAIG SMITH

  18 Nietzsche

  17 Sidgwick, Green, and Bradley T. H. IRWIN

  HENRY WEST

  16 John Stuart Mill

  KENNETH R. WESTPHAL

  15 Hegel

  THOMAS E. HILL JR

  14 Kant

  FREDERICK ROSEN

  13 Utilitarianism to Bentham

  

CONTENTS

  25 The open question argument THOMAS BALDWIN

  32 Ethics and psychology

  36 Reasons, values, and morality SIMON ROBERTSON

  PART IV Perspectives in ethics

  JOHN GARDNER

  35 Ethics and law

  ERIK CARLSON

  34 Formal methods in ethics

  MICHAEL RUSE

  33 Biology

  JESSE PRINZ

  JAMES LAIDLAW

  26 Realism and its alternatives

  31 Social anthropology

  PART III Ideas and methods from outside ethics

  NICHOLAS L. STURGEON

  30 Relativism

  29 Cognitivism without realism ANDREW FISHER

  28 Error theory and fictionalism NADEEM J. Z. HUSSAIN

  ALEXANDER MILLER

  27 Non-cognitivism

  PETER RAILTON

  

CONTENTS

  37 Consequentialism

  PART V Morality

  GEOFFREY SCARRE

  49 Evil

  CHRISTOPHER BENNETT

  48 Blame, remorse, mercy, forgiveness

  ALLEN W. WOOD

  47 Respect and recognition

  JOHN SKORUPSKI

  46 Conscience

  STEPHEN DARWALL

  45 Morality and its critics

  ROBERT STECKER

  BRAD HOOKER

  44 Ethics and aesthetics

  SAMANTHA BRENNAN

  43 Feminist ethics

  42 Contemporary natural law theory ANTHONY J. LISSKA

  RAHUL KUMAR

  41 Contractualism

  MICHAEL SLOTE

  40 Virtue ethics

  PHILIP STRATTON-LAKE

  39 Ethical intuitionism

  38 Contemporary Kantian ethics ANDREWS REATH

  

CONTENTS

  

CONTENTS

  50 Responsibility: Intention and consequence SUZANNE UNIACKE

  51 Responsibility: Act and omission MICHAEL J. ZIMMERMAN

  52 Partiality and impartiality

  JOHN COTTINGHAM

  53 Moral particularism

  MICHAEL RIDGE AND SEAN MCKEEVER

  PART VI Debates in ethics

  (i) Goals and ideals

  54 Welfare

  CHRISTOPHER HEATHWOOD

  55 Ideals of perfection

  VINIT HAKSAR (ii) Justice

  56 Rights

  TOM CAMPBELL

  57 Justice and punishment

  JOHN TASIOULAS

  58 Justice and distribution

  MATTHEW CLAYTON (iii) Human life

  59 Life, death, and ethics

  FRED FELDMAN

  60 Ending life

  R. G. FREY (iv) Our world

  61 Population ethics

  TIM MULGAN

  62 Animals

  ALAN CARTER

  63 The environment

  ANDREW BRENNAN AND NORVA Y. S. LO (v) Current issues

  64 The ethics of free speech

  MARY KATE MCGOWAN

  65 The ethics of research

  JULIAN SAVULESCU AND TONY HOPE

  66 World poverty

  THOMAS POGGE

  67 War

  HENRY SHUE

  68 Torture and terrorism

  DAVID RODIN Index

  

  

CONTENTS

  

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures

  26.1 Branching taxonomy of meta-ethical positions with respect to questions of realism.

  303

  34.1 A prisoner’s dilemma matrix (severity of harms to agents caused by alternative choices).

  414

  45.1 Values of the outcomes of A’s and B’s choices in a prisoner’s dilemma.

  543

  Tables 37.1 Calculating expected values.

  450

  66.1 Distribution of global household income converted at current market exchange rates.

  798

  66.2 Consequences of choosing a level and baseline year for the international poverty line.

  801

  

CONTRIBUTORS

  Peter Adamson is Reader of Philosophy at King’s College London. His main areas of interest are ancient philosophy (especially Neoplatonism) and medie- val philosophy (especially in Arabic). He is the author of The Arabic Plotinus, and has published articles on Plotinus, al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Avicenna and other fi gures from Greek and Arabic philosophy. Robert Audi is Professor of Philosophy and David E. Gallo Chair in Ethics,

  University of Notre Dame. He writes on epistemology, philosophy of action and philosophy of religion as well as on moral and political philosophy. His recent books include Religious Commitment and Secular Reason (2000), The Architecture of Reason (2001), The Good in the Right: A Theory of Intuition and Intrinsic Value (2004), Practical Reasoning and Ethical Decision (Routledge, 2006), and (as editor) The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (1995, 1999).

  Thomas Baldwin is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of York, having been previously a lecturer in philosophy at Cambridge University. He is cur- rently editor of Mind. Christopher Bennett is a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy, University of Sheffield. His work has mainly concerned the moral emotions, punishment and criminal justice. Simon Blackburn is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, and Research Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His books include: Spreading the Word (1984), Essays in Quasi-Realism (1993), The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (1994), Ruling Passions (1998), Think (1999), Being Good (2001), Lust (2004), Truth: A Guide (2005), Plato’s Republic (2006) and How to Read Hume (2008).

  Andrew Brennan is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia, having previously been Professor and Chair of Philo- sophy at the University of Western Australia and Reader in Philosophy at the University of Stirling, Scotland.

  Samantha Brennan is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Western Ontario. She works in con- temporary normative ethics and political philosophy, including feminist approaches to both. Brennan co-edited, with Anita Superson, Feminist Philo- sophy in the Analytic Tradition, a special Issue of Hypatia (2005), and edited Feminist Moral Philosophy, a Canadian Journal of Philosophy supplementary (2003).

  

CONTRIBUTORS

  Tom Campbell is Professor Fellow at Charles Sturt University and Convenor of the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, an Australian Research Council Special Research Centre. He has written extensively on law and legal philosophy. He is author of Adam Smith’s Science of Morals (1971), The Left and Rights (1983) and Justice (1988, 2nd edn forthcoming in 2010). His Routledge book, Rights: A Critical Introduction, was published in 2006. Erik Carlson is Professor of Practical Philosophy at Uppsala University. His areas of research include axiology, measurement theory, normative ethics, the problems of free will and determinism, and decision theory. He has published one book, Consequentialism Reconsidered (1995), and about thirty papers in journals and anthologies. Alan Carter is Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of numerous articles and three books: A Radical Green Political

  Theory, The Philosophical Foundation of Property Rights and Marx: A Radical Critique. He is also joint editor of the Journal of Applied Philosophy. Maudemarie Clark is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California–

  Riverside. She is the author of Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (1990), co- translator and -editor of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality (1998), and co-author of a work in progress on Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. Stephen R. L. Clark is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Liverpool.

  His most recent book is G. K. Chesterton: Thinking Backward, Looking Forward (2006), and his present work deals with the third-century Neoplatonist, Plotinus.

  Randolph Clarke is Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University. He is the author of Libertarian Accounts of Free Will and of numerous articles on agency, free will and moral responsibility. Matthew Clayton is Associate Professor of Political Theory at the University of

  Warwick. He works on issues concerning distributive justice and liberal poli- tical thought. His recent work includes Justice and Legitimacy in Upbringing (2006) and he has co-edited The Ideal of Equality (2002) and Social Justice (2004).

  John Cottingham is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Reading, Professorial Research Fellow at Heythrop College, University of London, and an Honorary Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford. He is (since 1993) editor of the journal Ratio. His books include The Rationalists (1988), Western Philosophy (2nd edn 2007), Philosophy and the Good Life (1998) and The Spiritual Dimension (2005), and his edited collections include (with Brian Feltham) Partiality and Impartiality (forthcoming in 2010).

  

CONTRIBUTORS

  Stephen Darwall is the Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. He has written broadly on the history and foundations of ethics.

  His books include Impartial Reason, The British Moralists and the Internal “Ought,” Philosophical Ethics, Welfare and Rational Care and most recently The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability. With David Velleman, he is a founding co-editor of The Philosophers’ Imprint.

  Fred Feldman , University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Author of Introductory Ethics (1978), Doing the Best We Can: An Essay in Informal Deontic Logic (1986), Confrontations with the Reaper: A Philosophical Study of the Nature and Value of Death (1992), and Pleasure and the Good Life: On the Nature, Varieties, and Plausibility of Hedonism (2004).

  Andrew Fisher is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Nottingham. His research is primarily in meta-ethics and he has published in this area. He teaches a large number of students on a wide range of subjects including meta-ethics. He is co-editor with Simon Kirchin of Arguing about Metaethics (Routledge, 2006).

  R. G. Frey is Professor of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University and Senior Research Fellow in the Social Philosophy and Policy Center there. He is the author (and editor) of numerous books and articles in normative and applied ethics.

  John Gardner is Professor of Jurisprudence and a Fellow of University College, Oxford. An occasional Visiting Professor at Yale Law School and a Bencher of the Inner Temple, he was formerly Reader in Legal Philosophy at King’s College London (1996–2000). He serves on the editorial boards of the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Legal Theory, Law and Philosophy, The Journal of Moral Philosophy, The Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, The Journal of Inter- national Criminal Justice and Criminal Law and Philosophy.

  Bernard Gert is Stone Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy, Emeritus, Dartmouth College. He is the author of Morality: Its Nature and Justification (revised edn, 2005), Common Morality: Deciding What to Do (2004) and Hobbes: Prince of Peace (2010); first author of Bioethics: A Systematic Approach (2006), and editor of Man and Citizen (1972, 1991).

  Michael B. Gill is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona. He received his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is the author of The British Moralists on Human Nature and the Birth of Secular Ethics (2006). He has also published numerous articles in the history of philosophy, meta-ethical theory and medical ethics.

  Knud Haakonssen is Professor of Intellectual History and Director of the Sussex Centre for Intellectual History, University of Sussex. He has published extensively on early modern moral, legal and political philosophy and edits a large series of natural law works.

  

CONTRIBUTORS

  Vinit Haksar is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and an Honorary Fellow, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh. His publications include Equality, Liberty and Perfectionism (1979), Indivisible Selves and Moral Practice (1991) and Rights, Communities and Disobedience: Liberalism and Gandhi (2003).

  James A. Harris is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Of Liberty and Necessity: The Free Will Debate in Eighteenth-Century British Philosophy (2005). He is the editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, and (with Aaron Garrett) of the “Enlightenment” volume of A History of Scottish Philosophy (general editor Gordon Graham).

  Christopher Heathwood is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is the author of several articles on welfare and other topics in ethics. Thomas E. Hill Jr,

  Kenan Professor at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is the author of Autonomy and Self-Respect; Dignity and Practical Reason in Kant’s Moral Theory; Respect, Pluralism, and Justice; and Human Welfare and Moral Worth. He edited the Blackwell Guide to Kant’s Ethics and, with Arnulf Zweig, co-edited Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. Recent essays concern Kantian constructivism, duties to oneself, virtue, revolution, humanitarian interventions, and the treatment of criminals.

  Brad Hooker is Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Reading.

  His book Ideal Code, Real World: A Rule-Consequentialist Theory of Morality appeared in 2000. He has published articles on intuitionism, Kantianism, particularism, human rights, desert, world hunger, impartiality, the demand- ingness of morality and friendship. His research monograph will be on fairness. Tony Hope is Professor of Medical Ethics at the University of Oxford, Hon- orary Consultant Psychiatrist, and Fellow of St Cross College. He founded the

  Ethox Centre. He has carried out research in basic neuroscience, Alzheimer’s disease and clinical ethics. His books include the Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine (editions 1–4); Manage Your Mind; Medical Ethics and Law; Medical Ethics: A Very Short Introduction; and Empirical Ethics in Psychiatry.

  Nadeem J. Z. Hussain is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University. He specializes in meta-ethics and the history of late nineteenth- century German philosophy. He assessed the resurgence of fictionalism in contemporary meta-ethics in “The Return of Moral Fictionalism” in Philosophical Perspectives (2004), and defended a fictionalist interpretation of Nietzsche in “ Honest Illusion: Valuing for Nietzsche’s Free Spirits,” in Nietzsche and Morality (2007).

  

CONTRIBUTORS

  T. H. Irwin is Professor of Ancient Philosophy in the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Keble College. From 1975 to 2006 he taught at Cornell University.

  He is the author of Plato’s Gorgias (translation and notes 1979), Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (translation and notes 1999), Aristotle’s First Principles (1988), Classical Thought (1989), Plato’s Ethics (1995) and The Development of Ethics, 3 vols (2007–9).

  Richard Kraut is the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University. He is the author of Socrates and the State and How to Read Plato, and has edited the Cambridge Companion to Plato and Plato’s Republic: Critical Essays.

  Rahul Kumar is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Queen’s University, Canada. He is a co-editor of Reasons and Recognition: Essays on the Philosophy of T. M. Scanlon and is the author of several papers on Scanlonian contractualism.

  James Laidlaw is a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, and a University Le cturer in the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge. He has conducted research in India, Inner Mongolia and Taiwan. His publications include Riches and Renunciation (1995); a two-volume collection of the writings of the social anthropologist Edmund Leach, The Essential Edmund Leach (2001); and two collections, both jointly edited with Harvey Whitehouse: Ritual and Memory (2004) and Religion, Anthropology, and Cogni- tive Science (2007).

  Michael LeBuffe is Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University. His recent work includes “Spinoza’s Normative Ethics,” in Canadian Journal of Philosophy (2007), and “The Anatomy of the Passions,” in the Cambridge Companion to Spinoza’s Ethics (forthcoming).

  Anthony J. Lisska , Maria Theresa Barney Professor of Philosophy at Deni- son University, has published Aquinas’s Theory of Natural Law and essays and reviews on natural law. Past President of the American Catholic Philoso- phical Association, he received the Carnegie National Professor of the Year award.

  A. A. Long is Professor of Classics, Irving Stone Professor of Literature, and affiliated Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. He is author and editor of many books on ancient philosophy, including most recently Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life and From Epicurus to Epictetus: Studies in Hellenistic and Roman Philosophy. Norva Y. S. Lo is Lecturer in Philosophy at La Trobe University, Melbourne,

  Australia, having previously worked at the University of Hong Kong and the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

  

CONTRIBUTORS

  Mary Kate McGowan is Class of 1966 Associate Professor of Philosophy at Wellesley College. She has published in metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of law and analytic feminism and she is especially interested in free speech issues in their intersection.

  Sean McKeever is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Davidson College, North Carolina. He is interested in contemporary moral theory, the history of ethics and political philosophy. He is the author, with Michael Ridge, of Principled Ethics: Generalism as a Regulative Ideal (2006), which critiques moral particularism while developing and defending a generalist alternative.

  Alexander Miller is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham.

  He is the author of An Introduction to Contemporary Metaethics (2003), Philoso- phy of Language (Routledge, 2nd edn 2007) and co-editor (with Crispin Wright) of Rule-Following and Meaning (2002). Tim Mulgan is Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy at the University of

  St Andrews. He is the author of The Demands of Consequentialism (2001), Future People (2006) and Understanding Utilitarianism (2007). Stephen Mulhall is Professor of Philosophy at New College, Oxford. His current areas of research include Nietzsche, Sartre, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, the philosophy of religion, and philosophy of literature. Recent publications include The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy (2009) and The Conversation of Humanity (2007). Thomas Pogge received his PhD from Harvard. He is Leitner Professor of

  Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale University, Professorial Fellow at the Australian National University’s Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, Research Director at the Oslo University Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature, and Adjunct Professor at the Faculty of Health and Social Care of the University of Central Lancashire. Jesse Prinz is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the City University of

  New York Graduate Center. His research areas are philosophy of psychology, philosophy of mind, aesthetics, consciousness and cognitive science. His books include The Emotional Construction of Morals (2007), Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion (2004) and Furnishing the Mind: Concepts and Their Perceptual Basis (2002).

  Peter Railton is John Stephenson Perrin Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His main research has been in ethics and the philosophy of science, focusing especially on questions about the nature of objectivity, value, norms and explanation. A collection of some of his papers in ethics and meta-ethics, Facts, Values, and Norms, was published in 2003.

  

CONTRIBUTORS

  Andrews Reath is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. He has worked extensively on Kant’s moral philosophy and is author of Agency and Autonomy in Kant’s Moral Theory (2006). He has co-edited two anthologies: with Barbara Herman and Christine Korsgaard, Reclaiming the History of Ethics: Essays for John Rawls (1997); and with Jens Timmermann, A Critical Guide to Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (2010).

  Michael Ridge is Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh.

  His main research is in moral and political philosophy, though he also has substantial research interests in action theory, the philosophy of mind and the history of philosophy. He is the author, with Sean McKeever, of Principled Ethics: Generalism as a Regulative Ideal (2006).

  Simon Robertson is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow working on the Nietzsche and Modern Moral Philosophy project at the University of Southampton. His main research interests lie at the intersection of normative ethics, meta-ethics and practical reason.

  David Rodin is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, where he co-directs the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict, and Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethic and International Affairs in New York. His publications include War and Self-Defense (2002), which was awarded the American Philosophical Association Sharp Prize, as well as of articles in leading philosophy and law journals and a number of edited books, including Preemption (2007) and Just and Unjust Warriors (2008).

  Frederick Rosen is Professor Emeritus of the History of Political Thought and Honorary Research Fellow at the Bentham Project, University College London. He was formerly Director of the Bentham Project and General Editor of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham. He is currently writing a book on the moral and political philosophy of John Stuart Mill.

  Michael Ruse is Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University. He is the author of many books on the history and philosophy of science, including Monad to Man: The Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biology, Can a Darwinian be a Christian? The Relationship between Science and Religion and most recently Science and Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science.

  Alan J. Ryan was Warden of New College, Oxford, from 1996 to 2009. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at Princeton University. Professor Ryan has written extensively on liberalism and its history, on theories of property, and on issues in the philosophy of the social sciences; among his books are Liberal Anxieties and Liberal Education (1998), John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (1995) and Russell: A Political Life (2003).

  

CONTRIBUTORS

  Julian Savulescu is Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics and Director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford. He is also Director of the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics and of the Program on the Ethics of the New Biosciences at the University of Oxford. Professor Savulescu is the author of over 200 publications and has given more than 100 international presentations.

  Geoffrey Scarre is Professor of Philosophy at Durham University, UK, where he teaches and researches mainly in the areas of moral theory and applied ethics.

  He has recently published books on death and on Mill’s On Liberty; his most recent book is On Courage (Routledge, forthcoming in 2010). Henry Shue is Senior Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford, and

  Professor of Politics and International Relations. His research has focused on the role of human rights, especially economic rights, in international affairs, and, more generally, on institutions to protect the vulnerable. He is best known for his book on international distributive justice, Basic Rights.

  John Skorupski is Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of St Andrews. His books include John Stuart Mill (Routledge, 1989), Ethical Explorations (1999) and The Domain of Reasons (forthcoming in 2010).

  Michael Slote is UST Professor of Ethics at the University of Miami. He has recently been working at the intersection of virtue ethics, care ethics and moral sentimentalist thought, and has just published three books: Moral Sen- timentalism (an account of normative ethics and meta-ethics in sentimentalist terms); Essays on the History of Ethics (containing discussions of both ancient and modern views); and Selected Essays (a collection of published articles and some new papers). Craig Smith is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Adam Smith’s Political Philosophy: The Invisible Hand and

  Spontaneous Order (Routledge, 2006), and is book review editor of the Adam Smith Review. Robert Stecker is Professor of Philosophy at Central Michigan University. He is the author of Artworks: Definition, Meaning, Value; Interpretation and Construction: Art,

  Speech and the Law; and Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: An Introduction. Philip Stratton-Lake is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading.

  His main research interests are Kant, ethical intuitionism, meta-ethics and normative ethics. His book Kant, Duty and Moral Worth was published by Routledge in 2000. Nicholas L. Sturgeon is a Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University. He has published a number of articles on foundational issues in meta-ethics and on the history of modern moral philosophy.

  

CONTRIBUTORS

  John Tasioulas is Reader in Moral and Legal Philosophy at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. His research interests are in moral philosophy, legal philosophy, and political philosophy. He is currently engaged in a project on the philosophy of human rights funded by a British Academic Research Development Award.

  Christopher Taylor is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Oxford University, and an Emeritus Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Suzanne Uniacke is Reader in Applied Ethics at the University of Hull. Before moving to the United Kingdom in 2001 she taught philosophy in Australia.

  She has published widely in normative moral theory, applied ethics and phi- losophy of law. Jonathan Webber is a lecturer in Philosophy at Cardiff University. He is the author of The Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre (Routledge, 2009), and numer- ous philosophical articles on moral psychology and applied ethics. Henry R. West is Professor of Philosophy at Macalester College, Saint Paul,

  Minnesota. His publications on Mill include An Introduction to Mill’s Utilitarian Ethics (2004), The Blackwell Guide to Mill’s Utilitarianism (2006) and Mill’s Utilitarianism: A Reader’s Guide (2007).

  Kenneth R. Westphal is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kent, Canterbury. He has published widely on both Kant’s and Hegel’s theoretical and practical philosophies, in both systematic and historical perspective. He edited The Blackwell Guide to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (2009).

  Allen W. Wood is Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor at Stanford University. He has also been on the faculty of Cornell University and Yale University, has held visiting appointments at the University of Michigan and the University of California, San Diego, and has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is author and editor of numerous books and author of numerous articles, chiefly on topics in ethics and on the philosophy of Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Marx.

  Yang Xiao is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Kenyon College, USA. He has published essays on Confucian moral psychology, philosophy of language in early Chinese texts and Chinese political philosophy. He is currently working on a book manuscript on early Chinese ethics.

  Michael J. Zimmerman is Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is the author of both books and articles on the conceptual foundations of human action, moral responsibility, moral obligation and intrinsic value.

  

PREFACE

  A companion to ethics should be a companion for two kinds of inquirers. The fi rst consists, of course, of students and teachers of philosophy. The second comprises a much wider group – anyone who is interested in the state of philo- sophical ethics today, and the history of how we got to where we are.

  Philosophical ethics is only a small part of the general ethical discussion that goes on in any society at any time. However, it can and should make a vital contribution to that wider discussion. Furthermore this is especially true in the case of ethics, for various reasons that do not apply, or do not apply as much, to other parts of philosophy. To be sure, some cogent philosophical questions about ethics are quite abstract, and cannot so easily be made accessible to wider ethical discussion. Philosophy does, after all, have an obligation to follow wher- ever its questions lead. A comprehensive companion to ethics should try to convey what is currently being said about such questions. Yet it should also, as one of its main aims, engage with the wider discussion, and be as helpful as possible to anyone seriously interested in ethical questions – across all their width and depth. In designing the structure and content of this Companion we have tried hard to keep these aims in mind.

  I should mention that we have in the end been unable to obtain two chapters that we would very much like to have had: in Part I, on medieval ethics, and in

  Part VI, on ethical questions about the beginning of life. We regret this and hope to include chapters on these topics in future editions. My personal thanks must go in the first place to our authors, for their patience and diligence. Apart from anything else, I have learnt an enormous amount about ethics and its history from their work. Tony Bruce at Routledge suggested the idea of a Companion to Ethics to me, and has been truly helpful and encouraging throughout. I am also very grateful to Adam Johnson and James Thomas for their editorial efficiency and hard work. Finally, my thanks to Roger Crisp, Andrew Fisher and two anonymous readers for Routledge for their sen- sible advice on my initial ideas about the shape that this Companion should have.

  John Skorupski St Andrews

  

Part I

HISTORY

1 ETHICAL THOUGHT

IN CHINA

  

Yang Xiao

  Chinese ethical thought has a long history; it goes back to the time of Confucius

  BCE BCE

  (551–479 ), which was around the time of Socrates (469–399 ). In a brief chapter like this, it is obviously impossible to do justice to the richness, com- plexity, and heterogeneity of such a long tradition. Instead of trying to cover all

  BCE

  the aspects of it, I focus on the early period (551–221 ), which is the founding era of Chinese philosophy. More specifically, I focus on the four main schools of thought and their founding texts: Confucianism (the Analects, the Mencius, and the Xunzi), Mohism (the Mozi), Daoism (the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi), and Legalism (the Book of Lord Shang). There are two reasons for this choice. First, Chinese philosophers from later periods often had to present their own thoughts in the guise of commentaries on these founding texts; they spoke about them as well as through them. Second, this choice reflects the fact that early China is still the most scrutinized period of the history of Chinese philosophy by scholars in the English-speaking world, and that most of the important texts from this period have been translated into English.

  It must be borne in mind that the early period lasted for about 300 years, which may still be too long for such a brief chapter to cover. My goal is not to provide an encyclopedic coverage or standard chronological account of ethical thought in early China. Rather, I want to identify important and revealing common features and themes of the content, style, and structure of ethical thought in this period that have reverberated throughout the history of Chinese philosophy, and have uniquely defined and characterized the tradition as a whole. In other words, this will not be a historian’s, but rather a philosopher’s, take on the history of Chinese ethical thought.

  In this chapter I use terms such as “Chinese philosophy,” “Chinese philosophers,” and “Chinese ethics,” which some scholars may find problematic. There has been an ongoing debate about whether there is “Chinese philosophy” (Defoort 2001 and 2006). Some scholars have argued that Confucianism is not a “philosophy” (Eno 1990), that there is no such thing as “Chinese ethics” (Mollgaard 2005), and that

YANG XIAO

  Confucius is not a “philosopher of ethics” and has no “normative ethical theory” (Hansen 1992). This is obviously a complicated issue. The reality is that in China we can find both normative ethical theory and ethical practices such as self- cultivation through spiritual exercise. In what follows, I first address the unique problem of style in Chinese ethics; I then discuss the structure of the normative ethical theories of the four main schools of thought. I end with a discussion of the idea of philosophy as spiritual exercise, as well as a brief conclusion.

  The problem of style in Chinese ethical thought

  One main reason that Chinese philosophical texts are difficult to understand is our unfamiliarity with their styles. For example, when a contemporary reader picks up a copy of the Analects, she might find it very easy to understand the literal meaning of Confucius’ short, aphorism-like utterances; however, she might still be baffled because she does not know what Confucius is doing with his utterances.