Lake Morality

Exploring the relationship between consequentialist theory and moral rules, this book focuses mainly on rule consequentialism or on the distinction between act and rule versions of consequentialism.

People get up to all kinds of mischief out at Lake Morality.When Kristen Morgan abandoned her baby girl in a locked car, Lt. Maggie Redmond was angry. Though the baby was uninjured, things could have been much worse.When the mother¿s body is found two days later, in a lake far outside town on the road to the county prison, Maggie suddenly has more than child endangerment or a missing person on her hands.Kristen Morgan¿s family and doctor say that she was depressed and possibly not taking her medication, and that she¿d talked about suicide in the past, but Maggie and her fiancé, former Sheriff Wyatt Hamilton, aren¿t convinced.When evidence of homicide surfaces, Maggie must discover who wanted a young mother dead, and why.The greatly-anticipated 8th book in the Forgotten Coast Florida Suspense series has plenty of page-turning action and suspense, along with its trademark coastal atmosphere, rich characterization and dry humor.

Emotions shape our mental and social lives, but their relation to morality is problematic: are they sources of moral knowledge, or obstacles to morality? Fourteen original articles by leading scholars in moral psychology and philosophy of mind explore the relation between emotions and practical rationality, value, autonomy, and moral identity.

Since its first publication in 1996, Law and Morality has filled a long-standing need for a contemporary Canadian textbook in the philosophy of law. Now in its third edition, this anthology has been thoroughly revised and updated, and includes new chapters on equality, judicial review, and terrorism and the rule of law. The volume begins with essays that explore general questions about morality and law, surveying the traditional literature on legal positivism and contemporary debates about the connection between law and morality. These essays explore the tensions between law as a protector of individual liberty and as a tool of democratic self-rule, and introduce debates about adjudication and the contribution of feminist approaches to the philosophy of law. New material on the Chinese Canadian head tax case is also featured. The second part of Law and Morality deals with philosophical questions as they apply to contemporary issues. Excerpts from judicial decisions as well as essays by practicing lawyers are included to provide theoretically informed legal analyses of the issues. Striking a balance between practical and more analytic, philosophical approaches, the volume's treatment of the philosophy of law as a branch of political philosophy enables students to understand law in its function as a social institution. Law and Morality has proved to be an essential text in both departments of philosophy and faculties of law and this latest edition brings the debates fully up to date, filling gaps in the previous editions and adding to the array of contemporary issues previously covered.

Topless bars, casino gambling, needle exchange programs for drug addicts—there's no question, morality issues remain front and center in urban politics. Presenting a systematic analysis of culture-war issues at the local level, Elaine Sharp shows how American cities deal with these ongoing concerns. Drawing on a sample of ten strategically chosen cities, she explains differences in how municipalities respond to controversies surrounding sex business, abortion clinics, legalized gambling, gay rights, and drug use. By analyzing the relative importance of subculture, economics, and institutional arrangements in the disputes, she points the way toward richer and more complete understanding of how different cities respond differently to these hot-button issues. Far more than a statistical study, Morality Politics in American Cities is a collection of fascinating stories of real people grappling with down-to-earth issues and real-life drama—richly informative case studies that will captivate students and interested citizens alike. Mayors, public health directors, activists, and others speak their minds about the pros and cons of these controversies. Here are officials in one city confronting the Vatican over funding for abortion services, those in another battling a local university over its refusal to provide health benefits to gay partners of faculty members, and still others mounting a massive, community-sponsored attack on topless clubs. These stories provide detailed evidence to support classifications needed for comparing cities' experience with each of the five morality issues. They also corroborate inferences drawn from the comparisons by showing what considerations were in play as local officials grappled with these issues. Overall, the study shows that cultural factors usually dominate policymaking in local politics—except when specific economic interests are at stake—and also observes that county-level governments are more important than previously thought in terms of morality-issue decisions. As provocative as it is informative, Morality Politics in American Cities demonstrates that such issues—same-sex marriage, for example—are multidimensional and often difficult to resolve. Its conclusions, however contingent, mark an important step in the ongoing process of understanding important differences in approaches to these issues and clearly show how moral conflicts continue to define American politics.

In Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism David Enoch develops, argues for, and defends a strongly realist and objectivist view of ethics and normativity more broadly. This view—according to which there are perfectly objective, universal, moral and other normative truths that are not in any way reducible to other, natural truths—is familiar, but this book is the first in-detail development of the positive motivations for the view into reasonably precise arguments. And when the book turns defensive—defending Robust Realism against traditional objections—it mobilizes the original positive arguments for the view to help with fending off the objections. The main underlying motivation for Robust Realism developed in the book is that no other metaethical view can vindicate our taking morality seriously. The positive arguments developed here—the argument from the deliberative indispensability of normative truths, and the argument from the moral implications of metaethical objectivity (or its absence)—are thus arguments for Robust Realism that are sensitive to the underlying, pre-theoretical motivations for the view.

Ethical Intuitionism was the dominant moral theory in Britain for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth and the first third of the twentieth century. However, during the middle decades of the twentieth century ethical intuitionism came to be regarded as utterly untenable. It was thought to beeither empty, or metaphysically and epistemologically extravagant, or both. This hostility led to a neglect of the central intuitionist texts, and encouraged the growth of a caricature of intuitionism that could easily be rejected before moving on to 'more serious' philosophical theories. More recently, however, this hostility towards ethical intuitionism has subsided. A wide range of moral philosophers, from Aristotelians, to rule-consequentialists, to expressivists, Kantians, and deontologists, are beginning to look to the ethical intuitionists' work as a positive resource. It is,therefore, a good time to get clear on what it was that intuitionists said, and re-evaluate their contribution to our understanding of morality. This volume is the first serious engagement with ethical intuitionism in the light of more recent developments in ethical theory. It contains essays by eminent moral philosophers working in very different traditions whose aim is to clarify and assess ethical intuitionism. Issues addressed includewhether the plurality of basic principles intuitionists adhere to can be grounded in some more fundamental principle; the autonomy of ethics and self-evidence; moral realism and internalism; and the open question argument and naturalism.

Distinguished philosopher Bernard Gert presents a clear and concise introduction to what he calls "common morality"--the moral system that most thoughtful people implicitly use when making everyday, common sense moral decisions and judgments. Common Morality is useful in that--while not resolving every disagreement on controversial issues--it is able to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable answers to moral problems.

The relationship between morality and self-interest is a perennial one in philosophy. For Plato, Hobbes, Kant, Aristotle, Hume, Machiavelli, and Nietzsche, it lay at the heart of moral theory. This text introduces the topic and looks at its place in philosophical history.